The Oresteia Read online

  THE ORESTEIA

  AGAMEMNON | WOMEN AT THE GRAVESIDE | ORESTES AT ATHENS

  AESCHYLUS

  A NEW TRANSLATION BY OLIVER TAPLIN

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK • LONDON

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  In gratitude to the poets I have had the good fortune to know

  CONTENTS

  Map: Places Relevant to the Oresteia

  Introduction

  On This Translation

  AGAMEMNON

  WOMEN AT THE GRAVESIDE

  ORESTES AT ATHENS

  Notes

  Recommended Pronunciations of Proper Names

  Acknowledgments

  “Publisher’s Note: On older legacy e-readers, line numbers will flow into the lines of poetry, instead of appearing off to the side. Please do not treat these numbers as part of the text. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

  Places Relevant to the Oresteia

  Map by Mapping Specialists, Ltd., Fitchburg, WI.

  INTRODUCTION

  Popular Performance

  The Oresteia trilogy was created by Aeschylus to be performed in the open air before his fellow citizens in Athens on a spring day in 458 B.C.E. Although it comes from so early in the record of world literature, it retains an extraordinary power to grip and to provoke to this day. In fact, it is probably more widely known and widely performed now than at any other time in the last twenty-two hundred years. It remains a challenging yet accessible work which embodies conflicts about family, gender, and justice in ways that still arouse disturbing thoughts and strong emotions.

  The Oresteia was not—and is not—just a text: Aeschylus was the director, composer, and choreographer as well as the playwright and poet. The text in this volume is the verbal record, the libretto, of a work of art that interwove action, costume, objects, dance, music, poetry, and voice. Furthermore, it did not come into being for an exclusive or elite public—and there is no good reason why it should be regarded like that today, either. It was produced, on the contrary, for an audience of at least six thousand, quite possibly many more, gathered in the theatron, the “viewing place” dedicated to honor the god Dionysus, beneath the walls of the Athenian Acropolis. It was a huge event, the popular entertainment of its time.

  This is all a far cry from most modern theatrical experiences, which are constrained within enclosed, darkened spaces where actors move naturalistically and speak colloquial prose. Also, as well as the actors, there was the chorus, which provided an essential layer in Greek drama. Many modern productions have found that, far from being a problem, this group of witnesses, with their searching attempts to make some sense of the tragedy through their poetry and music, supply an extra, vivid dimension. This is especially true of Aeschylus’ plays, where the choral songs (or “odes”) are so strong and full. It makes sense that Richard Wagner, with his ideas of a “total artwork” (Gesamtkunstwerk), said that his impressions of the Oresteia molded his ideas “about the whole significance of the drama and of theater.”

  More recently, many of the leading stage directors have seized the opportunity to put on Agamemnon or the whole trilogy in order to push the boundaries of routine theater. A roll call of names gives some idea of their variety: Max Reinhardt, Jean-Louis Barrault, Tyrone Guthrie, Vittorio Gassman, Karolos Koun, Peter Stein, Peter Hall, Ariane Mnouchkine, Katie Mitchell, Michael Thalheimer. These productions have not been acts of antiquarian piety to make passive audiences feel complacent; they have been innovative explorations to provoke those who want to have their ears and eyes and emotions freshly opened.

  So where did this story of theatrical revolution begin? Aeschylus was born in about 525 b.c.e., and the Oresteia, put on in 458, just two years before his death, was recognized as his masterpiece. The art form of tragedy had developed with amazing rapidity, given that theater, in the core sense of the word, had most probably been invented within Aeschylus’ lifetime. For theater to happen, there had to be a fixed viewing place (theatron) and a fixed time for the audience to gather; and rehearsed players, both actors and chorus, had to be organized to enact a structured story. The evidence all suggests (though not beyond dispute) that these conditions coalesced not long before 500 b.c.e. It can hardly be coincidence that at just that same time, in 508, the Athenians radically changed their political constitution to transfer ultimate power to the people (demos)—in other words, they inaugurated the world’s first democracy. So the first performance of the Oresteia may well mark the fiftieth birthday both of democracy and of theater.

  The Athenian theatron was inherently democratic, in that it was not select or exclusive: every citizen was admitted, and the seating was not segregated or privileged. Furthermore, tragedy calls for understanding and sympathetic fellow feeling toward the situations and sufferings of other, very different people; and a thoroughgoing democracy arguably calls for an enhanced sense of the variousness of humanity and of human suffering. Open-mindedness and a plurality of viewpoints are needed if true participation in any society is to become extended to all its citizens. This is epitomized in the third play of the Oresteia, where the vendetta vengeance of the old aristocratic society, structured around family bonds, as seen in the first two plays, is superseded by the jury made up of citizens. This civic institution hands adjudication over to society as a whole, subsuming all other affiliations.

  The theater was open, then, to all citizens. But did that extend to women, who were citizens in only limited ways that did not include participation in political decision-making or legal proceedings? Scholars are divided on this question of whether there were women present in the audience or not—there seems to be good evidence both for and against. But if they were admitted, they were still very probably a marginal minority. In that case, it is fascinating that women are so central to so many ancient Greek tragedies, not least the Oresteia, where Clytemnestra and Cassandra are in many ways more powerful and intelligent figures that any of the male characters. Outside of the theater, women were restricted and suppressed, but inside that contained space the plays opened up a different perspective: the realization of their potential, their strengths and their articulacy. Clytemnestra and her tragic sisters may be portrayed as deviant and dangerous, and they ultimately come to grief, but the idea that women are far more interesting than society officially recognized is planted. This is central to the enduring appeal of the Oresteia and many other Greek tragedies.

  The Three Plays

  Every year three playwrights each put on three tragedies at the dramatic festival. These were normally separate plays, but in the early days connected trilogies were more common, and the Oresteia seems to have been the culminating exemplar of that kind of dramatic construction. The three constituent plays have been traditionally given the titles Agamemnon, Choephoroi (Libation Bearers), and Eumenides (Kindly Ones). These may well not go back to Aeschylus, and they are rather deterrent, suggesting to modern readers and audiences that they need to have some esoteric knowledge of ancient Greek terms before they can embark on engaging with the plays. This is not at all the case, and that is why in this translation they have been retitled as Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, and Orestes at Athens. The argument for these coinages is set out in more detail on pp. xxx–xxxi below.

  A connected trilogy would offer the obvious opportunity to tell of three generations, especially if—as so often in myth!—it was a dynasty mired in a chain of vengeance. But, instead of doing that, Aeschylus dramatizes two generations of the royal house of Argos, and then in the third play turns to an external civic context to reach for some sort of
way out of the vicious cycle of vendetta. The setting breaks away from the claustrophobic family house and brings in the social dimensions of the law and politics and, by association, democracy.

  Agamemnon tells how the mighty king Agamemnon comes home triumphant from the ten-year siege of Troy, undertaken to recover Helen, who had been seduced by the Trojan prince Paris. He returns, though, only to be humiliated and slaughtered by his waiting wife, Clytemnestra. He has killed his daughter and sent many soldiers to their deaths, all for the sake of recovering the promiscuous wife who cuckolded Menelaus. Clytemnestra punishes him for that, but also because she wants her own power over her own life.

  The second play, Women at the Graveside, has Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, now a young man, return from his upbringing abroad to kill his mother along with her usurping lover, Aegisthus. He kills them to avenge his father and to reclaim his heritage; but to achieve that he has to plunge his sword into the maternal breast where he once suckled as a baby. The following scene, where Orestes stands over the two dead bodies, clearly and ominously replicates that in the first play where Clytemnestra stood over the slaughtered Agamemnon and his captive Trojan sex slave Cassandra.

  The Oresteia draws, like nearly all ancient Greek tragedies, on the inherited treasury of stories and legends about the great dynasties of a long-past “heroic” age. While these myths were fixed in some outlines, it was crucial that they were not canonical, but were open to invention and variation in detail. The common assertion that the plots were all known to the audiences in advance is simply false—the “fixed-story fallacy,” so to speak. Both of the bloody episodes of the first two plays were, indeed, old stories, already familiar in Homer’s epic Odyssey (a good two hundred years earlier), but Aeschylus has made a crucial change from all earlier versions. By having Clytemnestra single-handedly kill her husband, without the help of Aegisthus, and by making Orestes’ revenge on her central rather than that against Aegisthus, he creates the first great female role in the history of theater.

  While the first two plays are set on the crucial days of dynastic murder at Argos, it is part of the skillful complexity of Aeschylus’ storytelling that Agamemnon—by far the longest of the three plays—vividly evokes and incorporates other times and places. Furthest back in time, the internecine conflict of the previous generation is reconstructed. Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, was challenged for the throne of Argos by his brother Thyestes, who had also seduced Atreus’ wife, Aerope. In revenge, Atreus butchered Thyestes’ children, except for the baby Aegisthus, and served them cooked to their father at a feast. This macabre tale is evoked in hallucinatory visions by Cassandra.

  Another crucial “backstory,” that of Helen and her elopement with Paris, is primarily supplied by the chorus of old men in Agamemnon. Too old to go to Troy, they still have vigorous memories. In their second great song they dwell on both the entrancing appeal of Helen and on her dangerousness. Her delicate beauty grows into a curse that will destroy many soldiers and the whole city of Troy—she turns their wedding songs into laments.

  But the fullest and most vivid reenvisioning of a past event is the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis ten years earlier, recalled by the chorus in their very first song. When the expedition was ready to set off for Troy, the fleet was held up from crossing the Aegean Sea by adverse winds. Following prophetic advice that this was the only way to solve the problem, Agamemnon cut the throat of his own daughter Iphigeneia. Not a good start—a start that leaves Iphigeneia’s mother, at home in Argos, brooding on revenge.

  After all this, the third play, Orestes at Athens, is quite different: no blood is shed, and the drive to revenge is restrained by the establishment of a court of law. Before she was killed, Clytemnestra warned Orestes of the curse of “a mother’s rabid hunting dogs.” These materialize in the form of a whole chorus pack of Erinyes, ghoulish old goddesses who relentlessly pursue for revenge (on the Erinyes, conventionally known as “Furies,” see p. xxx). They arrive eventually in Athena’s city of Athens, and she sets up a trial for Orestes before human jurors under oath to deliver honest judgment. The votes turn out equally divided between mother and son, and Orestes is acquitted only with Athena’s casting vote. In the final scene of the trilogy, she manages to restrain the Erinyes from poisoning Athens as a further transferred stage of revenge: they are to be housed and honored there, and in return to give the city peace and prosperity. This benefit is, however, conditional on the citizens’ learning to respect them: the threat of the Erinyes is contained, but not extinguished.

  Motivation and Judgment

  The Oresteia is political through and through, in the sense that it multifariously explores the relationship between individuals and families within the city (polis in Greek) and within human society as a whole. Yet it is far from a sermon or a morality tale. It is essential that the theatrical and aesthetic experience be fully realized in its own right. Aeschylus had devoted his energies to developing the new art form of tragedy, and an awareness of the relationship between life and art is built into the work itself. The whole trilogy is thus pervaded with language and ideas about ugliness and beauty, discord and harmony, shapelessness and form, randomness and pattern. Among these, the themes of music and song recur most insistently, stretching all the way from the Watchman at the very start, who is unable to summon the comfort of song, to the call for communal music making in the closing lines of the final play. This motif enlists the poetry and visual presentation, combined with the dance and song, to draw attention to the potential place of art in human life. What is the point, the work itself asks, of crafting words and movements and sounds into a highly skilled and rehearsed presentation like this? Aeschylus, the first great tragedian, is already asking: Why tragedy?

  There have been—and are—many answers to that question of “Why tragedy?” But a central one must be that tragedy faces full-on the fact that we humans suffer, and explores whether any understanding of this suffering is to be found: can any sense or vision can be salvaged from it? This central concern inevitably raises issues of guilt and innocence, blame and responsibility. The notion has become widespread that in Greek tragedy everything and everyone is somehow fated, doomed; that human creatures have no power over their destinies, and that they simply carry out what has been determined for them by some overruling force. This is in most ways a false, or at best misleading, perspective—“the fate fallacy,” we might call it. While it is true that there are powers at work which are beyond the human—gods, oracles, curses, even cosmic checks and balances—Greek tragedies hardly ever show humans as in any way taken over or controlled from outside, or behaving as puppets or proxies. On the contrary, they struggle with their decisions, dilemmas, and justifications.

  Clytemnestra is a striking example of this concern with the motivation and explanation of human behavior. While she does recognize belatedly in Agamemnon that her actions have coincided with what the family curse (the “Daimon”) also determines, she proudly proclaims her deeds as her own. Her driving motives are revenge for her daughter, love for Aegisthus, resentment of Agamemnon’s presumption and sexual infidelity, and protest at being treated as a subservient woman. She acts as she does precisely to show that she has the power to do so. The family curse concurs, but it does not make her do it.

  Similarly, Orestes in Women at the Graveside has been told by Apollo’s oracle that, under pain of horrific threats, he must kill his own mother. Yet, as he himself explains, he would do it anyway: he wants to be true to his father, to reclaim his ancestral wealth, and to liberate the Argive people. His motives are political and economic and impelled by family honor. He is then fully determined on the killing until the moment when Clytemnestra appeals to her motherhood. He has to be reminded of Apollo’s instruction, and has to reassert his choice. But that is not the end of his psychic story: he still has to justify killing the woman whose womb had brought him to birth. It is not hard to see why Eugene O’Neill, in his trilogy adaptation of the Oresteia transp
lanted to 1860s New England, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), explores Orestes and his sister Electra as studies in the Freudian subconscious. And Colm Tóibín’s novel House of Names (2017) is also a study in the tortured psyches of family violence and hate-love, portraying Orestes as a cowed figure swept along by stronger personalities, particularly Electra.

  It is crucial for the resilience of these questions of free will, determinism, responsibility, credit, and blame that for the Greeks, unlike for peoples of many other cultures, there was no clearly laid down doctrine of ultimate explanation or determinism. There is no holy book, no supreme leader, no final authority to be appealed to: any person’s assessments are open to dispute and to persuasion. There are, instead, both a divine level of explanation through the gods’ will, on the one hand, and, on the other, the human level of choice, decision, and deliberation. The two levels of accountability and motivation so deeply coexist that it is impossible to pull them apart: human and divine will are both variously at work in every action.

  The Greeks were polytheist, and their many gods were by no means uniform or unanimous. There were many other kinds of divinity as well as the canonical Olympian gods—Zeus, Athena, and the rest. And in the Oresteia, there is a particularly important set of non-Olympian divine powers: the Erinyes (“Furies”), along with the Moirai and the power of the angry dead (for more on these see p. xxx). Yet, at the same time, tragedy fully makes room for a wide range of human volitions and drives, including rational thought, passion, inherited character, loyalty, deceitfulness, instinct, and resentment. Aeschylus draws all of these and more into the range of the possible explanations for his characters’ behavior, as there emerges no firm explanation that is key to these portrayals of human causation. Nor is there any rationale of how these coexist with the superhuman powers, except that Zeus is in some transcendent—yet unfathomable—sense at the root of the way things are.