Classic Lectures

Darkness, Light, and Drama in the Oresteia (continued)

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Whether this more general and ongoing establishment could be as easily rationalized in male Olympian terms as the single vote on Orestes is not clear. It is clear that Athena doesn’t attempt to; her male-oriented explanation applies only to the vote, not to the founding of the Court. Her broader objective is at least as much mercy as rational analysis. And Athena’s responses when she first heard the Furies’s accusation against Orestes are reminiscent of Electra’s query to her Chorus as to what kind of savior she should hope for: “a judge or one who does justice?” Electra’s Chorus had no patience with that question. Their concern was for retribution alone. And there is no evidence in either play that Electra’s emergent distinction is shared by anyone else in society or the cosmos except and until Athena. What the goddess ultimately does is to give institutional form to concerns and perceptions first articulated in the trilogy by an isolated mortal woman.

Neither the vote nor the creation of the Court are Athena’s last acts on stage. And in her subsequent behavior her more than male nature is most clearly manifested, however it may have earlier been blurred or denied.

Orestes has been saved. Nevertheless, two problems remain, one religious, one moral and social. Or rather, one problem with both religious and social dimensions. Athena’s vote has been a partisan, Olympian one, by her own account. The claims of the Furies have been denied. The conflict among the gods is yet unreconciled. Furthermore, in acquitting Orestes, Athena has refused to be influenced by the Furies’s contention that their power must be maintained because it operates as a deterrent to crime, in spite of the fact that she has earlier recognized the truth of their assertion. Paradoxically, in acquitting Orestes because in avenging his father king and ridding his house of a usurper he was acting on behalf of the social order, she has set a precedent—the denial of the rights of the Furies—which, if followed, will itself result in the disturbance of social stability.

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After the Furies have been won over, Athena gives thanks to “Zeus of the assembly,” who has “prevailed.” But in the same utterance she more fervently expresses thanks to a female power: “I rejoice; and I cherish Persuasion’s eye,/for having guided my tongue and lips.” This expression of affiliation with both male and female powers is in striking contrast to her self-definition while casting her vote for Orestes. Athena herself has been through much. Before the trial, she told Orestes “either course, that you should stay/or that I should send you away is disastrous, and perplexes me.” Has she suffered into truth? Has she learned not only how to support Orestes and not outrage the Furies, but also the truth of her own nature—that she embodies and serves both male and female principles? This is her last reference to Zeus. As for visible effects, one may wonder if she drops her spear when she assumes the role of the Fury Chorus’s Leader and joins them in their dance.

The Furies are not demeaned, as they gradually recognize. Entering the cave is not allowing themselves to be shut away. Earth has always been their home, from which their influence can still radiate. The lower position of the cave at the base of the hill relative to the Court at the top represents not a subordinate role but a foundational one.

The resolution of the trilogy requires both the establishment of the Court of the Areopagus and the migration of the Cthonic goddesses to a new home in the soil of Attica, with their conversion from blind and bloody persecutors into defenders, through the awe they inspire, of the new system in which discriminating justice is practiced—or attempted. When they consent to enter the civic structure, their earlier function of avenging bloodshed on family and clan terms is expanded to include avenging acts of violence on behalf of the polis. By accepting Athena’s proposal, these gods of the underworld gain great power in cooperation with the gods of Olympus, and mankind.

At the conclusion, Athena becomes a stage director, like Artemis, Clytemnestra, and Orestes before her. And her directions include the last visual manifestations of the trilogy’s two unifying motifs. The Furies’s black robes disappear from view and torches are kindled—light out of darkness. Their new robes of red, the color designating quests of the state in the Panathenaic procession, supersede the red fabrics that had been involved in the crimes in the preceding plays—the net transformed.

Is this a fulfillment of our hopes or a mockery of them? Is the triumphant conclusion earned and potentially salutary, as critics such as Kitto affirm? Or is it ironically, skeptically, or obtusely imposed on double talk and false consciousness, as Lebeck’s, Goldhill’s, or Zeitlin’s analyses conclude? Or something in between?

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There is a kind of chronological double vision in Portrait. Though often we have the illusion of unmediated access to young Stephen’s consciousness, there is an older, wiser writer—call him older Stephen, Joyce, or an anonymous narrator—who is fostering our understanding of what Stephen still needs to learn and do. The chronological double vision in the Oresteia may be thought to function in a similar way. If the audience supposes that the Eumenides is reverential in relation to the seventh century foundation of the Areopagus, then the triumphant procession must seem a mockery indeed. The Council’s Court, as originally constituted, did not succeed in bringing harmony to the city during the ensuing two hundred years. If the audience supposes, however, that the play is reverential in regard to the reform of the Court three years before the production, the implication is different. The play simultaneously confronts the audience with an earlier failure and a new chance.

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It is most significant for judging the Oresteia’s implied claim for itself that the audience is invited to join in the procession to the hill. The double vision suddenly becomes triple. The time is not two hundred on three years ago, but now. The invitation—actually challenge—is not to celebration but to commitment and participation. Whether the procession will lead to a triumph or a mockery depends upon whether the audience can manifest in the city the consciousness that the trilogy has sought to manifest in the theatre.

Works Cited

Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993.

Fagles, Robert, and W.B.Stanford. The Serpent and the Eagle: A Reading of the 'Oresteia.' The Oresteia. By Aeschylus. Trans. Robert Fagles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. 13-97.

Goldhill, Simon. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Joint Association of Classical Teachers. The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. Chester G. Annderson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.

Kitto, H.D.F. Form and Meaning in Drama: A Study of Six Greek Plays and of "Hamlet." 2nd ed. London: University Paperbacks–Methuen, 1964.

Lattimore, Richmond, trans. Oresteia. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953.

Lebeck, Anne. "The Oresteia": A Study in Language and Structure. Publications of the Center for Hellenic Studies. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1971.

Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Zeitlin, Froma I. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

—Author info: Thomas Gillcrist retired from Reed College in 2002 after 40 years in the English department. He received a Graves Award for excellence in teaching in the humanities and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, and Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Seoul. He also served on the executive committees of the Association of Departments of English and the Western Humanities Alliance. Since retiring, he has written on Victorian historian and statesman T.B. Macaulay’s essay on Warren Hastings and served as guest editor for a special Macaulay issue of Nineteenth–Century Prose.