The
Oresteia: Bringing Structure and Unity to a Core
Course"
by
Janice Siegel, Temple University
originally
presented at
The
Association of Core Texts and Courses
Third Annual Conference
Tradition
and Innovation: The Full and Open Discussion
DoubleTree Hotel
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
April 10-13, 1997
Today
I will speak about using the Oresteia to bring structure
and unity to a core course. The comments presented here are
connections and ideas generated in discussion among my students,
my colleagues and myself in honest and open interaction with texts
and ideas, in class and out, this past year at Temple University.
The particular texts these discussions involved this past term
are: Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and
Antigone, Pericles' Funeral Oration (from Thucydides' Peloponnesian
War), Plato's Apology and Crito, selected poems
by Sappho, Genesis and Exodus (Old Testament), Gospel
of Matthew (New Testament), selected surahs of the Koran,
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, Galileo's "Starry
Messenger," Machiavelli's Prince, and Shakespeare's Othello.
As with any investigation, since the original conception of these
ideas, many themes and threads identified here have become
apparent in other texts. In a course such as ours, which purports
to be an intellectual history/history of ideas/survey course of
various genres of literature from antiquity through the
Renaissance - otherwise known as Intellectual Heritage 51 - I
don't believe that anyone would question the need for a Greek
drama on the syllabus. But I hope to prove its particular
usefulness as a foundation-builder for the rest of the course. I
invite the perspicacious reader to use this study only as a point
of departure.
The
Oresteia offers many great teaching opportunities, especially
for those of us who have an extensive Greek slide collection and
know how to use it! I like to take my students on the Orestes
Trek, tracing his footsteps from the Lion Gate at Mycenae to the
Temple of Apollo at Delphi, to the Aeropagus at Athens, site of
the culminating scene of the trilogy. Included in such a slide
show, of course, is a tour of ancient theaters so they can view
the orchestra of the theater from the vantage point of an audience
member, see a Greek chorus in action, and stare at the
breath-taking sight of the sylvan vistas which surround all Greek
theaters, a primary structural requirement since they are all
carved into mountainsides. But before our students can absorb the Oresteia
as ancient theatergoers would have, they must become familiar with
the story known to every person in the Theater of Dionysus that
day in 458 BC when Aeschylus' trilogy won first prize: the story
of Clytemnestra's murder of her husband Agamemnon,
commander-in-chief of the victorious Greek attack on Troy, father
of Orestes. He is also the next recipient of the Curse of the
House of Atreus. Because the Oresteia is based on a legend
that would have been known to the Greek audience through Homer and
others, we now have a reasonable excuse - and need - for
introducing material from Homer's Odyssey, for which there
is, alas, no room on our syllabus. Officially. Sophocles' Theban
Plays offer no such opportunity. Providing information now
about Homer's poem and the tradition of epic poetry helps not only
in terms of filling in plot details, but will come in handy later
when we present the Sundiata, another epic which springs
from an oral tradition (in this case, the Mandingo tradition of
Old Mali). The Oresteia is knit from thematic threads which
run throughout the fabric of courses such as we all teach: we
shall see similar themes and plot developments in texts from other
cultures, as well as direct reflections/imitations of Aeschylus'
art in diverse works in the Western tradition. Since the Oresteia
is, in fact, about the founding of a new order and a new system of
justice, there is no better place for us to start than with the
subject of crime and punishment.
In
the Oresteia, the Furies are presented as the goddesses of
vengeance born of the intergenerational violence perpetrated by
son upon father (we recall they are born from the drops of blood
that hit the ground after the castration of Ouranos by Cronos):
And
the blood that Mother Earth consumes clots hard, it won't seep
through, it breeds revenge and frenzy goes through the guilty,
seething like infection, swarming through the brain. (LB,
66-69)
The
libation bearers of the second play attempt to convince Orestes
that murdering his mother is the right course to take in order to
avenge his own father's death at her hands. They remind Orestes
that in the world of Mycenean justice, a brutal world ruled by
Zeus' Law, the spilling of kindred blood demands a literally
retributive response, the spilling of more blood:
It
is the law: when the blood of slaughter
wets the ground it wants more blood.
Slaughter cries for the Fury of those long dead to bring
destruction on destruction churning in its wake! (LB, 394-398)
The
image of spilled blood crying out for vengeance is powerful...and
familiar. We also recall that all the trouble for the House of
Atreus began when Atreus punished his brother Thyestes for raping
his wife by tricking his brother into eating his own children.
Aegisthus, Thyestes' son, will help Clytemnestra plot the murder
of her husband Agamemnon, Atreus' son. These two murderers will
then be killed by Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who
will then send the Furies after her son for the crime of spilling
parental blood. But it all began the generation before with
brother-on-brother violence... which also rings a bell. It is, of
course, in Genesis where we read of two other brothers, the
one spilling the blood of the other. That victim's blood, too,
cries out for vengeance. After Cain murders Abel, God asks,
"'What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying
out to me from the ground!'" (Gen. 4:10)
In
both stories we have a divine power responding to the spilling of
kindred human blood. Even the metaphor of a ground that drinks in
spilled human blood appears in both texts:
the
mother's blood that wets the ground,
you can never bring it back, dear god,
the Earth drinks, and the running life is gone.
(Furies, Eum. 259-261)
(And
the Lord said,) "And now you are cursed from the ground,
which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood
from your hand." (Gen. 4:11)
This
brings us to the question of punishment. Cain is exiled for his
crime,
(And
the Lord said,) "When you till the ground, it will no
longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a
wanderer on the earth.
(Gen. 4:12)
and
the Furies argue that Orestes should be too:
Can
a son spill his mother's blood on the ground, then settle into
his father's halls in Argos? Where are the public altars he
can use? Can the kinsmen's holy water touch his hand? (Furies,
Eum. 661-664)
When
one of my students wrote in an essay, "killing is a form of
banishment," I almost slashed it through with a red pen,
assuring myself that proofreading would have caught such an
obvious blunder. But the line stayed with me, and it slowly dawned
on me that, as misled as this student might have been in her
articulation of the point, the basic idea was sound: both killing
and banishment serve the same purpose, to remove the perpetrator
of a crime from his community. Ostracism is an admittedly severe
punishment for anyone with a sense of community identity, and we
see the same suggestion of a choice between death and banishment
as appropriately equivalent punishments in many of the texts on
our syllabus, beginning with the Oresteia. Toward the end
of the first play, Clytemnestra is justifiably outraged when the
chorus, composed of old men of Argos, sentence her to banishment
for murdering Agamemnon who received not even a word of
chastisement for sacrificing their daughter, the crime she is
avenging:
"And
now you sentence me? - you banish me from the city,
curses breathing down my neck? But he - name one charge
you brought against him then. He thought no more of it than
killing a beast, and his flocks were rich, teeming in their
fleece, but he sacrificed his own child, our daughter, the
agony I labored into love to charm away the savage winds of
Thrace. Didn't the law demand you banish him? - hunt him from
the land for all his guilt? But now you witness what I've done
and you are ruthless judges." (Ag. 1437-1448)
She
will, in fact, be murdered by her own son instead. But
surprisingly, those punished thus generally consider banishment to
be the more hurtful of the two options: when God banishes Cain
instead of killing him, he cries out, "My punishment is
greater than I can bear!" (4:13) Cain's lament will be echoed
by Shakespeare's Romeo, also banished instead of sentenced to
death, a reduction in sentence deemed clement by all but Romeo:
"Ha, banishment! Be merciful, say 'death'; for exile hath
more terror in his look, Much more than death. Do not say
'banishment'!" (Romeo and Juliet, III.iii.13-15) This,
of course, is the opposite ploy of the innocent Desdemona, who
negotiates unsuccessfully with her husband Othello: "O,
banish me, my lord, but kill me not!" (Othello,
V.ii.94). We note that only innocent victims plead for any chance
at life over death (except, of course, Socrates!).
In
the pseudo-mythological era of the Trojan War, Mycenean Greeks
live violent yet poetically justified existences, as presented in
the Oresteia: each perpetrator claims to have
"right" on his side; each perpetrator is reacting to a
past wrong; even those who are committed to end the cycle with
"one last death" only perpetuate it (the closing words
of the Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy, are
Clytemnestra's immediately following her murder of Agamemnon:
"We will set the house in order once and for all."). And
each character believes his retributive act of justice is
appropriate (we recall Clytemnestra's cry of "act for act,
wound for wound" as she slays Agamemnon for the murder of
their daughter, and Orestes' stony response to Clytemnestra's cry
for mercy: "You killed and it was outrage - suffer outrage
now.") Orestes' situation is an unresolvable paradox: the law
states that the murder of a parent must be avenged, and that
children may under no circumstances murder their own parents.
What, then, can Orestes do, since his mother murdered his father?
As a system of justice, these Mycenean laws - created and executed
by a divinity - accomplish nothing positive at all in terms of the
society, community or even family: crimes breed retaliation,
intergenerational curses visit the sins of the father upon the
son, families are decimated. The cycle of violence inexorably
turns, with no end to the carnage in sight. Orestes' unresolvable
conflict causes this system to collapse under its own weight, thus
breaking its stranglehold on the people, allowing them to develop
laws of their own, to learn and grow, to become the Greeks of the
Golden Age, governed by the laws of the polis. Before the
law-givers and law-enforcers can use their judgment to administer
the law, however, there must be an agreement concerning what the
law is, so it must be written down. Only then can interpretation
be allowed, as opposed to the Furies' rigid and uncompromising
attitude toward all rule-breakers, justified or not.
We
see the same progression in the Old Testament: in the Five Books
of Moses we can trace the progression from divine punishment to
human-delivered punishment and in regard to human punishment, a
movement away from violent reactionary justice toward compensatory
retribution. God himself punishes the first murderer, Cain. But
soon enough God delegates that responsibility to men: in Genesis
9:6 (the covenant with Noah), God says, "Whoever sheds the
blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be
shed" (which presumably is why Moses does not get into
trouble for killing that Egyptian in Exodus 2:12). Then we
get the "thou shalt not murder" commandment (which still
appears to be different from "kill" as God himself
commands the community to kill a man who breaks the Sabbath (Numbers
15:35). It is in Exodus that the laws are written down and
codified and it is in Exodus that we are presented with the
"eye for an eye" proposal:
If
any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for
eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for
burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Ex.
21:23-24)
The
very next verse makes it clear that this code of behavior is
presented as compensatory retribution, not literal retaliation:
When
a slaveowner strikes the eye of a male or female slave,
destroying it, the owner shall let the slave go, a free
person, to compensate for the tooth. (Ex. 21:26)
This
is a big step in the development of a justice system, for what
good is your attacker's tooth or eye to you, even if you have lost
your own? The perpetrator is now responsible for paying
appropriate compensation (the idea "eye for an eye" can
also be read to mean "only an eye for an eye"),
and the community and its citizens reap the rewards.
On
to the New Testament. We note Jesus' rejection of any kind of
violent response to violence: "You have heard it said , 'An
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not
resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek,
turn the other also..." (Matthew 5:38-39) Is this
meant to be understood literally? No, for Jesus communicates in
metaphor ("Jesus told the crowds all these things in
parables; without a parable he told them nothing." (Matthew
13:34) So too are we to understand this advice in a figurative
sense: "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and
throw it away." (Matthew 5:27)
In
these parallel traditions, we see a similar development of law and
justice, complete with a paralleled system of authority
increasingly delegated to the people: Mycenean Law yields to a
written law code and a human-staffed jury-system to enforce it. In
Genesis, God's will is Law - he has just to utter his
desire and it is so: "Let there be Light!" This power of
God, by the way, explains Islam's rejection of Jesus as the son of
God: "When He decrees a thing, he need only say: 'Be,' and it
is. (Surah 19:36). God's law becomes the law of the polity in
Exodus, and Moses writes down the rules so he and other just men
can serve as judges of the people. Jesus comes "not to
abolish the law, but to fulfill it" (Matthew 5:17),
and he too delegates responsibility, charging his apostles with
the mission of spreading the words and acts of God (Matthew 10:7-8).
In the Book of John, we see the Biblical progression concerning
the development of law most clearly articulated: "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God...and the Word became flesh." (John 1:1-14)
Then
there is the Koran. Born of a different time and place, the
ideas we so easily relegated to the realm of metaphor take on
startlingly new significance: "We decreed for them a life for
a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a
tooth for a tooth, and a wound for a wound. But if a man
charitably forbears from retaliation, his remission shall atone
for him." (5:46) Are we to understand that retributive
vengeance is acceptable, although not encouraged? The Koran
outlines very specific, real punishments for particular crimes:
"Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread
disorder in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have
their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished
from the land." (5:34) And, "As for the man or woman who
is guilty of theft, cut off their hands to punish them for their
crimes." (5:38) In the West African Mandingo tradition, which
celebrates the thirteenth century AD Islamic foundations of the
Empire of Old Mali, the epic hero Sundiata, who wears "the
robes of a great Muslim king" (73) rules over a land in which
"a thief would have his right hand chopped off and if he
stole again he would be put to the sword." (82) Although
appearing harsh, the asperity of these punishments is a good match
for Old Testament punishments levied against certain sinners,
among them death for adulterers (Lev. 20:10) and homosexuals (Lev.
20:13).
In
the Oresteia, we realize that a system of justice which
offers no viable options to an otherwise innocent man is a system
that will eventually destroy its society. Orestes' attempt to
satisfy Mycenean Law is a lose-lose proposition. Sophocles'
Antigone courts death to break an unjust law, Pericles calls for
unthinking loyalty to the state in his Funeral Oration,
Socrates claims a tacit covenant with the Laws of the State as
explanation why he can't break them now that they are inconvenient
for him. Socrates also says that there are no unjust laws, just
unjust men. Plato excludes written law from his Just City because
just people don't need it and wicked people won't read it. In
terms of the history of Greek law in the literature on our
syllabus, we see the Mycenean Age of the Oresteia give way
to the Archaic Age Law Codes of Draco and Solon and Cleisthenes,
to be replaced by fifth century law courts, the abuse of which is
documented in Plato's Apology. In Genesis, the
people are told to live by God's Law, in Exodus the Law of
God is imposed on the polity, and in the New Testament, the stress
is on Jesus fulfilling and teaching the law. Galileo will learn
the hard way that the Law of Nature and the Law of the Land are
not necessarily compatible (at this point we look back at the Apology,
in which Socrates recalls Anaxagoras' similar predicament - like
many others he was expelled from Periclean Athens for suggesting
natural explanations for the celestial bodies), and Machiavelli
will suggest that laws are only as good as they allow princes to
achieve their goals. By the way, many of my students have written
very good papers on whether Machiavelli would have considered
Clytemnestra a successful leader or not.
But
who is the law, and how is it manifested in these texts? In the Oresteia,
Orestes seeks retribution for his father's murder at the hands of
his mother, his true parents, but he must turn to Father Apollo
for guidance and protection. The argument in the Eumenides
allows Orestes to deny parenthood status to his mother,
Clytemnestra, thus freeing him from the vindictiveness of the
Furies, goddesses devoted to the avenging of the spilling of
parental blood. Then the power of the Furies is transferred to the
law courts of men. Thus the power of the law becomes parental
itself, acting as the guide/protector Orestes originally sought in
Apollo. This is the exact relationship identified by Socrates in
the Crito when he argues that laws are guiding principles,
and that we owe to the Laws an even more solid allegiance than we
do to our own parents, based on the same respect and necessity. To
Socrates, the sanctity of Law is inviolable, for Laws are the
truest manifestations of Forms in our world.
In
the Bible, too, God is presented as Father of All. But God must
learn to be a parent, just as we need to learn to be good
children. In his parental role, God begins by giving the gift of
life. Then the teaching process begins. God sets down rules and
demands unconditional adherence. God strikes out with anger when
his children break their word, or fail to treat him according to
his station. In the Old Testament, God is often portrayed as
vindictive, temper-driven, only occasionally remorseful. His
responses often call to mind a harried parent faced with
crayon-covered walls and a recalcitrant three-year old.
"Where are you?," God asked Adam (Gen. 3:9),
knowing full well that Adam was hiding in the Garden. "What
have you done?," God asked Cain (Gen. 4:10), knowing
full well that he had killed his brother. The crayon-besmudged
child has an opportunity to admit guilt, the parent metes out a
punishment, and the learning process continues.
There
is the idea, too, that law stands for more than order - it stands
for humanity, a sense of community, a moral rightness. Pericles
makes this point when he discusses laws which "although
unwritten, yet cannot be broken without disgrace." (58) When
certain inviolable laws are broken, there can be no going back. It
is the law of xenia - guest/host relations - that is broken
most frequently and most dramatically in the Oresteia. The
violation of this law fills Greeks with such panic because the law
stands for order, civilization, humanity, while violations and
perversions of if threaten all things Greek. In Greek literature,
cannibalism and child-feasting have always represented this threat
most dramatically. The Curse of the House of Atreus actually
begins with the Feast of Tantalus, four generations back, when he
attempted to feed his own child to the gods. But closer to home is
Agamemnon's father Atreus who invited his brother to dinner and
served him his own children at banquet, the grossest perversion of
guest/host relations, and related in all its gory detail by
Aegisthus in the first play of the trilogy. It is no coincidence
that there are breaches of this same hospitality rule in every one
of the plays composing the Oresteia: Agamemnon is killed at
his ritual welcome-home bath in the first play, Orestes can kill
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in The Libation Bearers only by
abusing his privilege as a guest to gain access, and the Furies -
charged with enforcing these very rules - are themselves turned
away from Apollo's Temple in the Eumenides. Order can be
re-established only because Orestes is absolved of his crime.
Understanding
the metaphor of broken xenia as a threat to order and law,
especially as reflected in such practices as cannibalism and guest
treachery, comes in handy for students when we tackle the Sundiata
later in the semester. Not far removed from the horrors of the
cannibalism of Homer's Cyclops and Laestrygonians or the
treacheries of the House of Atreus (Cassandra: "the babies
wailing, skewered on the sword, their flesh charred, the father
gorging oin their parts..." Ag. 1094-1097) lies Suamoro, the
evil ruler in the Sundiata: he wears a robe and footwear
made from human skin, reigns from a throne whose seat is human
skin, and surrounds himself with the decapitated heads of his dead
enemies. In each of these stories we see the same metaphor for
threat to society, civilization, order and law. It is either
escaped but not eradicated (Odyssey), breeds further
injustices until the system breaks down and is replaced (Oresteia),
or is triumphed over by the forces of Good (Sundiata).
Students
who have read Homer's Odyssey may notice that Aeschylus'
description of Agamemnon being killed at bath is not the story of
murder at banquet Agamemnon himself tells Odysseus as a warning
when they meet in the Underworld. Essentially Aeschylus and Homer
make the same point: in both instances, the king is cut down while
receiving the traditional displays of xenia - the laws of
hospitality - in a time and place of supposed safety. So why the
discrepancy? Because Aeschylus the dramatist, by painting a
picture of Agamemnon having his arms pinned helplessly to his side
by his entangling robe, seizes this opportunity to introduce the
metaphor of the entangling web of deceit, pervasive throughout the
trilogy. Fagles' translation perfectly captures its figurative
meaning, rendering Clytemnestra's reference to it during her
victory speech as "black-widow's web," with all
appropriate ramifications. Instead of the weaving a proper Greek
wife must attend to as head of the oikos - and we cannot
help but think of Penelope here - Clytemnestra spins a web
designed to catch her own husband. Thankfully, we also read
Shakespeare's Othello, where we see another great dramatist
play with the same imagery, but this time in the untranslated
original. Although Othello is not the only place
Shakespeare dabbles with web imagery to capture the complexities
of human involvement ("Oh what a tangled web we weave when at
first we practice to deceive"), it is in Othello that
he pursues the web metaphor with a vengeance. In Othello
Iago weaves an intricate plot, and then lies in wait for his
victims to become his prey, hopelessly entangled, completely at
his mercy. After arranging for Roderigo to provoke Cassio into a
fight, he announces "With as little a web as this I will
ensnare as great a fly as Cassio" (II.i.190). Web imagery
becomes net imagery as Iago sets the snare by planting seeds of
suspicion in Othello that cause him to see Desdemona's innocent
comments as proof of an illicit love:
"So
will I turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all." (Iago, Othello,
II.iii.364)
The
fact that the two tragedies that bracket this syllabus (Agamemnon
and Othello) are both vengeance plays allows a basis for
comparing classical and Renaissance theater, too, with a nod to
Aristotle's Poetics. A closer look also reveals that both
Iago and Clytemnestra have multi-layered motives: each claims as
his primary motivation the desire to right a wrong (Iago wants his
promotion; Clytemnestra, vengeance for Iphigenia's death), but
each also has significant jealousy issues: Clytemnestra kills
Cassandra, too, and Iago suspects that the "lusty Moor hath
leap'd into my seat" (II.i.295) and "twixt my sheets has
done my office" (I.i.387-388). Clytemnestra's speech in the Agamemnon
concerning men's behavior regarding their wives makes a
wonderful introduction to Emilia's famous speech in Othello
Act IV. Although my last point is not directly concerned with Othello,
I cannot resist the opportunity to prove an Oresteian model for
one of Shakespeare's other great metaphors. Both Macbeth's and
Lady Macbeth's tortured admissions of bloodguilt draw on the image
originally used to illustrate Orestes' innocence::
"Will
all great Neptune's oceans wash this blood clean from my hand?
No this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas
incarnadine, making the green one red."
(Macbeth, Macbeth II.ii.60-62)
"Out,
damn'd spot! out, I say!"
(Lady Macbeth, Macbeth V.i.35)
"What,
will these hands ne'er be clean?"
(Lady Macbeth, Macbeth V.i.43)
"The
blood sleeps, it is fading on my hands,
the stain of a mother's murder washing clean." (Orestes, Eumenides
278-279)
In
conclusion, tracing the threads of the Oresteia through the
fabric of Intellectual Heritage 051 helps bring structure and
unity to a course whose syllabus includes authors as far-ranging
as Sappho and Shakespeare. As the sole surviving trilogy of
antiquity, the Oresteia supremely represents the genre of
classical tragedy, and its plot provides us with an opportunity to
introduce our generally uninitiated students to Homer (one benefit
not offered by Sophocles' Theban plays). This brief introduction
to the epic genre both offers a foil to the lyric (in Sappho here,
and in the next course in the sequence - IH52 - in Blake,
Wordsworth, Whitman and Dickinson) and will facilitate students'
later understanding of the Sundiata. In the Eumenides students
see the shift from Mycenean justice to the Athenian democracy
known to us through two other texts, Thucydides' Funeral
Oration and Plato's Apology. Religion (gods or God,
concept of afterlife, code of morality), politics (laws written
and unwritten, codes of justice, social system) and sex (gender
issues concerning culturally determined roles and interaction of
men and women) are fundamental themes of the Bible and Koran as
well. The gender of Clytemnestra, the main and aggressive
character of the first play of this trilogy, interests our
students and provokes discussion of women's roles in antiquity and
modern society. In terms of the Humanist portion of our syllabus,
the thematic similarity between the Oresteia and Othello
makes it easy to contrast production techniques, literary
conventions and rhetorical nuances in the two dramatic traditions
(classical and Renaissance). The Oresteia, then, addresses
the need for both tradition and innovation in a core curriculum
course, and a study of the trilogy itself as well as its
resonances in later literature serves both practical and creative
purposes.
comments
to: jfsiege@ilstu.edu
Editions
Cited:
Student
Guide to IH,
Marra and Zelnick, edd. (new edition)
Aeschylus, Oresteia, tr. Fagles (Penguin)
Plato, Last Days of Socrates, tr. Treddenick (Penguin)
Holy Bible (New Revised Standard Version)
Koran, tr. Dawood (Penguin)
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, tr. Niane (Longman)
Galileo, Discoveries and Opinions, tr. Drake (Doubleday)
Machiavelli, The Prince, tr. Wootton (Hackett)
Shakespeare, Othello (Folger Library) |