Why “The Oresteia” Still Matters

It is said that the Oresteia is the ancient world’s Divine Comedy, with some justification. Originally a four-part play, only three pieces of the movement survive: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides. The finale, Proteus, was a cosmic dance of the gods and heroes, the full fruition of the work’s manifestation—the waltz of the heavens and earth in harmony already implied and presupposed at the conclusion of the Eumenides. From the murder of Agamemnon to the revenge taken by Orestes, his flight to Athens, and exoneration before the court of Apollo and Athena, the Oresteia moves from “hell” to “purgatory” to “paradise.” Yet the Oresteia, written two and a half millennia ago, touches on themes still so relevant today: justice, injustice, revenge, and gender conflict. Its themes touch on the eternal relevance of the human condition and struggle with much consideration for how to live today.

Aeschylus lived through the golden age of Greece and Athens. In his thirties, he was a hoplite in the army that defeated the Persians at Marathon. Living through the Second Persian Wars, he experienced the tumultuous sack and burning of Athens by Persian forces after the Hellenic allies led by Sparta were defeated at Thermopylae. Aeschylus subsequently fought with the victorious Greek forces at Salamis and Plataea which drove the Persians from Greek soil. The Greeks, as we know from their subsequent writings, saw their victory as the triumph of justice over injustice; of right over might. This theme of justice triumphing against injustice became themes of later Greek works: Herodotus’s Histories and Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War. Then came Plato’s Republic and various other dialogues. It wasn’t just history and philosophy that was touched by this concept of justice: tisis (τίσις). Drama concerned itself with this theme as well, inspired by those sublime events that secured Greek freedom against Persian imperial pretensions.

The Oresteia is a play that is concerned with the question of justice. In politics, justice may be the most pressing issue of any politeia. It is important to remember that in ancient Greece, despite attempts to find the roots of the public-private distinction in ancient Athens, such a clear division didn’t exist (and we can argue today whether it does, in fact, exist or whether it remains a cherished myth we tell ourselves). The public impacts the private, the private cannot escape the public. Since public and private are intermixed, the kind of life we live—or have—is bound up with politics: life in the city. This is the best way to understand Aristotle’s declaration that humans are political animals. We are more than mere social creatures seeking relations of love and intimacy. We live, eat, breathe, and die in the city—we exist in a realm touched by every facet of the political: law, economy, friendships and animosities, all exist under the roof of the polis.

The question of what kind of city we live in is not just Platonic, as I’ve written in understanding Plato’s Republic, but equally artistic and dramatic. The great plays of the Athenian playwright tradition deal with the same concern albeit in its dramatic, cathartic, form. As political animals, we must necessarily deal with the question of what kind of city we live in. Once we wrestle with that question, we can, hopefully, move toward the justice offered in a community united in religious, gender, political, and relational harmony. Amid the ruins of death and injustice, can life and justice—a new harmony of love—emerge? This is what The Oresteia attempts to reach, it is the best form of tragedy according to Aristotle’s Poetics: the imitation of admirable things.

Agamemnon opens as if in a prison. The Watchman, an altogether insignificant character, begins: “Dear gods, set me free from all the pain, the long watch I keep, one whole year awake…propped on my arms, crouched on the roofs of Atreus like a dog.” The beginning of the entire movement of the Oresteia is brilliantly set in motion by Aeschylus’s opening. Something is not right, amiss, afoul. We have pain and dreariness, implications for a rough situation ahead. The chorus, rather extensive in the opening, sings of glory in slaughter: “Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end!” Let us remember this refrain of the chorus in Agamemnon vis-à-vis the ending chorus in the Eumenides.

Imprisonment, worry, fear, death, and slaughter. Quite the opening. From a tortured watchmen to a raucous chorus singing of the lust of violence, the play shifts to Clytemnestra—the equally tortured and vengeful wife of Agamemnon.

Agamemnon, mind you, has abandoned Clytemnestra in his glory seeking conquest that brought death and destruction to Troy. He has also sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, to secure safe passage and blessings in the war. Abandoned by her husband, who has also slaughtered their daughter to win glory in war, Clytemnestra is understandably angered by what she considers a great betrayal. In the absence of Agamemnon, she has taken a new lover—Aegisthus. Together, the two plot the downfall of Agamemnon upon his return.

Lies and deceit fill the House of Atreus. The glory of Mycenae, it is implied, is built on a crooked foundation that causes the apple to not fall far from the tree. The parousia of Agamemnon should have been his triumph. He was away for more than a decade. He is returning the conqueror and slaughterer of the east, vanquisher of the city of Troy. Clytemnestra even feigns the joy of his return when she exclaims, “[H]ave him come with speed, the people’s darling – how they long for him. And for his wife, may he return and find her true at hall, just as the day he left her, faithful to the last.” We know, however, that Clytemnestra speaks with the hissing tongue of lies. The reunion of a family long separated by war should mark the new harmony of life previously robbed by the chaos of war. The hopeful peace of the household is nevertheless ruptured by the bloodstained hand of vengeance.

Agamemnon returns but something is not right. Cassandra, a spoil of war, a princess of Troy taken captive to be a slave for Agamemnon, is hysterical. She serves a prophetess of destruction upon the House of Atreus. Cassandra’s spasmodic utterances reveal the depravity of Agamemnon; moreover, she is a prisoner of horrid and cruel memories and a terrible lived experience that is foretelling the coming horrid cruelty and destruction of her captors. As the chorus sings after Cassandra’s fateful screams, “Death is close, and quick.”

Death does indeed come quick. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus hatch their plan to kill the King of Mycenae. The two lovers kill Cassandra and Agamemnon. Aegisthus sings: “O what a brilliant day it is for vengeance! Now I can say once more there are gods in heaven avenging men, blazing down on all the crimes of earth.”

This returns us to the great theme of the Oresteia while also foreshadowing, with irony, the fate of Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Orestes, and the gods. What is the difference between justice and vengeance? And what role do the gods play in upholding and dispensing justice? Are we prisoners of a violent fate, or do we have the power to enact justice in a world often filled with the violence of injustice?

At the end of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra reveals that they never sought justice but power: “You and I have power now. We will set the house in order once and for all.” There is a temptation for political utopianism too, “We will set the house in order once and for all.” Clytemnestra and Aegisthus trust in themselves. Whatever pieties they utter to the gods, whatever veil of justice they claim for themselves, is ultimately empty in their lust for power and political perfectionism.

The Libation Bearers opens with the contrast of our murderers several years after their heinous act. Orestes, who is now introduced to us, prays to the gods (specifically Hermes) for deliverance. Aeschylus immediately sets up Orestes as a model for piety for us. He is dutiful to the gods. As he is dutiful to the gods, he is also dutiful to his family, especially his father, however imperfect Agamemnon was. (Aeschylus doesn’t paint a flattering picture of Agamemnon we must remember; Cassandra’s delirious outbursts show him to be a monster and a monster he was.)

The chorus once again sings of the tension we suffer from: revenge or justice? The earth cries out for blood. The human heart seeks vengeance. Or does it seek justice? That dividing line is still obscured for us.

Enter Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The agony and suffering of Electra add a new dimension to the murder. Electra’s suffering leads her to ask the audience to pity her. Through her pain, Aeschylus attempts to show the human consequences of murder. Human beings are not just bodily casualties. They are psychological casualties. Electra’s agony is meant to illicit pity from the audience and softens us to Orestes’ calculated movement toward vengeance/justice. The loving relationships that have been stolen from Electra are given a substitute between us (as audience) and her; a restored relationship of love emerges when Electra and Orestes are reunited which further drives the dramatic plot.

“Here I am. Look no further. No one loves you more than I,” Orestes proclaims. “Your pain is mine. If I laugh at yours, I only laugh at mine,” Orestes continues.

Electra, stumbling through the shock and joy, realizes her brother. “I turn to you the love I gave my mother – I despise her, she deserves it, yes, and the love I gave my sister, sacrificed on the cruel sword, I turn to you. You were my faith, my brother – you alone restore my self-respect.”

Love in relationships, Aeschylus reveals in the touching interplay between Orestes and Electra, brings healing. It brings healing to the suffering wounds Electra has felt since Agamemnon’s murder. It brings some healing to Orestes who is also without a family but now has—at the very least—Electra as a loving companion. Brother and sister share each other’s pain and suffering in a beautiful moment of sibling love that brings a brief moment of solace in the midst of death and destruction.

Aeschylus does a wonderful job bringing a new depth to his characters and in the second act. In introducing Orestes as a pious son, we are filled with a sense of divine justice rather than human revenge emanating from his spirit. The deliverance of Electra’s anguish in the reunion of brother and sister adds a sentimentality that was absent in the previous play. Murder is still to be done, but we have a new feeling within us. However cruel Agamemnon was, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus’s murder of the king feels wrong. Orestes’ murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus feels righteous. Or at least acceptable, understandable, justifiable. Aeschylus has gotten us to think about the nature of justice and revenge and where the distinction lay.

Furthermore, Aeschylus juxtaposes images and actions against each other. Just as Agamemnon is welcomed by a scheming Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and killed in this false hospitality, a scheming Orestes is welcomed by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and puts on a veil of false hospitality to kill them. Just as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murdered Agamemnon, so too does Orestes murder Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Just as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus stood over and gloated above the dead body of Agamemnon, so too does Orestes stand over the dead bodies of his father’s murderers. In this juxtaposition of imagery and action, imagery and actions that mirror one another, Aeschylus is probing the soul of justice and revenge, piety and hatred, love and lust.

Electra had called down divine retribution, “Both fists at once come down, come down – Zeus, crush their skulls. Kill! Kill!” As mentioned, the Libation Bearers opens with Orestes in prayer, “Hermes, lord of the dead, look down and guard the fathers’ power. Be my saviour, I beg you, be my comrade now.” These prayers are the only difference between Orestes and Electra vis-à-vis Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Aeschylus seemingly wants to assert that religious fidelity, piety, has something to do with justice. Prayers to the gods are conspicuously absent in the plotting of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Agamemnon is a bastard, this we know. Yet we are unsettled by his murder. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are bastards too, but we are less unsettled by their murder. We hold Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in contempt. We hold Orestes in some degree of sympathy despite the continuation of bloodshed by his hands.

Cycles of violence dominate the course of the Oresteia. Violence begets violence. Orestes, after murdering Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, is haunted and hounded by the furies. He is driven into exile, chased by the spirits of the old world calling for death, revenge. He heads to Athens where Athena is the patron goddess, where Apollo is also an enshrined god. The Eumenides, then, is the resolution to the dark spell and retributive spirit of violence. The furies call for violence. Blood for blood. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Orestes, in the presence of gods and goddesses of reason and justice, rationally pleads his case. The previous two acts have shown us the outcome of violent retribution moved by pure passion: murder. The furies call for vengeance, a perpetuation of murder. Orestes pleads his case, hoping to break the destructive spell of violence holding sway over us.

What makes the Eumenides a remarkable concluding act—given the fact that the fourth installment of the Oresteia is missing, and perhaps divinely so as it works exceptionally well as the concluding piece—is how action gives way to rationality, logos supersedes energeia. Looking back on the actions taken in Agamemnon and the Libation Bearers, and the action called for by the furies, there is no rule of law and courts of arbitration and justice. Pure will dominates. Now, however, will is tempered by rationality, by reason.

There is endless discussion as to the nature of the furies. Psychologically, they can be interpreted as the guilt-stricken conscience of Orestes in having murdered his mother. After all, the furies call for Clytemnestra’s revenge, not Aegisthus’s. Alternatively, the furies also represent the old law and the customs of ancient Greece. They are the manifestation of tradition, a tradition rooted in that retributive understanding of “justice,” a perversion of justice, the call for vengeance. Moreover, the furies can also be seen as a manifestation of the human condition, the twists and turns, turbulence and turmoil, of the human life in its complex miseries. The call for revenge is always hanging over us. Literally. Some might say that the desire for vengeance that the furies shriek for is all too hauntingly natural.

So Orestes flees. As he flees he is hounded by the furies. He is a broken and shattered man, a tarnished son and brother, and exiled human, a tormented soul like all of us.

Yet Orestes retains that cloak of piety. Once more he cries out to the gods, Apollo in particular: “Lord Apollo, you know the rules of justice, know them well. Now learn compassion too. No one doubts your power to do great things.” From first introduction to end of the play, Orestes is portrayed as having some sort of communion with the gods. This is not accidental on Aeschylus’s part. While the images and sounds of death surround him, the images and sounds of life—the gods—are also nearby. They never desert him, or he never deserts them.

It is the gods who bring forth the revelation of life to us over the course of the play. The furies and their leader confront Apollo and demand justice. Or, more appropriately, revenge. Apollo strikes back. “Why, you’d disgrace – obliterate the bonds of Zeus and Hera queen of the brides. And the queen of love you’d throw to the winds at a word, disgrace love, the source of mankind’s nearest, dearest ties. Marriage of man and wife is Fate itself, stronger than oaths, and Justice guards its life. But if one destroys the other and you relent – no revenge, not a glance in anger –then I say your manhunt of Orestes is unjust.”

Apollo’s revelation reveals what we have already been internally wrestling with from the time Orestes murdered Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Grisly and gruesome as murder is, Orestes did so out of some fidelity to his father, his family; in other words, out of love. This stands in stark contrast to the naked power politics and desire of pure revenge exemplified by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

After Apollo’s rebuke of the furies, Orestes comes to Athena and begs entrance in her presence. He declares himself free of blood guilt, of the murder he had committed which Apollo has defended. Prostrate before Athena, goddess of reason, wisdom, and justice, Orestes will plead his case.

The court trial between Orestes and the furies in Athena’s presence is the climax of the play and the climax that the entire movement of the Oresteia has been building to. As mentioned, we are moving from the world of pure will and the id to rationality and the superego. The action that has driven the play so far is coming to a close as will is superseded by reason. Before the presence of almighty Athena, Orestes and the furies do battle—not with force of arms but with force of persuasion, with speech. Physical force, which was the manifestation of confrontation in the preceding plays, disappears as intellectual force, rationality and persuasion, take center stage.

During the court proceeding, Orestes is still clearly haunted by the murder of his mother. “The blood sleeps, it is fading on my hands, the stain of mother’s murder washing clean. It was still fresh at the god’s hearth. Apollo killed the swine and the purges drove it off. Mine is a long story if I’d start with the many hosts I met, I lived with, and I left them all unharmed. Time refines all things that age with time…Athena, help me!” Yet again we see Orestes in communion with the gods; as he pleads before Athena we have the imagery of a human co-laboring with the gods, human life is incomplete without the gods. Justice, then, is incomplete without the gods.

The furies, by contrast, link arms and dance and seek to bring force and terror into the proceeding. Revenge, the demand for blood reciprocity in murder, is declared to be the birthright they are seeking. “[W]e rise,” they sing, “witness bound to avenge their blood we rise in flames against him to the end…This, this is our right, spun for us by the Fates, the ones who bind the world, and none can shake our hold.”

Morality and justice can be horrifying realities when you first come to realize their existence. This is what shocks the furies before Athena. If cycles of violence only lead to more violence, and that this cycle of violence is exactly what the furies seek to perpetuate, the horror that one must feel when one recognizes another path—that of reconciliation rather than destructive violence—must be gut wrenching.

Athena asks where will the cycle of violence end? The leader of the furies declares “Where there is no joy.” In other words, death. But death begets death.

Balance is needed. Athena’s adjudication walks a tight rope; civilizational fragility is also a topic implicit in the trial. Civilization exists where there is a law and justice. Civilization dissipates where law and justice are eroded. Arguments over the moral law abound. Both Orestes and the furies claim to be guided by the moral law. But Orestes’ moral law is the light of the day, the furies’ the darkness of the night.

Aeschylus seems to posit that both are part of the human condition. This is what makes the furies sympathetic. Revenge is an all too human instinct. That is what the furies are crying out for. The desire for revenge in response to a callous act of murder. (Though they conveniently leave out the callous act of murder on the part of Clytemnestra whom they are representing from the grave.) Yet we also instinctively know that the base desire that the furies are governed by are inconducive to human, social, life. Revenge cannot allow life in the city to be fruitful. Id and superego are intertangled in a gruesome wrestling match. Superego, eventually, wins.

Athena rules in favor of Orestes not so much out of his devotion to filial piety, but out of a recognition that the cycle of violence must come to an end. Reason, persuasion, is therefore the superior law to will. Athena acknowledges that the furies are pursuing justice of some kind. She accosts them, however, for the manner in which they sought it: outside the law, outside of reason. Taking matters into one’s own hands brings only bloodshed and destruction.

The furies are, appropriately, furious. They rebuke the Olympians. “You, you younger gods! – you have ridden down the ancient laws, wrenched them from my grasp – and I, robbed of my birthright, suffering, great with wrath, I loose my poison over the soil, aieee!” Athena calms the storm of the furies by articulating the necessity of persuasion against passion, of reason over will, “But if you have any reverence for Persuasion, the majesty of Persuasion, the spell of my voice that would appease your fury – Oh please stay.”

Athena’s taming of the furies represents the triumph of legal jurisprudence and civil law over the human instinct. The furies represent the boiling blood of human existence; they are the darkness to the day, that other side of human nature we like to ignore. But Aeschylus doesn’t ignore it. He shows it in its naked brutality. But he also reveals how it can be tamed and brought into the services of the polity, of human life. Instinct and rage are powerful forces, but without the rule of law, which Athena is establishing, life would just be an endless cycle of bloodshed and violence. We must have calm, we must have peace, we must have harmony between day and night, between id and superego, between passion and persuasion.

The furies relent. They accept Athena’s persuasion. The furies, we realize, have been the embodiment of the original chorus: “Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end.” Now, however, in the end, they are singing a new song: “Cry, cry in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on. This peace between Athena’s people and their guests must never end. All-seeing Zeus and Fate embrace, down they come to urge our union on – Cry, cry in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on!”

Aeschylus’s achievement is enduring for several reasons. He recognizes the torn nature of humanity, between lust and love, between instinct and reason, between passion and persuasion. He doesn’t so much abrogate one half for the other as much as he seeks to tame the darker side of human nature and subordinate it to what has been called “the better angels of our nature.” Additionally, Aeschylus articulates through the Eumenides the importance of reason and persuasion to justice. Without reasoning and persuasion, courts of law and their legal arrangements are null and void. We are the inheritors of this ideal of justice. Furthermore, Aeschylus doesn’t exile the furies into the abyss.

The furies are given an invitation to join in the co-creation of a better city. They accept. Enemies have become friends. Reconciliation, Aeschylus tells us, despite all the blood and hardships of the past, is possible. Reconciliation, rather than vengeance, ends the spell of violence and is the most reasonable, and just, action to pursue. For in reconciliation the possibility of love emerges. In reconciliation, rather than destruction, inclusion, rather than exclusion, true justice is manifested and the creation of a better city, a better republic, is possible. Two and half millennia later, we are still struggling to achieve that noble vision.

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