The Complete Aeschylus, Volume I: The Oresteia Read online

  The play insistently presents other points of view as well. Cassandra opens up the history of the royal house by evoking infants slaughtered and served up to their father to eat:

  Look there, do you see them? Can’t you see them, there

  by the house, so young, like hovering dream shapes, children

  killed by the very ones they loved, their hands

  full of the gore of their own flesh, the vitals,

  all the dripping inner parts—I see

  them holding out that pitiful weight

  of meat their father ate. (1391–97 / 1217–22)

  Cassandra reminds us that the crimes of the house of Atreus go back to earlier generations. She evokes the horrible strife between Agamemnon’s and Aegisthus’ fathers, the brothers Atreus and Thyestes. The children she sees are Aegsithus’ brothers, killed by Atreus to avenge himself on Thyestes, who had taken Atreus’ wife as his mistress. Atreus banished Thyestes from his realm, then called him back with false blandishments and served him a meal of flesh from the boys he had secretly killed. Aegisthus can truly claim that with Agamemnon’s death the “kind light of the day of final justice” (1814 / 1577) has brought vengeance at last for his father and his slain brothers. Adultery, deceit, slaughter of innocent children: the crimes of the house of Atreus appear as an incessant, obsessive repetition of past crimes, repayment “stroke for stroke” (1636 / 1430) without end.4 Yet the very repetition makes it clear that each new blow is an act of dikê:

  The hand of fate is honing bright

  the blade of justice on another

  whetstone for another act of harm. (1768–70 / 1535–37)

  Other and even broader perspectives on dikê are given vivid voice in the course of the trilogy. The presentation of the Trojan War is perhaps the most perplexing and most illuminating example. Troy’s destruction is at once the trilogy’s paradigmatic instance of justice and the occasion of horrible injustices that condemn Agamemnon, its triumphant returning hero, even before he reaches home. The Chorus shows us Zeus xenios (“Zeus, lord of host and guest,” 417 / 362) ordaining the destruction of the whole city as punishment for Paris’ violation of the laws of guest-friendship. In his service, “Kindly Night” (407 / 355)

  cast down over the towers

  of Troy the smothering mesh, seamless,

  so that in no way could the old

  or young slip free

  of the enslaving wide net of

  all-conquering destruction. (410–15 / 357–61)

  And Zeus himself dispatched the sons of Atreus with their vast armies, and they have conquered and destroyed the city. The Herald who announces Agamemnon’s return says that he has “broken her soil / up with the just spade of avenging Zeus” (596–97 / 525–26). Even Helen, known to one and all as the cause of all the suffering, can be seen as the agent of justice: the lion cub that grows up to become “a priest of death / and ruin, ordained by god” (841–42 / 735–36), “poisonous deliverer of tears / to brides, the Erinys” (858–59 / 749).

  Yet everything about the war conspires to make it cry out for new punishment, new retribution. Consider, for example, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia. He does not choose to kill his daughter; a great goddess, Artemis demands the sacrifice, and by stilling the winds so that the Greek fleet cannot sail to Troy, she makes it a necessary condition of waging war and winning the just victory that the gods have ordained. It is worth noting how this theme is developed. Although the death of her daughter gives Clytemnestra a powerful claim for vengeance against Agamemnon, the emotional burden of the tale is given not to her but to the old men of the Chorus. The Chorus members’ entrance song in Agamemnon, a lyric sequence of length and complexity unequaled in ancient drama, begins by invoking the cry for justice raised by the sons of Atreus against the Trojans, but when they compare that cry to the shrieking of vultures whose chicks have been stolen from the nest (56–63 / 47–54), they conjure up unbidden the slain child of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Proceeding to tell the story of the expedition, the Chorus recalls the omen seen by the kings before they set out:

  The king of birds to the kings

  of the ships, black eagle and a white behind it,

  in full view, hard by the palace,

  by the spear hand, ripped open a hare

  with her unborn still swelling inside her

  stopped from her last chance ever to escape.

  Sing sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail. (133–39 / 114–21)

  Calchas the seer explains that the omen portends victory in the end, but reveals that Artemis (goddess of wild animals) is angry. The slaughter of “the trembling hare and all her unripe young” (156 / 137) thus foretells the sacrifice of Iphigenia as well as the multitudes of warriors who will fall in battle, and civilians who will die with the death of Troy. Iphigenia haunts the rest of this song. The old men seem drawn against their will to evoke the scene of the sacrifice. “Sing sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail” becomes a refrain, repeated (158 / 139, 178 / 159) as they find their words turn more and more ill-omened. Finally, when they reach the moment of Iphigenia’s death, we see how Agamemnon

  ordered his men to lift her like

  a goat, face downward, above the altar,

  robes falling all around her, and

  he had her mouth gagged, the bit yanked

  roughly, stifling a cry that would

  have brought a curse down on the house. (267–72 / 231–38)

  Agamemnon’s guilt in the death of his daughter has attracted intense scholarly scrutiny, but it is perhaps fair to say that it is a problem for us largely because the trend of Aeschylus’ thought here does not square with the familiar Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle. Aeschylus is explicit that Agamemnon is both trapped by fate and responsible for his deed, and we must accept that these truths are compatible:

  And when he secured the yoke-strap

  of necessity fast upon him,

  yielding his swerving spirit up

  to a reckless blast, vile and unholy,

  from then on he was changed, his will

  annealed now to mere ruthlessness (248–53 / 218–21)

  There is necessity here—in the world of this drama, like that of the Homeric epics, nothing happens by mere chance—but there is also something about Agamemnon, who will not abandon his ships, his allies, his command even to spare his beloved daughter. Fate in tragedy is often like that, after all. Oedipus has no way to avoid his fated crimes, but the brash, proud young man who kills his father at the crossroads, and who takes as his prize for destroying the Sphinx, a queen old enough to be his mother, is no puppet, but Oedipus to the life, acting entirely in character. Character, in Heraclitus’ famous phrase, is destiny.

  The Chorus’ evocation of Iphigenia shows both Agamemnon’s impossible dilemma and its intolerable human consequences. The just cause is tainted from the beginning. And it is only the beginning. If Iphigenia haunts the parodos, the warriors who die at Troy are the central figures of injustice-within-justice in the magnificent first stasimon (407–552 / 355–488). As we have seen, the song begins on a triumphant note, with the Chorus’ evocation of Troy’s just destruction, caught in the net of Zeus’ retribution for the crime of Paris, but their theme soon turns bitter, becoming a lament for all who died in the struggle, and particularly for the men who will return from Troy only as “dust bitterly wept for, urns packed tight / with ashes that had once been men” (504–5 / 442–44). The old men give voice to the disproportion between what was lost and what was to be won, the faithless Helen:

  “All this,” some murmur to themselves,

  “all this for someone else’s wife.”

  All through their grief, resentment smolders

  against the champions of justice,

  the sons of Atreus. (509–13 / 448–51)

  In the end, what began as a hymn of victory ends in fear for the victor, against whom the citizens and the gods are angry for having killed so many. For the first
time, the Chorus invokes the Erinyes by name (526 / 463), the dreaded agents of dikê who destroy the proud and prosperous if they have thrived unjustly. To be an Agamemnon, to wage a great and victorious campaign, is to court excess, lose balance, risk the most terrible of falls. Great triumphs bring ruin in their wake:

  The price of excessive glory

  is excessive peril. The thunderbolt

  strikes truly from the eyes of Zeus. (533–35 / 468–70)

  This lesson is driven home again and again in incident and image. Victory brings sacrilege. Clytemnestra, for example, warns that if the conquerors of Troy destroy the city’s shrines and temples, they will be conquered in turn (386–89 / 338–40). Coming from Clytemnestra, this suggests a surprising sympathy with Agamemnon’s cause; hence it is treated as a problem by modern commentators, who tend, in the interest of consistent characterization, to make the warning a hypocritical mask for Clytemnestra’s secret hopes. The point, however, is not so much about Clytemnestra’s character as about the tainted character of the Trojan War itself. The scene in which the Greek Herald arrives to announce Troy’s destruction follows directly on the first stasimon and shares its pattern of moving from triumph to foreboding. Among much else, the Herald confirms—fulfills, as it were—the queen’s warning when he asks for a fitting welcome for “Lord Agamemnon, lighting up the darkness” (593 / 522–23):

  Come give him now the greeting he is owed,

  for he has harrowed Troy, broken her soil

  up with the just spade of Zeus.

  The altars, too, and all the holy shrines

  are leveled, and the seed is dying out

  from all that land. (595–600 / 524–28)

  Aeschylus’ audience knew from the epic tradition that the Greeks’ atrocities and excesses in sacking Troy drew divine wrath down upon them, but this is not just an allusion to the traditional tales. The complexities of dikê in the Oresteia are on full display here. No sooner has the Herald shown us Agamemnon as the vicar of Zeus on earth, wielding the spade of dikê, when we hear news of divine vengeance still in store for the victors. Clytemnestra’s warning serves in retrospect to make the meaning of this moment crystal clear.5

  Agamemnon’s arrival confirms this sense of danger. Prominent among the spoils of war he brings with him is the prophetess Cassandra, now his concubine. She was Apollo’s virgin priestess, but Agamemnon has dared to violate her and make her his own. Cassandra’s presence underscores the link between the conquest of Troy and the death that awaits its conqueror, the death she will so vividly foresee and then share. Agamemnon’s first and final act on his return is to succumb to Clytemnestra’s blandishments and tread, against his better judgment, on the sacred cloths strewn before him. Walking this crimson path to his death, he enacts a visual metaphor of the conqueror conquered. The symbolic act that signs his fall is not chosen at random; the trampling down of lovely things also characterized Troy’s crime (428–29 / 371–72). Similarly, Agamemnon “lighting up the darkness” evokes the flames that ravaged Troy, metamorphosed into the beacon-fires that brought the news of Troy’s destruction, and then “swooped down on the royal house” of Argos (353). So also the net of destruction cast over Troy (410–15 / 357–61) will become the net in which Agamemnon is caught and killed.

  Agamemnon’s death is overdetermined, to say the least, but we are not invited to choose the “real” reason among all those on offer. Rather, we are led to see how they all converge to give his death a sense of inevitability. But what of justice? What difference does it make that the Trojan War is both just and unjust, that Agamemnon is both an avenger and a criminal? It is possible to construe this seemingly disorderly and self-contradictory surfeit of dikê as an indication that the concept we call justice cannot be given a fixed meaning or a certain referent in the Oresteia,6 but it may be more to the point to recognize that Greek dikê encompasses something at once broader and deeper than our word “justice.” Indeed, I am arguing that this move is crucial for understanding how the Oresteia works. To accept that Agamemnon is both an agent of justice and a perpetrator of injustice in the very act of carrying out justice, need not make dikê into something incoherent or incomprehensible; the Oresteia seems rather to demand that we recognize the almost mathematical precision of the workings of dikê, whether by the hand of a god, a mortal, or nature itself, as it rights one excess by a sharp turn to equal and opposite excess in a seemingly doomed struggle for balance. This is a crucial component of the tragedy of the house of Atreus—the horror of that incessant swing of the pendulum—but also the problem for which the trilogy as a whole will propose a solution.

  At the end of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and the Chorus seem to be reaching for some sort of compromise that could bring the balance to rest at last.7 The queen, fresh from murdering the king and his concubine, stands over the corpses and glories in her deed, daring to turn its horror into something natural and beautiful:

  And so he fell, and panted his life away,

  and breathing out a last sharp gale of blood

  he drenched me in the dark red showering gore,

  and I rejoiced in it, rejoiced no less

  than all the plants rejoice in Zeus-given

  rainfalls at the birthtime of the buds. (1582–87 / 1388–92)

  The Chorus expresses disgust at Clytemnestra’s words and the repellent spectacle: “Your tongue astounds us, how you can swagger so / over the butchered body of your husband” (1596–97 / 1399–1400). Horrified as they are, however, they come to recognize—as must we—that she has indeed done dikê, a necessary and even righteous act of revenge, and they try to understand the consequences still to come:

  Charge answers charge, and who can weigh them, sift

  right from wrong? The avenger

  is ravaged, the slayer slain. But it abides,

  while Zeus on his throne abides,

  that he who does will suffer. That is law.

  Who will cast out the seed of curses

  from the house? The race is grafted to ruin. (1794–1800 / 1560–66)

  Clytemnestra, in turn, comes to see that her deed is not autonomous and final, and counters the Chorus’ bleak prospect of killings yet to come by offering to make a pact with the “Spirit of the clan” (1805 / 1569, the curse that has dwelt so long in the house of Atreus) to offer up her wealth in return for his departure from her halls:

  However

  small my share

  of wealth may be, I’ll be content

  if I have rid our halls at last

  of our frenzied killing of each other. (1809–13 / 1574–76)

  Clytemnestra’s gesture is manifestly futile, for no such easy bargain can be struck with the implacable Spirit of vengeance, but it is the sign of a new recognition that she owes some price, still to be exacted, for her own act of vengeance. Before the significance of this insight can be tested, however, Aegisthus unexpectedly appears to deliver a speech that interrupts the colloquy, and moves Agamemnon toward an abrupt and grating end that promises only more violence. Yet even this treacherous adulterer, Clytemnestra’s lover during Agamemnon’s absence and now openly her consort, can rightly invoke dikê from first phrase (“O kind light of the day of final justice,” 1814 / 1577) to last (“now that I’ve caught / him here in the net that Justice spread,” 1856–57 / 1611), since the death of his brothers at the hands of Agamemnon’s father has been avenged at last by Agamemnon’s death. Yet Aegisthus’ very insistence on blood feud and vengeance points toward the next round of revenge killings. His stated intention to use the wealth of Agamemnon to enforce his rule (1891–96 / 1638–42) contrasts with Clytemnestra’s willingness to let it go in return for an end to the cycle of violence. And the Chorus’ scorn for their new tyrant leads them openly to wish for Orestes’ return in the role of avenger (1901–3 / 1646–48). If one needed evidence to show how mistaken Clytemnestra is to hope that the Spirit of the house will be induced to choose another family of victims (1806–9 / 1571–73), the Aegisthus
scene would suffice.

  Libation Bearers continues the tale of the house of Atreus, but, from the perspective of justice, it is less a sequel than a repeat. What one notices first, however, are the striking differences, particularly in the presentation of the avengers, Electra and Orestes, the surviving son and daughter of the murdered king. Perhaps most obviously, the culturally jarring gender roles of Clytemnestra, the “manly” woman who plots and executes her own vengeance, and Aegisthus, the “womanly” man, who lurks inside the house and plays a passive role, are returned in Orestes and Electra to the cultural norm. Electra prays for Orestes’ return, and when he appears cedes the action entirely to him. The changed tone of the play is marked from the start, when Agamemnon’s friends gather at his tomb for a rite that evokes only his greatness and the cruelty of his slaughter, his memory marred by no shadow of the guilt that is so prominent in Agamemnon. Images from Agamemnon recur with their meanings completely reversed in Libation Bearers. Recall, for example, the simile we noticed earlier that conjures up the slain Iphigenia by comparing the war cry of the Atreidae to the shrieking of vultures whose chicks have been stolen from the nest (Agamemnon, 56–63 / 47–54); and the omen of the eagles (Agamemnon 133–39 / 114–21) that foretells victory—and all the horrifying destruction to come—by equating Agamemnon with an eagle that destroys a hare and the unborn young in her womb. These images are conflated and transformed in Libation Bearers when Orestes invokes Zeus for help: