Do you remember the moment you realized The Lion King, Strange Brew, and the 1992 Robin Williams classic: Toys were all adaptations of Hamlet? I do. I don’t actually remember the exact date and time, but it was definitely in Mrs. Rowe’s 12th Grade AP Lit class. She loved Hamlet and made us read it four times that year, so at some point in there it became painfully obvious.
Imagine having a similar realization at 30,000 feet on a pre-dawn flight from Las Vegas to Houston. I read Stephen Greenblat’s biography of Shakespeare “Will In The World” twenty years ago and have a vague recollection that he briefly summarized some ancient Greek tragedy that Hamlet was based on, but the exact name of the work didn’t get slotted into my brain. So there I am constantly underlining and writing in the margins of a paperback, feverishly tapping fantastic lines into my “awesome/quotable lines” Google Doc, and frequently whispering “wow that’s beautiful” under my breath when it dawned on me: Shakespeare adapted The Oresteia when he wrote Hamlet. There are differences between the two, but the overall plot and questions entertained by the works bear unmistakable similarities. In both plays a king is murdered by someone close to him, his son is called upon to avenge him, and the personal and social consequences of conflict and revenge are examined. The dramatic techniques and cultural contexts are very different, but the bones are there.
So there I am enjoying these plays with an alarming intensity and I couldn’t help but stop and ask why? Why should a sordid tale of murder, revenge, and their fallout bring me such delight? Is it just the tickle my brain got from appreciating the parallels that exist with Hamlet? Am I a weirdo sociopath? Am I uncontrollably pretentious in my tastes? All of the above? What gives? I don’t think any of us enjoys total clarity on these types of questions but I think there are two main reasons that make sense to me.
I think one reason is the writing. Robert Fagles enjoys a reputation as one of the great translators of Ancient Greek of our time for a reason. His sentences blossom on the page without feeling overwrought. His Odyssey and Iliad translations are award winning, but having read all four of his major translations (Iliad, Odyssey, Sophocles’ Theban Plays, and The Oresteia) I think his rendering of The Oresteia is the most engaging of the bunch. It is reasonable to ask if I like Robert Fagles or Aeschylus? I wondered the same thing, so I went out and bought three more modern English translations. I’m pleased to report it’s not just Robert Fagles. I loved three of the four. The Norton verse translation wasn’t to my taste. Peter Meineck’s and Anne Carson’s translations are both worthy of one’s time and attention as well. Anne Carson takes a unique approach by Using Aeschylus’, Sophocles’, and Euripides’ texts for her renderings of Agamemnon, Elektra, and Orestes respectively, so hers is not the same as the others, but the project is definitely a great read. I might go as far as saying Meineck’s version is where one should start. The point is that while I know next to nothing about Ancient Greek, so I can’t comment on the actual language of the text, I can’t help but assume the original writing is beautiful and vibrant because modern translators can churn out such consistently splendid versions. Also, these plays won the City Dionysia competition (Ancient Athenian Tony Award) when they were first produced, so their intended audience felt them worthy of instant acclaim. I’m reading them 2500 years afterward, so there must be something to them. Bear with me while I relay some favorites.
The first play, Agamemnon, opens on a watchman sitting atop the palace walls, he’s startled by a vision in the distance that sets the action of the trilogy in motion. Sound familiar? Anyway, he opens by describing his year-long nightly vigil watching for the signal that Troy has fallen and the Greek armies will be returning home:
“I know the stars by heart, the armies of the night, and there in the lead the ones that bring us snow or the crops of summer, bring us all we have – our great blazing kings of the sky” (Fagles 4-8)
Once the imminent return of the king has been established by Clytemnestra’s signal fires (like Gondor calling for aid) the palace and city come to life and in the midst of a flurry of action the chorus lays out a pretty extensive background that explains the tension in the air at Argos. The glorious victory and wealth returning with the victors comes at a cost.
“But grief sits at the hearth of every house where a man sailed off to war. Many things pierce a woman’s heart: in place of the man she sent out she knows she’ll get back a handful of ash” (Carson 311-317)
The chorus is short on details, but something is off in how the polis is being managed too. The chorus is composed of men who were too elderly to go to war a decade ago, as such there’s a measure of romanticism and FOMO in their take on the war. Their support for the war is alloyed with an appreciation for its human cost, and the effects of overstepping the natural order for wealth and power.
“Let each man have enough, no more, let him know the limit of his needs, then we might avoid this suffering. There can be no defense for the man who gorges himself on the fat of wealth, and kicks the altar of justice far from sight. The wretched spirit of Persuasion, conniving child of Ruin, forces him on, remedy is futile, the crime cannot be hidden, like a beacon’s blaze the evil shines out. The grinding stone scratches the surface, the metal of the man turns true, bad bronze blackened and base. Like a child chasing a bird in flight, Justice eludes him, and he taints his city with a touch of terror.” (Meineck 379-395)
The chorus’ explicit target in those lines was Paris, but there is of course a measure of foreshadowing in them as well. Also, one cannot help but notice the parallelism of “like a beacon’s blaze”, when the lighting of a far off beacon is what opens the play.
Traditionally the sack of Troy was depicted as a savage act full of impiety that cursed its participants. I think it instructive that this is the judgment “the winning side” passed on itself. History written by the victors in this case went something like: yeah the Trojans were asking for it, but what we did was a bit much and our aggression ended up harming ourselves. In the Odyssey, we see the disruption on Ithaca and Menelaus weeps bitter tears of regret and remarks that the wealth and glory gained from the war was poor compensation for the time and friends lost in battle. There’s a direct acknowledgement of the curse that accompanies war, conquest, and destruction a few lines later.
“And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe, the handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered. The people’s voice is heavy with hatred, now the curses of the people must be paid, and now I wait, I listen… there- there is something breathing under the night’s shroud. God takes aim at the ones who murder many; the swarthy Furies stalk the man gone rich beyond all rights- with a twist of fortune grind him down, dissolve him into the blurring dead – there is no help. The reach for power can recoil, the bolt of god can strike you at a glance.” (Fagles 447-462)
The chorus, and the trilogy as a whole offers an extended examination of the nature of justice. Cultural norms and beliefs shift over time, but some things never change:
“There’s an ancient saying, old as man himself: Men’s prosperity never will die childless, once full-grown it breeds. Sprung from the great good fortune in the race comes bloom on bloom of pain- insatiable wealth!” (Fagles 744-750)
“There is a time honored saying that a man’s good fortune at its height does not die without giving birth. For happiness always cultivates insatiable misery to curse the future generations. (Meineck 750-756)
“You know the old saying – Great wealth gives birth to great woe. (Carson 750-751)
Timeless wisdom. Mo money, mo problems.
I could do this all day. My favorite formulation of the wisdom the trilogy offers comes pretty early on when the chorus reveals the barbaric price the Achaean army, and the royal family specifically, paid 10 years ago before even leaving Greek shores for Troy:
“Any man who shouts his victory-song to Zeus will hit the mind’s mark of true understanding. He set us mortals on the road to understanding, and he has laid down this law: ‘Man must learn by suffering!’ Not even sleep can relieve the painful memories that fall upon the heart, drop by drop, discretion comes even to the unwilling. This grace is forced upon us by sacred spirits who reign above.” (Meineck 174-183)
“Raise your cries and sing him Zeus the Victor! You will reach the truth: Zeus had led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again and we resist, but ripeness comes as well. From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love” (Fagles 175-184)
“Zeus is the victor! Proclaim it: bull’s eye! Zeus put Mortals on the road to wisdom when he laid down this law: By suffering we learn. Yet there drips in sleep before my heart a griefremembering pain. Good sense comes the hard way. And the grace of the gods (I’m pretty sure) is a grace that comes by violence” (Carson)
Also:
“But Justice turns the balance scales, sees that we suffer and we suffer and we learn. And we will know the future when it comes.” (Fagles 252-253 )
Clearly, with the king returning home after being away for a decade, we are speeding toward a reckoning here at Argos.
All that is in the first 800 lines of the trilogy. That was a pretty long digression, but I hope we can agree that these are beautifully written plays that can and have been enjoyed for millennia without pretense, apology, or need to claim them as “classics”. They’re great reads plain and simple.
In addition to employing beautiful language full of vivid imagery and metaphor, I think Aeschylus explores timeless and powerful themes in The Oresteia. The most obvious evidence for this fact is the ongoing recasting and retelling of the story through many ages, styles, and genres. We remade it into an animated Disney musical for crying out loud. There’s clearly something here that transcends time and place. These themes aren’t particularly subtle, but I think a brief plot summary is appropriate here to inform future discussion. I probably won’t be able to completely resist pointing out the parallels to Hamlet while I’m at it.
The Oresteia consists of three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. It’s basically a single three act drama.
Agamemnon opens on a cold night where a single guard watches a distant horizon waiting for a signal which would mark the successful conclusion of the Trojan War. The older Hamlet’s ghost first appears under similar circumstances. A light suddenly appears on the horizon and soon the palace and all of Argos is animated by the anticipation of a victorious homecoming (like the cannons fired nightly from the ramparts of castle Elsinore). A group of old men who were physically unable to go to war let the audience in on the tension beneath the surface of this joyous reaction. The protracted nature of the conflict, the stream of remains of husbands, fathers, and brothers coming home in urns, and the absence of leadership over the past decade has not gone unnoticed. Lest the audience believe the King’s house has been immune to the sting of personal loss from the war they recount the story of the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia at Aulis to secure the army’s successful departure. Yeah. You read that right. Agamemnon performed a human sacrifice to satisfy the goddess Artemis and secure favorable winds, safe passage, and victory at Troy. The chorus isn’t forthcoming on details, but rest assured something is rotten in the city-state of Argos.
Because the exact human sources of the unrest aren’t explicitly identified there’s also a measure of tension in the audience. Athenians of the 5th century BCE knew the traditional myth of Agamemnon and his return home, and they also know they’re watching a reboot, so they can assume Aeschylus has taken some liberties and a plot twist is probable. We don’t know who to trust or distrust. One person who seems to be above these concerns is Clytemnestra, the king’s wife. She’s busily organizing public sacrifices and festivities. There are several extended exchanges between the chorus, Clytemnestra, and a messenger who is disappointed that his news has been preempted by the queen’s advanced tech, but eventually the king and the army arrive.
When Agamemnon enters the scene he is accompanied by a captive from Troy. Cassandra, daughter of defeated King Priam, who is cursed to accurately foretell the future but to always be disbelieved or misunderstood, stands next to him in his chariot. He introduces her as his war prize: a gift from the Achaean army, the most beautiful of the prisoners. There’s an awkward reunion between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The guy rolls up after a decade long absence from his wife and his new “side piece” is riding shotgun in his chariot. It’s a bad look if you ask me. Nonetheless, Clytemnestra lavishes him with praise and he enters his palace honored like a god. Cassandra foretells murder. First the king’s and then her own, but the chorus, despite their foreboding and ample foreshadowing, can’t seem to grasp her meaning until they hear shouts of distress from inside the palace.
Agamemnon has been killed in his bathtub. Shades of Jean-Paul Marat. It turns out Clytemnestra has been participating in her own extra-marital dalliances with Agamemnon’s cousin Aegisthus. Sound like Claudius and Gertrude to anyone else? The version of this story relayed in The Odyssey has Aegisthus spear-heading a conspiracy to murder Agamemnon and his men at a homecoming banquet, so the audience is predisposed to attribute the murder to him. He is a male of the House of Atreus so he, like Agamemnon, bears the weight of a multigenerational curse of familial violence. Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, killed his nephews, Aegisthus’ half-brothers, and fed them to their father Thyestes. The whole thing is terribly sordid and disturbing and a very compelling motive for revenge, but in Aeschylus’ telling Aegisthus is not the chief conspirator. Who is? You guessed it. There’s a reason Clytemnestra wanted advanced notice of the king’s arrival and why she’s so stoked he’s home. She emerges from inside the palace, blood splattered and defiant. The chorus stands aghast and the play closes after an exultant and unrepentant Clytemnestra rails against those who would condemn her.
In Libation Bearers Clytemnestra’s and Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns from abroad. Hamlet home from university at Wittenberg. He visits his father’s grave where he bears witness to the fact that he seeks vengeance. His speech makes clear the vengeance is not only his desire, but is a commandment he has received from Apollo through the Delphic Oracle. Not the same as his father’s ghost, but the need for vengeance arrives by supernatural means. While there, he encounters his sister Elektra. She leads a group of women who have been sent, by of all people Clytemnestra, to offer libations to propitiate the soul of Agamemnon. They’re pouring one out for their dead homie. Unsurprisingly Clytemnestra is haunted by her actions and has been suffering terrifying nightmares. Elektra is famously spiteful of her mother and in at least one version (Sophocles) displays signs of mental illness from her grief, stress, and resentment following her father’s death and brother’s absence. Consider Ophelia. Orestes and Elektra have a touching reunion and mutually express their outrage at the situation and hatch a revenge plot against their mother and her lover Aegisthus.
The plan works flawlessly and Orestes kills Aegisthus and then has a classic hero/villain philosophical exchange while facing off with his own mother before he kills her. Afterwards Orestes is suddenly beset by the Furies, pre-Olympian goddesses of revenge.To everyone else they are invisible so Orestes appears to have gone mad (an antic disposition) and he flees the palace and Argos as the 2nd play of the trilogy comes to an end.
The Eumenides opens with an exhausted Orestes at the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi. He’s returned to be purified of his actions. It stands to reason that Apollo commanded the murder, so he can absolve him. Apollo obliges and while the Furies are sleeping he sends Orestes to take shelter at Athena’s temple at the Acropolis in Athens. Moving the resolution of the drama to the audience’s hometown? Smart. Every performer knows saying “Athens we love you!” Is only a bad idea if you’re in Sparta. The Furies are… furious. They represent retributive justice and they resent Apollo and the whole host of young Olympians screwing around with the natural order of things. Blood has been shed. Justice must be satisfied. They set off in search of Orestes and eventually catch up with him in Athens. Athena hears Orestes’ story, the complaints of The Furies, and Apollo’s assurance that the matricide was performed at his command. What is a goddess of wisdom to do with so much conflict?
Athena invents the jury trial. She convenes a council of respectable Athenians and sets herself as the judge. The Furies are the prosecution and Apollo acts as Orestes’ defense attorney. The fundamentals of the case are not in dispute, and the Furies point out that if murderers are allowed to go unpunished chaos and violence would engulf the world.
A word here about the cultural assumptions about murder and revenge killings in the play. As the action supposedly takes place in the aftermath of the Trojan war it is set something like 700 years before the text was written. Like a modern playwright setting a story during the Black Death of medieval Europe. He’s writing about a time far enough in the past that any number of values and assumptions can be projected onto it. Homer, the authoritative source for Trojan War era ethics then and now makes clear in the Iliad and Odyssey that taking revenge through violence, even on an outlandish scale, is totally OK and heroic. The available sources for the consolidation of texts for the Homeric epics date to about 800 BCE and these stories are about 400 years removed from the “history” they tell. Nonetheless, to get into the assumptions about the ethics of the Trojan war, think about its origin, the number of lives ended by Achilles in his distress/revenge for Hector killing Patroclus, and the over 100 suitors and slaves Odysseus kills upon his return to Ithaca. The bottom line is killing isn’t necessarily the problem here, killing enemies and those who betray you and your interests is par for the course. The issue at hand is killing a family member. The penalty for blood crimes is expulsion from society until your sins are purged through an act of atonement. The famous twelve labors of Heracles are his punishment for killing his own wife and children during a bout of temporary insanity imposed upon him by Hera. Oedipus blinded himself and wandered his remaining days after learning he killed his own father. The point is that the question before the jury is: was Clytemnestra’s murder a justified revenge killing because she had killed Orestes’ father, or was it a matricide requiring a more severe punishment?
Don’t kill the messenger here, but Apollo argues that mothers aren’t actually blood relations of their children; therefore Orestes could not have committed a “blood crime” requiring atonement, and he was justified in avenging his father. Record scratch. Say what? The exact argument Apollo uses (Eumenides, Fagles 665-677) is that a woman is like the soil receiving a seed from the man and therefore children are only related to their fathers. It’s a fundamentally flawed understanding of biology, but it fits with elements of Greek mythology in general (see Hesiod’s Theogony and the birth of Aphrodite and in some versions the origin of The Furies themselves) and seems particularly well crafted for the judge presiding over the case. Recall that Athena allegedly emerged fully formed from Zeus’ head. She is living proof that female input isn’t actually necessary to create life thus supporting Apollo’s claim. This argument persuades the goddess and half of the human jury and Orestes is acquitted.
The Furies are… furious. They were already pissed that these young whipper snapper Olympians had gone off and changed the game, but now these mortals dare to supplant them from their gods given rights by rendering judgment on their own? The leader of the furies unleashes a series of vicious threats. Athena encourages them to consider an alternative. What if, and she’s just spitballing here, they dispense justice in a positive sense? What if, so long as the Athenians worship the gods and maintain order through their own efforts, The Furies bless the polis with peace and prosperity? In a way the act of human sanctioned justice through formalized law and jury trial would be an act of worship directed toward The Furies. They would be loved, not feared. The frightful appearance of The Fruries had been remarked upon in all three plays in the trilogy, and Athena claims they would be considered beautiful and kind instead of ugly and spiteful. Wouldn’t that be better? Initially The Furies resist the proposal. Athena then not so subtly tells them that if they don’t find that option persuasive, she knows where daddy keeps the thunderbolts and can bring the pain if they refuse this generous offer. They accept. The title of the play Eumenides means “the kindly ones”.
The obvious themes of the trilogy are betrayal, vengeance, and justice, some of the fundamental problems of human social life. Consider for a moment the interesting position humans occupy on the tree of life on planet Earth. There are an awful lot of us. We inhabit every large landmass, even the most inhospitable ones. We transform the environments we populate in dramatic ways that are unrivaled by any other species. We defy gravity and even venture beyond the protective atmosphere of our home. Clearly our species has some advantage(s) that grant us such outsized influence. This is a complex question that people more intelligent and knowledgeable than I fail to answer, so I’m not gonna claim to have THE answer(s) here. But it seems to me the size, complexity, and nature of our social networks is somehow involved.
Humans suffer enormous disadvantages in the business of reproduction. We have a long gestation, generally for singleton births that are perilous because the fetal head is disproportionately large compared to the female pelvic opening. After 24 hours of painful labor in the hospital my wife and I learned that our children could only be born via caesarean section because of this anatomical discrepancy. Once born our young are basically helpless for over a year. Essentially we come out underdeveloped physically because of how big our brains are. Despite this apparent stacking of the deck against us, there are over 7 billion humans walking around, so it appears to be a viable strategy. What do we get with those big brains? Lots. One thing that we seem to do that has little to no precedent elsewhere is that we can combine existing knowledge and synthesize ideas with no known precedent. We can imagine. Some of us daydream, others create beauty, others see the patterns in the chaos of existence. Singular geniuses like Newton are few and far between. Even the transformative powers of Calculus and the laws of motion are only manifest when others beside Newton comprehend, adopt, and exploit them. Isaac Newton famously said that “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. I think the power of our ability to conceive, communicate, and collectively act on ideas cannot be overstated.
So we find ourselves in a unique and challenging intersection. We are alive, smart enough to know it, we have deeply entrenched individual biological imperatives to survive and reproduce, but our physical limitations and at least one major survival and reproductive advantage demands a level of peaceful coexistence and cooperation with others who have their own individual needs and desires. Success demands trust. Trust can be abused: betrayal. Betrayal invites vengeance. Vengeance begets reprisal perpetuating a vicious cycle. Eventually we decide the ability to settle scores without endangering life and limb has obvious advantages: we seek to establish justice.
We drive down two lane highways at 70 miles per hour separated from oncoming traffic, also traveling at 70 miles per hour, by two stripes of yellow paint. We walk by strangers by the tens and sometimes thousands in a given day. How many times has one of them assaulted you? We have elaborate organizational structures that build and maintain roads, flowing potable water, sanitary sewers, electricity, and telecommunications. Almost all of us agree to exchange goods and services for green pieces of paper and zeros and ones stored on silicon chips. The peace and prosperity of our lives is contingent upon stable, orderly, predictable social interactions where violence and vengeance are curtailed and there is some measure of community sanctioned justice. This is primal stuff. There’s a reason we will continue to retell stories about how we arrived at this place for as long as there are humans to hear it.
In the next three essays I’d like to take a deeper look into these concepts in general and the specifics of how they are portrayed in the Oresteia relative to how we conceive them now. As always I find that by looking through the lenses of others I better appreciate the clarity and blemishes of my own perception. Hopefully I’ve made a reasonable case for you to join me.
MaximumKungFu 