Episode 29: The Mound and the Furies

The Orestia Up to the Eumenides

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 29: The Mound and the Furies. In this program, we will read The Eumenides, the third and final installment of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, or Oresteian trilogy, which first premiered in the spring of 458 BCE. If you want to start the story from the beginning, Episode 27 is the place to look.

The Oresteian trilogy is named after Orestes, the son of the legendary Greek king Agamemnon. And the last we saw Orestes, things weren’t going very well for him. Orestes was being pursued by the Furies, the bloodthirsty deities who were emblems of vengeance to the ancient Greeks. The name of our play for today is, once again, The Eumenides, which is an alternate name for the Furies, those spirits of revenge for the dishonored dead. Whatever we call them – The Eumenides, or the Furies – these creatures, at the outset of the play we’re beginning today, symbolized of blood for blood. The Furies caught Orestes’ scent at the end of the previous play because he had done something shocking – Orestes had killed his mother. And so as we come to the end of the Oresteia, we wonder just what Aeschylus’ audience was wondering as they watched this same trilogy. Will Orestes escape the wrath of the Furies? Will they drag him to Hades? Or will something altogether different happen? By the end of this program, you’ll know the answer to all of these questions.

Let’s begin with a quick review. The whole Oresteian trilogy is about a family, a family often called “The House of Atreus.” This family has a violent streak. Past members have killed children and fed them to parents, murdered uncles, killed in-laws, and started wars. The family’s most famous sons are Agamemnon and Menelaus – the aggressors who set in motion the Trojan War. And following the war at Troy, Agamemnon, after ten years, finally headed home. Agamemnon’s homecoming was the subject of the Oresteian trilogy’s first play, titled Agamemnon. The king came home, dragging a captive Trojan princess with him as a concubine. But rather than being honored and welcomed, the vaunting king Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, who also killed the poor innocent Trojan princess Cassandra. The play Agamemnon ends with Clytemnestra and her lover standing victoriously and vengefully over the corpses of king Agamemnon and Cassandra.

The second play, The Libation Bearers, picks up a few years after King Agamemnon murder. In The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon’s son Orestes came home, and reunited with his sister Electra. The siblings commiserated and conspired for a while. They were distraught about the murder of their father Agamemnon, and Orestes, in particular, sought revenge against their mother Clytemnestra. A chorus of old slave women – the Libation Bearers of the title – occasionally offered their counsel. When the moment of crisis came, Orestes was uncertain of how to proceed. He was ultimately hesitant to kill his mother. Yet the god Apollo had told Orestes that he had to kill Clytemnestra to honor the dead Agamemnon. Trapped between his natural compassion for his mother and the mandate of the deity Apollo, Orestes ultimately followed the will of the gods and committed matricide. This murder was what set the pack of Furies on Orestes.

And that’s a quick synopsis of the Oresteian trilogy so far. First play, king gets killed by the queen. Second play, queen gets killed by the son. Third play – well, let’s find out. Before we begin The Eumenides – again the third and final play in this trilogy – I actually want to quickly tell you a bit about the settings of The Eumenides. I think knowing the settings of this third play will make jumping into it very easy. Here they are.

The Settings of The Eumenides

First setting. The Eumenides is going to start at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. You’ve probably heard of Delphi – let’s talk about what its significance was. According to legend, Olympian Zeus once released a pair of eagles from the extreme eastern and western ends of the earth’s surface, and told them to fly toward the center. The place where they met, Zeus decreed, would be the center of the world. The two eagles, after covering great distances, met over a place called Delphi, where a rock called the omphalos, or navel of the world, was found. It is a spectacular location, and a tourist destination today just as it was 2,500 years ago – a rugged and rocky pilgrimage site, most of the way up a spine of mountains in the Lower Pindus range on the Greek mainland. From the earliest times, the natural magnificence of the site of Delphi made it a holy place in the Greek imagination. And by the era of classical Athens, Delphi was home to a grand temple of Apollo. The temple of Apollo at Delphi, which is the legendary center of the Greek world, is the first setting of the play that we’ll explore together today. And Apollo, the god of truth, prophecy, poetry, and healing, will be a major character in this play.

Next setting. The Acropolis in Athens. This raised outcrop is the historical heart of Athens – I’ll talk a bit more about it when the play gets there, but the Acropolis would have been a familiar sight to every single Athenian in the audience, because they were actually sitting on the side of it as they watched Aeschylus’ play in the spring of 458 BCE. So, first setting, Temple of Apollo at Delphi, second setting, Acropolis at Athens – conveniently, the biggest tourist destinations on the Greek mainland today.

Now, third setting. The third setting of The Eumenides is a big, famous rock. This is a bit confusing, because I already told you about the omphalos rock – the rock supposedly at the center of the world. But the third setting of our play for today takes place on top of a much bigger rock – and this second rock is called the Areopagus. As Aeschylus actually explains in the play, Areopagus means the “Rock of Ares.” The Areopagus rock, like the Acropolis and the temple at Delphi, is a real place – a giant chunk of stone near the Acropolis in Athens. It was a famous location, for many reasons, and during the Classical period, it became associated with the Athenian judiciary system. We’ll talk about that a bit later. Anyway, the culmination of the Oresteian trilogy takes place atop this well-known landmark in Athens, a landmark which Aeschylus’ audience would have associated with their own recently updated legal system. Those are the three settings – the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Acropolis of Athens, and the Areopagus rock nearby in Athens.

The climactic scene of The Eumenides, and the entire Oresteian trilogy, is going to be a trial. I mean an actual, a courtroom trial, with a defendant and defense, a plaintiff and prosecution, a judge, and a jury. Orestes is going to be the defendant, and the prosecutors are going to be the Furies – those divine agents of blood for blood revenge. The key to The Eumenides and really the whole Oresteian trilogy, is that it is a story about an old system of vigilante justice – the Furies, and the dark history of the House of Atreus, and then a new system of tribunals run by citizen juries, symbolized by the rocky mound of the Areopagus. This new tribunal system was only a few years old when Aeschylus first staged the Oresteia, and I’ll also tell you about that a bit later. So, let’s conclude the Oresteian trilogy by hearing the story of its final chapter, The Eumenides. And as with the first two shows, unless otherwise noted, I’m quoting from the Robert Fagles translation, published by Penguin in 1979. [music]

The Oresteia, Part 3: The Eumenides

It was morning at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The doors were open slightly, so that one could look out and see a vertical sliver of mountains and crags. And through this small opening, onto the stage stepped the Pythia. The Pythia was the living oracle of the deity Apollo. When people came to consult the oracle at Delphi, they spoke with this woman. The Pythia’s lineage as a prophet extended far into the past. Once, Delphi had been called Pytho, and even in this remote, antique time, the progeny of the Pythia had offered visions of days past and things to come. When she communicated with Apollo, she fell into a state of frenzy, and her semiconscious ramblings were decoded and interpreted by male priests. Delphi, to Aeschylus’ audience, was a pinnacle sometimes considered the center of the world, where a powerful seer could communicate with one of the highest gods.

The Pythia stood in the temple doorway, and she prayed. She recollected Apollo’s first arrival Delphi, and she made proclamations that honored Zeus and mighty Athena. She invited the audience into the temple, and stepped out for a moment to do something. But before anyone could enter, she staggered back through the doors and collapsed onto her knees, her eyes wide with terror. The Pythia gibbered, crawling, and managed to struggle to her feet. She’d seen something ghastly outside. A youth stood at the omphalos, or navel stone, which rested at a sacred spot on the temple grounds. Only, in addition to the customary olive branch that one held there for ritual purification, the youth also held a sword, and his hands ran wet with blood.

And all around him there were, the Pythia said – there were things. A ring of them, twined among the offertory benches, asleep, but still guarding the young man. They were like gorgons, maybe, said the Pythia, but not quite. They were worse. The Pythia described the creatures. In the Fagles translation, the Pythia said,

These [monsters] have no wings,
I looked. But black they are, and so repulsive.
Their heavy, rasping breathing makes me cringe.
And their eyes ooze a discharge, sickening,
and what they wear – to flaunt that at the gods,
the idols, sacrilege! even in the homes of men.
The tribe that produced that brood I never saw.¹

The youth whom the Pythia saw, and the monsters that she described, are the two opposing forces in the play. The youth was Orestes, who had killed his mother Clytemnestra on the order of the god Apollo, and who had come to the temple of Apollo at Delphi to atone and seek safe haven. He sought safe haven there at the temple because of the creatures that had pursued him. And these monsters, once again, were called the Furies. Hideous agents of vigilante justice, the Furies were there to exact revenge on the murderer Orestes.

The Pythia admitted that the scene was too much for even her to handle. A youth who had slaughtered his own mother. And divine monsters who’d tailed him, all the way from Argos! It was all out of the Pythia’s pay grade. So she announced that Apollo himself would need to help adjudicate, and, proclaiming this, the Pythia abandoned her own temple. And at that moment, the great palace doors opened, revealing the scene that the Pythia described. Orestes prayed for help at the omphalos, or navel stone, of the world, surrounded by Furies. Only now, the god Apollo stood over the crouched shape of Orestes. Apollo had come to help.

Apollo promised Orestes that the young murderer wasn’t alone. Apollo had told Oretes to kill his mother Clytemnestra, and Apollo guaranteed that he would stand with Orestes against the young man’s enemies. Apollo regarded the Furies with indignation. He had caused them to fall asleep, he said, so that they would not – at Delphi, at least, be able to hurt Orestes. Gesturing at the sleeping Furies, Apollo hissed,

[T]hese obscenities. . .They disgust me.
These grey, ancient children never touched
by god, man or beast – the eternal virgins.
Born for destruction only, the dark pit,
they range the bowels of Earth, the world of death,
loathed by men and gods who hold Olympus. (234)

The Furies, Apollo said, were indeed a force to be reckoned with, but the god Apollo promised that he’d help Orestes. Only, Orestes would need to go to Athens, under the guard of the god Hermes. And in Athens, Apollo promised, Orestes would be judged, and vindicated, by the goddess Athena. [music]

The Furies at Delphi

And so Orestes and Hermes left Delphi, bound for Athens. Apollo vanished into the confines of the sanctuary. And still, around the stone at Delphi’s center, there lay the twisted shapes of the Furies, sleeping. The creatures would have remained asleep, but for the appearance of a new figure onstage. It was the ghost of Clytemnestra, the murdered mother of Orestes. She could not sit by idly in Hades while her ruthless son was acquitted. Queen Clytemnestra’s ghost urged the monsters to awaken.

Clytemnestra told the drowsing Furies that she had experienced great pain from people whom she’d loved and trusted. Clytemnestra’s ghost showed the furies the gashes on her body and told them to carve similar ones into themselves. The dead queen railed against the Furies, telling them that she’d given them plenty of libations and honey and other offerings, and that now they were ignoring her. Her murderous son was escaping. The Furies muttered in their sleep, and the ghost of Clytemnestra redoubled her efforts to awaken them, until finally, they began opening their eyes. They looked around for Orestes, saying, all at once, “Get him, get him, get him, get him[!]” (236). And Clytemnestra urged them on. She told the creatures to “blast him with your gory breath, / the fire of your vitals – wither him, after him, / one last foray – waste him, burn him out!” (236). The ghost of the queen vanished, and the lead Fury awakened the others. They moved like a pack of animals, rushing toward the Navelstone to see Orestes gone, sniffing and making hunting calls.

One of them growled about all the pain she had experienced. Another snarled that their quarry had escaped – he’d snuck right through their clutches. The Furies rushed around the stage, and they were certain about one thing. The younger gods – the Olympians – were an unjust and cruel bunch. A Fury exclaimed, “Such is your triumph, you young gods, / world dominion past all rights. / Your throne is streaming blood, / blood at the foot, blood at the crowning head – / – I can see the Navelstone of the Earth, it’s bleeding, / bristling corruption, oh, the guilt it has to bear” (238).

Apollo, said the Furies, was guilty of great crimes. Once, before the Olympians, the old deities, the children of the elemental titans, had ruled the lives of gods and men alike. The Fates had once scripted everything, deciding the course of each person’s life. Only now, Apollo and others like him were meddling in everything, involving themselves in the affairs of humans, and being more interested in men and women than honoring the old traditions. Orestes, said the Furies – whatever Apollo planned – Orestes would never, never be forgiven.

Suddenly Apollo appeared in full armor. He held his bow and brought out arrows and demanded that the Furies leave. He told them that they weren’t welcome at Delphi. Apollo bellowed,

[N]ever touch my halls, you have no right.
Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out,
where Justice and bloody slaughter are the same. . .
castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered,
extremities maimed, and huge stones at the chest,
and the victims wail for pity –
spikes inching up the spine, torsos stuck on spikes. . .
your kind. . .should infest a lion’s cavern reeking blood.
But never rub your filth on the Prophet’s shrine. (238-9)

Hearing Apollo’s curse, the Furies began arguing with Apollo in earnest. Their leader made a serious accusation. She said that Apollo had killed Clytemnestra – he had ordered it done, and so his guilt was unequivocal. The Furies shrieked that Orestes’ crime had been unforgivable because it had been committed against a family member. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, had killed her husband – not a blood relation. Apollo was unconvinced, and he said that Athena would oversee the final trial. And so the Furies rushed off toward Athens to catch their prey.

In their absence, Apollo voiced a short monologue. I like to think that at this point maybe he was thinking to himself, “Hmm. Oh, boy. Maybe I shouldn’t have told that guy to go and kill his mom. That’s kind of messed up. Yeah.” But instead, he said “I will defend my suppliant and save him. / A terror to god and men” (241). So, in this scene you can begin to see the essential trial structure that will dominate the rest of the play. Orestes, the defendant. Apollo, the defense. Clytemnestra’s ghost, the victim. The Furies, the prosecution, and, as you’ll see in a minute, Athena, the judge. Those are the essential components of one of the earliest courtroom drama stories in literature – a courtroom drama story that, at this point, changes scenes, to the city of Athens. [music]

The Furies Confront Orestes

The center of classical Athens in Aeschylus’ time was the Acropolis, a rocky promontory into which the Theater of Dionysus was built. So the play’s first set – the temple of Apollo at Delphi – would have been recognizable to most of the people who watched the Oresteia in the spring of 458 BCE, because it was the home of ancient Greece’s famous oracle. But the play’s second set – the Acropolis, would have been recognizable to every single person in the theater, because that was where they were presently sitting.

Atop the Acropolis in Aeschylus’ set was an ancient temple of Athena with a statue of her at its center. And at this statue knelt the battered, harrowed criminal Orestes. Orestes prayed for Athena to accept him there. Orestes said that he was done with violence, and he assured Athena, “My murderous edge is blunted now, worn down at last” (241). Almost as soon as Orestes appeared there, though, the Furies hurried onstage, sniffing and letting loose their hunting cries, until they found his trail. They said that the smell of his blood rang in their hearts like laughter.

And then the Furies screamed that Orestes would pay for his crimes. They would guzzle the blood from his veins, and in Hades he would suffer all the pains he had inflicted onto others. Yet in spite of these threats, Orestes kept his composure. He said Apollo had begun the process of washing his mother’s blood from his hands. And he petitioned Athena to help finish the process.

The leader of the Furies interrupted his pleas to Athena. She said Orestes wouldn’t be saved at all – his blood would be drained until all his color was gone, and his bones would be chewed by demons. They sung a long, frightening chorus – and one of its core ideas was that when a person committed a certain class of severe crime, that person was theirs under any circumstances, regardless of the gods. The furies sang, in the Penguin Robert Fagles translation,

[D]own on the man we swoop, [said the Furies,]
for all his power black him out! –
[We] wrench our mandate from the gods.
we make ourselves exempt from their control. . .
And all men’s dreams of grandeur
tempting the heavens,
all melt down, under earth their pride goes down –
lost in our onslaught, black robes swarming,
Furies throbbing, dancing out our rage. . .
[W]e are the great fulfillers. . .
disgraced, degraded, drive our powers through;
banished far from god to a sunless, torchlit dusk,
we drive men through their rugged passage,
blinded dead and those who see by day. . .
And so it holds, our ancient power still holds. (246-8)

Thus, the Furies repeated their unbudging resolution. They would have Orestes’ blood, and in Hades he would atone for his misdeeds. They would not compromise. [music]

Athena Arrives and the Trial Begins

Just as the Furies finished their threats and drew perilously close to Orestes, onto the stage strode the goddess Athena. Her armor gleamed, and in her hands, she clutched her great shield and spear. Athena took in the assembly on the Acropolis quickly. She’d just come from Troy, she said. After some prefatory dialogue, the Furies told Athena why they were there. Orestes, the Furies said, had killed his mother. Now he had to pay. Athena began asking them questions. Had Orestes been compelled to do so? she asked. Would they let her question the defendant? The Furies said they respected Athena’s judgment, just as she respected them.

The goddess Athena turned to the battered Orestes and told him it was now his turn. What, she asked, did he have to say for himself?

Orestes told Athena he wasn’t guilty. His crime, he said, was absolved. He described where he was from. He told Athena about how his father Agamemnon had been murdered by his mother Clytemnestra. Orestes admitted that he’d killed his mother. But he said that he’d done so out of love for his dead father, and emphasized “Apollo shares the guilt – / he spurred me on, he warned of the pains I’d feel / unless I acted, brought the guilty down” (252). Following this explanation, Orestes said he’d accept whatever verdict Athena delivered.

The goddess considered the situation. She could tell, she said, that Orestes had atoned, and that he would no longer seek to do anyone any harm. This prompted Athena to forgive Orestes and bring him into the fold at Athens. But on the other hand, if she denied the Furies their bloody form of justice, they would plague the world with their wrath. It was, Athena said, a difficult case. Again and again, she looked at Orestes, and then the Furies, and she said she was at an impasse.

But after considering the matter further, Athena said she knew what she would do. She proclaimed, “[T]he matter comes to rest on us. / I will appoint the judges of manslaughter, / swear them in, and found a tribunal here / for all time to come” (252). Athena said she would find a group of distinguished Athenians to help adjudicate the case, and then she left. In her absence, the Furies prophesied darkly about what would happen if Orestes were acquitted. If they are ignored, the Furies foretold, then justice itself would be ignored. Their lengthy speech attested that they were more than just gory avengers. They were a part of the balance of the world – they were a force that severed off the parts of humanity that committed egregious crimes against others. And the Furies advised the audience to always honor their parents, and guests, and be good to others, because if they acted treacherously, the Furies would come for them. [music]

The Prosecution and Defense Present their Cases

The scene shifted again – this time, to the Areopagus rock, that giant stone just a hundred yards northwest of the Acropolis. Just as Aeschylus’ audience in 458 BCE would have recognized the temple of Apollo at Delphi and the Acropolis, they would have recognized the Areopagus rock, because it was one of their city’s major landmarks. It was, as I said earlier, a site in Athens where trials were carried out.

On the great rock, Athena led a herald and a group of ten distinguished citizens to serve as the jury for the case. The herald blew a trumpet, and the jury took its place in front of the play’s audience. Side note, by the way, the courtroom drama of this part of the play would make it such that if you were sitting there in the theater, you felt like you were a spectator at a real trial, since you were sitting behind the ten jurors. Aeschylus’ play The Suppliants, which premiered a few years before the Oresteian trilogy, also has a public tribunal at its center. Anyway, so Athena had the Furies and Orestes stand on opposite sides of the stage. And Athena herself stood in the middle, so that she could orchestrate the trial. In a moment of silence, Orestes stood there, all alone, opposite the shadowy pack of Furies. It seemed as though he would face their prosecution on his own, but then Apollo suddenly entered. Athena demanded to know why Apollo was there, and Apollo explained himself. He was a witness, he said. And Apollo added that he was partly culpable for the murder of Clytemnestra, and that as far as he was concerned, Orestes’ hands had already been purged of the blood of the murder. For all these reasons, Apollo said, he would stand by Orestes. Athena indicated that she understood.

The prosecution was first. The Furies began questioning Orestes. Yes, Orestes said, he had killed his mother. He’d cut her throat with his sword. It had been at the command of Apollo. An atrocious crime, the Furies said – far worse than Clytemnestra’s. Clytemnestra killed her husband, but at least, the Furies specified – at least Agamemnon hadn’t been her blood relation. Orestes asked Apollo to weigh in.

I imagine the unwritten stage directions here. A long and dramatic pause. Because the case that’s been made against Orestes has been pretty devastating so far. So a long pause, and Apollo took a deep breath, and then began his explanation. Zeus, he said, had compelled him – Apollo – to drive Orestes to matricide. Apollo told the Furies there was no way around Zeus’ mandates. He told the Furies that the decision that Clytemnestra had to be murdered was “[Zeus’] justice – omnipotent, I warn you. / Bend to the will of Zeus. No oath can match / the power of the Father” (259). Apollo then drew his own portrait of Clytemnestra. She had cruelly, deceptively murdered the great Greek king – a magnificent, victorious king.

The Furies were not impressed. In fact, their rebuttal was a powerful one. Zeus, they reminded Apollo, had also killed a parent. Zeus had murdered his father, Kronos. The Furies weren’t interested in what Zeus had decreed. How, they asked, was Orestes supposed to take the throne of his kingdom, having committed a dreadful crime? What kind of precedent did it set? There were older and more primal codes of justice than the caprices of the newfangled Olympian gods. The furies were ancient things, and they remembered these codes. And they said to hell with Zeus and his pack of young siblings.

Then Apollo gave the speech about motherhood that I quoted in the previous episode. The gist of it is the flagrantly unscientific Ancient Greek doctrine that women are just storage containers for babies – that sperm, and sperm alone is the source of life. The core of Apollo’s speech is the famous (and absurd) line “The man is the source of life – the one who mounts” (260). That was Apollo’s case – killing your own mother wasn’t such a big deal, was it? A mother was just something that got mounted, and planted – men were the progenitors of all life – men created life all on their own.

After making this exceptionally dubious point, Apollo presented his evidence – Athena herself. Hadn’t she been born directly from a man? Of course she had! The great Athena had never been sullied by being in a womb. And, Apollo concluded, he had brought Orestes to the great Athena, so that Athena would have a powerful devotee, and the house of Atreus, purified by divine trial, would be bonded with Athena forever after.

Athena asked if the Furies and Apollo had finished making their cases. They had. It was time for the jury of ten distinguished Athenians to decide the fate of Orestes. The Furies had nothing else to add. Neither did Apollo. Athena urged the citizens to make a fair judgment. And as the jury moved to cast their votes, Apollo and the furies went at one another with threats. The Furies warned the god of prophecy “You dabble in works of blood beyond your depth. . . / You brought them down, the oldest realms of order, / seduced the ancient goddesses with wine (263-4). And in turn, Apollo growled that he was defending a just man.

Then Athena made a surprising move. The jurors were still in the midst of casting their votes, and she suddenly announced, “Orestes. . .I will cast my lot for you” (264). Athena’s reasons, she said, were that no mother had borne her, and she honored males, like her father Zeus, as the true engenderers of life. Athena proclaimed that because of her vote, Orestes would not be found guilty in the event of a tie between the jurors’ votes. And indeed, once the votes were cast, they tied, and Athena proved the tiebreaker. Orestes was acquitted. [music]

The Furies Become the Eumenides

Orestes, hearing the court’s decision, announced his gratitude toward the city of Athens. He said that his home city, Argos, would never make war on Athens henceforward. Orestes, and his triumphant patron Apollo, stepped down from the Areopagus rock.

The Furies, needless to say, were not happy with the verdict. They promised destruction and vengeance – the young gods had commandeered their authority, and there would be a cost –mankind would perish in an ocean of blood. What would Athena say to this? Well, being the wise goddess of Athens, Athena had a pretty decent, circumspect response.

The Furies hadn’t lost, Athena said. They had tied, and they’d been on equal footing with Apollo. It was Zeus, Athena said, who’d made her cast her lot. Athena told the Furies that there was no reason to run rampant over the face of the earth, exacting vengeance. The world needed them, and people would revere them as always. The Furies protested, but Athena again said to please not poison the land with their retributive violence.

Athena urged the furies to “Lull asleep that salt black wave of anger – / awesome, proud with reverence, live with me” (268). Athena promised that the Furies would be honored, and that they would have the first fruits of the harvest. She said that the Furies would have their own temple there, in Athens, and rather than running rampant and exacting revenge, they would be honored by devotional offerings. More than anything else, wise Athena urged, Greeks needed to stop killing Greeks. Athena said,

Here in our homeland never cast the stones
that whet our bloodlust. Never waste our youth,
inflaming them with the burning wine of strife. . .
Let our wars
rage on abroad, with all their force. . .
But as for the bird
that fights at home – my curse on civil war. (269)

Athena begged the Furies to soften their age ancient, destructive rage. They were older than her, she said, and wiser, but they needed to understand – that if the persuasive power of her own speech was good for anything at all – they needed to understand that the killing had to stop. The cycle of anguish had to end. If the Furies could do that, they would have a home in Athens forever, and every family forever would need their wisdom, and their age-old understanding of justice.

And finally, the Leader of the Furies said that Athena’s speech was having an effect – that she was conscious of her ancient rage diminishing. The Furies asked Athena to give a binding speech, and Athena said in place of vigilante killing she sought tranquility, and joy, and sunshine blooming all over Greece.

And the Furies prayed, saying that goodness would come like waves followed waves; like greenery issued forth from the dark fields in the spring sunshine. The Furies prayed that Greek soil would never see Greeks fighting Greeks, and Athena urged the audience to be kind to the wise Furies, who would in turn be kind to them. Athena said the time had come for the Furies to go to their new home. A group of female torchbearers appeared. The old deities would dwell deep beneath the rocks of Athens, and far from being agents of chaotic revenge, they would be the cornerstone of the city’s stability and harmony.

Athena’s entourage brought forth crimson robes and placed them on the Furies, and all of the torches blazed brightly as the old gods were consecrated and revered anew. Soon, Athena began leading the Furies from the stage and out of the theater, and into the real city of Athens, along with the actors who had played the judges. As the procession left the theater, a group of Athenian women sung a final chorus. They blessed the transformed Furies, and they urged those in the audience to sing their own blessings. The final chorus urged the audience to exult among the blazing torches of the evening, to cry out in victory, and to dance, and the play closes with a repeated encouragement to “Cry, cry, in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on!” And that’s the end. [music]

The End of the Oresteia

Looking out over the city of Athens from the top of the Theater of Dionysus. Photo by Gregor Hagedorn.

Some tragedy, huh? No corpses onstage at the end. No weeping. Just singing and joy. The Oresteia’s ending is really one of the happiest endings in literature. The first play, Agamemnon, ends with the killing of a king and his innocent captive concubine. The second play, The Libation Bearers, ends with a son killing his mother. That is all pretty tragic. But then the third play, The Eumenides, ends with the blood-soaked agents of violent retribution being changed into gentle local deities, and the gory history of the House of Atreus being concluded for good. The word eumenides, by the way, means “kindly ones,” and so the Furies – who were scary, frenzied monsters at the play’s beginning – the Furies are changed into benevolent spirits. At the core of the Oresteian trilogy’s happy ending is the fact that Athena not only stops the killing in the House of Atreus. She also stops the agents of bloody vengeance in the lands of Greece, and sets up something more like a legal tribunal system, forever after.

The Eumenides closed on a spring evening, with songs with dancing, and likely interactive songs, too. The play’s final chorus urged the real audience of Aeschylus’ play to voice their own praises. And it must have been quite a sight on that spring evening on 458 BCE – the sun would have been setting, or would have already set on stage right, and the Athenian women who close the whole show would have been singing a joyous chorus by torchlight, urging the Furies to dance, urging the audience to sing and dance, all in the spirit of wellbeing between all Greeks. I bet people were giving one another spontaneous handshakes and hugs in the audience at the joy of being Athenian, being Greek, and living in a time of peace after so many wars, and so much very real chaos and anarchy.

The history podcaster Dan Carlin is always talking about what it would be like to see this or that historical massacre or battle in cinematic widescreen – “What would it have been like to stand there and see the mass executions of the Khans? We just can’t imagine that!” – you know, that kind of thing. We all do wonder the same thing, of course, and Dan does a great job making history live and breathe. But I think it’s also good to leave behind mass casualty events and generals and kings, and to think of happy moments in history. Happy moments like the final five minutes of the first staging of The Eumenides, and the five minutes afterward, when almost every single person in the audience must have been grinning ear to ear, and strangers were nodding at one another with a sudden profound depth of hope and civic solidarity, and the story of the play was suddenly becoming real. I would like to see that, in widescreen, all those smiles in the torchlight, with the sound of lyres and celebratory aulos music, and people going off into the balmy spring evening together, and moonlight down on the Saronic Gulf at low tide and the smell of freshly bloomed flowers in the air. A whole city of real people, in an outdoor theater, inspired by the notion that we, like Orestes, are not irremediably cursed to repeat the misdeeds of our predecessors, and that things can get better.

There would have been one more play, still, after the end of The Eumenides. Each theatrical trilogy of tragedies in classical Athens was followed by a satyr play in the evening, and so if you were attending the premiere of the Oresteia, this would be the part of the evening when the warm, optimistic glow of Aeschylus’ final play gave way to dinner, and the rather different glow wine, and an evening of comedy, and if you hadn’t come with friends, you would have probably have made some by this point.

To return to the Oresteia, then and to begin summing the whole thing up, first of all, I’ll recommend that you read these plays for yourself. As I mentioned, I’ve used the translation by Robert Fagles, published by Penguin in 1979. Translators often know writers better than anyone. In a retrospective summary about translating Aeschylus’ work, Fagles comments, “I found him a burly, eloquent ghost, with more human decency and strength than I could hope to equal.”² I think if you get a chance, and you get a copy of the Oresteian trilogy, or a volume of Aeschylus’ other plays – the Seven Against Thebes, The Persians, or The Suppliants, you’ll see what Fagles means. Reading Aeschylus is like running your hands over a knotty, shaggy piece of wood – dense and with the grains all running together. His style, as Fagles reproduces it in English, is jagged and strange – it’s like Aeschylus is trying to wring every last drop out of language by sheer force and is willing to sacrifice smoothness and grace for sharpness and power. If you give the Oresteia a go, I think you’ll be hooked by the first shadowy monologue of Agamemnon, in which the night watchman says he’s been waiting for the king for so long that he knows all the stars in the night sky.

Generations of Gods

So we’ve finished the whole Oresteian trilogy. And ultimately it is a story like many others we’ve heard before in this podcast. We’ve heard it in the Mesopotamian creation story the Enuma Elish. We’ve heard it in the old Canaanite story of the god Baal. We’ve heard it in the books of Genesis and Job. Most of all, we’ve heard it in Hesiod’s Theogony. It’s a story that seems to be everywhere. Marduk beats Tiamat. Baal beats the Litan. Yahweh beats the Leviathan. Zeus beats Kronos. It’s the story of old, primeval gods being replaced by a younger pantheon. The older gods are colossal but unpredictable – they are revered, but their chaotic natures lead to death and destruction being dispensed randomly, century after century. Only, at some point, along comes a new force – singular or multiple, of deities, and these new gods triumph over their awful predecessors, and a new, stable, just order is established forever after. In the plays of Aeschylus, this storyline shows Athena and Apollo overmastering the dreadful Furies – the young Olympians supplanting the old children of the first titans.

These stories about multiple generations of gods show a view of time that is progressive. There was an initial period of chaos, followed by a period of order. The stories are shorthand for the tumult of childhood impulsiveness preceding the composure of adult discipline. The stories of multiple generations of gods are shorthand about the progress human civilization. We began in a chaotic welter – life was violent and unpredictable. But as civilization took hold, the frenzied violence and randomness of human existence was replaced by something else. This something else, like Marduk, or Baal, or Yahweh, or Zeus, could have its own brand of austerity and oppressiveness. But overall, it was preferable to what had come before. This story of younger gods supplanting older gods is way down at the root ball of world literature. And it’s ultimately at the core of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, too.

But I don’t want to just stop there. This story of new gods replacing old ones – of a mound of new enlightened policies replacing the furies of the old ways of justice – this story might be a pervasive mytheme in much of the ancient literature we’ve looked at. But I want to go a little bit deeper. Because by the 400s BCE, when Aeschylus wrote his plays, the story of new gods replacing old ones was already at least three centuries old. The miracle of Aeschylus’ most famous trilogy isn’t so much that he tells of this divine power transition. The miracle of the Oresteia is that it takes the ancient story of this divine power transition and applies it to a historical event that had actually taken place in Athens, just a few years before. Now, I’m going to tell you what that event – that rather momentous event – was. [music]

Athenian Democracy in Transition: The Birth of the Heliaia

In those joyous final moments of The Eumenides, when the homicidal Furies have been changed into beings called “the kindly ones,” many of the Athenians who watched the play would have been thinking about something that had happened very recently in their city’s history. This was a political transition that had taken place in the late 460s, and it had to do with an important evolution in Athenian democracy.

When we learn about Athenian democracy in school, we learn that Athenians threw off the shackles of monarchy and tyranny around the year 500, and that thereafter, they gathered in a public assembly, and as a collective, made decisions through voting. As with so many democratic systems prior to recent times, Athenian democracy was democracy with an asterisk. Women did not vote, slavery was a widespread and uncontroversial institution, and wealthy families had a disproportionate amount of political power. These are what we might call the two most basic facts about Athenian democracy. First, classical Athenians met, debated, and held votes to make important collective decisions. Second, only some classical Athenians met, debated, and held votes to make important collective decisions. Let’s go a bit deeper, and learn a bit about the history of Athenian democracy, because this history is quite relevant to Aeschylus’ play, The Eumenides.

Although democracy was established in Athens just before the 400s BCE, this new political system was rolled out slowly, and it was resisted, and campaigned against – it gained ground, and it lost ground over the course of the 400s, according to Athens’ economic fortunes, its military conflicts, and the unique personalities of its more prominent citizens. As is the case in all democracies, there was a tug-of-war between oligarchy and democracy, with plutocrats trying to shore up more power, and a voting base trying to preserve their political power. The early history of Athenian democracy was bumpy. And within this history, specifically, in the late 460s, something very consequential happened – something which likely influenced Aeschylus’ Oresteia. This was a series of political reforms spearheaded by a celebrated Athenian lawmaker named Ephialtes.

The reforms of Ephialtes, for historians, generally mark the onset of the most democratic period of ancient Athenian history. During most of Ephialtes’ career, and most of the life of Aeschylus, a council existed called the Areopagus. The Areopagus council was named after the Areopagus rock, or the Ares rock – the rock on which the climax of Aeschylus’ whole Oresteian trilogy takes place. The Areopagus council was essentially an old guard of elites who wanted minimum citizen participation in government, and maximum insider advantages for the wealthy. In a flurry of activity in the late 460s, Ephialtes prosecuted the more egregious offenses of key members of the Aeropagus council, and he began some political restructuring that became foundational to Athens’ future. Ephialtes, not wanting elites to continue to have all the power, lowered property holding requirements for public officeholders. He set up laws to ensure that officeholders were monitored by state agencies. This next one is a doozy. He set up a system so that public officeholders would be paid for their work, thus making public office a viable career option for those outside of the aristocracy.

All of these reforms unsettled the Areopagus council’s traditional means of doing business. The Areopagus was an old boy’s club, and it transferred power between elites regardless of interests and abilities. Ephialtes’ reforms for officeholders did much to make Athens’ bureaucracy into a functional, meritocratic system staffed by a diverse lot of citizens who were expected to be good at their jobs. But Ephialtes’ most deadly strike against the Areopagus’ council was to remove almost all of its judicial powers. Rather than letting the Areopagus council remain the combined executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government, Ephialtes spread these powers among a large citizen council, and turned the judiciary powers of the Areopagus council over to the Heliaia, a body of 6,000 citizens who functioned as the principal court of the city. The Areopagus still had some judicial powers, but only as a court for murder trials. The de facto judicial power, however, was with the 6,000-citizen strong Heliaia. Did Ephialtes give meaningful judicial power to thousands of his fellow citizens? Heliaia, he did.

By 462 BCE, these reforms were largely pushed through the legislature, and the Heliaia was starting to get up and running in earnest. The whole process took place during a diplomacy crisis with Sparta, and the instability of the international situation likely helped instigate the radical legislative changes. Now, naturally, not everyone was happy. The powerful old boy’s club who had suddenly been deprived of their privileges found that the old ways of money flowing through the city had changed, and would continue to change in a way more amenable to the welfare of the median citizen. And in 461 BCE, Ephialtes was murdered. We don’t know who killed him. But his death didn’t stop the reforms that he had put in motion. Power had been largely removed from the old Aeropagus council, redistributed amidst a larger number of citizens, and a system of checks and balances had been established. In the history of democracy, then, Ephialtes is a giant. Aeschylus and his democratically-minded fellow Athenians knew, when Ephialtes died, that one of their greatest citizens had fallen – but not before setting up something that genuinely made Athenian democracy work better. [music]

The Oresteia and the Heliaia

To return to the Oresteia, all of the political transformation of the Areopagus happened just a few years before the premiere of Aeschylus’ most famous plays. If the reforms were pushed through in 462, we can imagine that it took a few years for the new systems to be set up and the power transfers to fully take place, and so the spring of 458 BCE would have been the moment in Athens when citizens had really started feeling empowered by the reforms of Ephialtes.

The core of The Eumenides is a transition – a transition from the old, chaotic, bloody justice system of the Furies to a new justice system, led by citizens and Athena herself, and headquartered in Athens. The Oresteian trilogy is, as I said a moment ago, another tally mark among literature’s many stories of old pantheons giving way to new ones. But in its original context, it was a story about a specific political transition that had very recently taken place. The city, Aeschylus and his audience knew, would no longer be ruled over by a band of old, moneyed noblemen whose performance in office was egocentric and ineffectual. Government was going to work better. A civic assembly – just like the one in the play, had just started calling a lot of the shots.

As Athena and her assembly lead the Furies – now transformed into the “kindly ones” or Eumenides – off of the fake Areopagus set onstage and into the real city, maybe, symbolically, to the real Areopagus rock – as all of this happened Aeschylus’ audience would have been smiling in part because they felt they were watching a true story. The Areopagus was no longer a symbol of aristocratic mismanagement. In the theater, as well as the actual city, a period of chaotic, imperfectly administrated justice was over. A new period of more orderly justice had begun. The newly cleansed Areopagus rock was its symbol. The mound had triumphed over the furies.

The Oresteia‘s Loose Ends: Clytemnestra and the Old Gods

I think the Oresteia is a story about hope. But it’s also a lumpy story, and before we close our copy of the trilogy, we should consider those lumps. One of them is Clytemnestra. At the plays’ beginning, she appears as a ghost. Her husband killed their daughter, and she’s killed her husband to avenge this crime. Then, her son killed her, and got away with it. Clytemnestra died unavenged, the final victim of the infernal House of Atreus.

Needless to say, Aeschylus’ modern reader is, just as his original audience would have been, happy to see the generational violence finally stop. There’s been enough strife in the story of Agamemnon’s family. Yet at the story’s end, the lumps swept under the rug are all women, and those doing the sweeping are, but for one exception, men. Clytemnestra’s story ends in pure tragedy. The Furies, raw and bloody, surrender to a new order. Apollo says that he told Orestes to kill Clytemnestra because – uh – Zeus told him to, and, hearing this, Athena throws in with young Orestes, and the male defendant and defense triumph over the female victim and prosecution, and thusly, a better future is secured for all. It is a happy ending, but it’s an ending in which a new order ascends out of a legal morass more due to divine mandate than the rational exercise of justice, and as such, The Eumenides leaves some of us, as modern readers, just a bit skeptical. The new order of The Eumenides is a divine monarchy ruled by a capricious father god, and it doesn’t particularly look like the democratic society that Aeschylus’ generation had forged through law and war.

A divine monarchy ruling over a human democracy makes for an untidy ending. The gods don’t have to make sense or follow rules. Apollo’s most substantive speech on behalf of the plaintiff he’s defending is that mothers aren’t really related to their children, and so it’s alright that Orestes killed his mom. Athena, evidently, listens to this with a straight face, as do the play’s model Athenian citizen court, and no one brings up the fact that by that logic, Agamemnon butchered his daughter Iphigenia, and Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband had not exactly taken place out of the blue.

Just as Clytemnestra’s crime is demonized more than Orestes’, because Clytemnestra is a woman, the Oresteia also vilifies women in the forms of the Furies themselves. They are ugly, and dirty. They are passionate and aggressive, but at the same time ineffectual and feeble before the representatives of Zeus. And ultimately, just as Clytemnestra is disregarded for the sake of Orestes, the Furies are transformed and stuck in a closet for the sake of Zeus’ commands. In both cases, what is old and frenzied and disposable is female, and what is new, permanent and rational is male. The ending is perfectly consonant with the patriarchal values of classical Athenian society. But for a lot of modern readers, the ghost of Clytemnestra, and the once terrifying power of the furies continue to haunt the stage at the play’s end.

To consider the Furies for just a moment longer, the old gods are an especially potent part of the Oresteia’s end. Many of the most sublime speeches in the final of the three plays come from the Furies. At one point, before their transformation, the Furies warn Athena and Apollo that “[A]t birth, I say, our rights were so ordained. / The deathless gods must keep their hands far off – / no god may share our cups, our solemn feasts. / We want no part of their pious white robes – / the Fates who gave us power made us free” (246). As we see there, the Furies are wild. But they’re free. They were born before the laws and restrictions of the younger gods. The old, primeval deities like the Furies reigned over a period of turmoil and radical liberty. Generally, in Aeschylus, the old gods are a terrible and violent lot, best consigned to posterity. But just as civilization occasionally fantasizes about life in a state of nature, the Oresteia is mesmerized by the fearsomeness and pandemonium of the period before the ascendency of the Olympian pantheon. Pages and pages of The Eumenides are made up of the Furies’ speeches – their threats, their musings, their berserk dances and hunting cries. They’re the type of villains who are so spellbinding that they threaten to steal the show and become the protagonists, like an Iago or an Edmund.

Aeschylus had dealt with the old gods before. The play Prometheus Bound, most often attributed to Aeschylus, is about the titan Prometheus, chained to remote mountains as punishment for trying to thwart Zeus. Prometheus Bound shows a much more critical attitude toward the younger gods – in Prometheus Bound Zeus isn’t a welcome bastion of novel order – he’s an insecure, volatile young tyrant. So the very last point I want to make is this. The Oresteian trilogy has a pretty straightforward attitude toward progress. The new gods have done away with the old gods, and a new political system has replaced an old one, and it’s all good – the mound, again, has beaten the Furies. But Aeschylus himself, and his contemporaries, could feel simultaneously ambivalent about the progress of Athenian civilization. Progress had come with a cost. Prosperity had blossomed among a chosen set of propertied male citizens, and recent legislation had batted back the hungry claws of oligarchy. But many inhabitants of Athens had enjoyed no benefits from Athenian democracy, and their misfortunes and losses were still visible in the city. Beneath the freshly carved fluted columns going up around the city, and all around its vaunted new Heliaia court system and the Parthenon that would soon rise on the Acropolis, there were women and slaves, and these subservient classes, like Clytemnestra, and like the Furies, were no better off in the worlds that Zeus and modernity had engendered. [music]

Moving on to the Three Theban Plays of Sophocles

So that takes us through Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a theatrical trilogy with a mostly happy ending. Next to the two Homeric epics and the works of Hesiod, the Oresteia is required reading for students of ancient Greek literature, and if all you ever learned about ancient Greek literature was what we’ve covered in Literature and History so far, you’d still have bitten off a pretty ideal chunk of it. The story of how Aeschylus’ generation fought the Greco-Persian Wars and then instituted, and improved Athenian democracy between 500 and 450 BCE lines up nicely with the Oresteian trilogy, a series of plays that are, again, overall, very optimistic about the future of classical Athens. Aeschylus and his contemporaries laid the foundations for the most celebrated period of ancient Greek history, and his theatrical successors, most famously Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, continued to push ancient Greek literature forward during the next two generations.

In the next trio of episodes, we will move onto a new tragedian. The playwright Sophocles lived a long and active life from about 496-405 BCE. During much of his life, Sophocles dominated classical Athenian theater, writing more than 120 plays, seven of which survive in full. Of these seven, three go together as a set. These three plays were not staged all together as a trilogy, like Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The three Sophocles plays we’ll read in the next three episodes were staged decades apart from one another. Yet they all concern the same family. They are often called the “Theban Plays,” as they concern a series of events that took place in the ancient Greek city of Thebes. And just as Aeschylus’ Oresteia concerns the family of Atreus, Sophocles’ Theban plays are about a family, too – the family of a man named Oedipus.

Sophocles’ three Theban plays are Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and then Antigone. Over the next three programs, we will read these three plays, and dive more deeply into the history of Athenian democracy over the middle and later parts of the 400s BCE. The tale of Oedipus is something that many of us have heard about – the story of a man who kills someone he shouldn’t, and then marries someone he shouldn’t. Freud had a trademark interpretation of Oedipus’ story, and when we read the play Oedipus the King out of context, it’s a strange, creaky, fatalistic tale in which it takes a long time for the main character to discover the dark secret that most of us already know. When we read Oedipus the King in context, however, it really begins to blossom. Staged during the frightful first years of the Peloponnesian War, Oedipus the King wasn’t some drawn-out adaptation of a clunky old piece of folklore, but instead, a piercing tragedy highly relevant to what the ancient Athenians watching it were actually experiencing. So next time, as we read the first of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, we’ll learn that there’s a lot more to the story of the doomed King Oedipus than his awful and trademark sins. I have a quiz on this program available there in the notes to your podcast app if you want to review the details you’ve learned in this episode. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and if you want to hear a song, I’ve got one coming up. If not, see you next time.

Still here? So, I got to thinking about those Furies. They are, I think, the most memorable thing about The Eumenides, which is titled after them, of course. Those Furies are fuming for most of the play, and they’re hustling all over the stage presaging blood and gore and death all the time. In Aeschylus’ hands, they are some of the most haunting figures in Greek mythology. I got to thinking about those Furies, and decided to write a song about them. This tune takes the Furies and imagines them singing a song about who they are, and what they do, in multipart vocal harmony over some rock instrumentation. This one is called “Flap Flap Flap, They’re the Furies,” and it’s – uh – one of the more ridiculous songs I’ve ever recorded, which is saying something. So thanks again for being interested in the Oresteia by Aeschylus, and here comes “Flap Flap Flap, They’re the Furies.”





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