Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Martin Classical Lectures)

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Essential Reading: Aeschylus, Agamemnon. Supplementary Reading: Conacher, Oresteia. Goldhill, Oresteia.

Is there any sense in which Agamemnon had a choice about whether or not to sacrifice Iphigenia? Under a system of blood vengeance, is Clytaemestra justified in killing Agamemnon? We consider how the major themes set up in through Libation Bearers and finally resolved in Eumenides. The lecture also discusses the context of Eumenides as a response to a specific set of political reforms enacted four years before The Oresteia was produced and considers precisely what kind of response the trilogy represents. Finally, the lecture looks at the way in which the gender issues raised in Agamemnon are resolved by Eumenides.

In the second play of the trilogy, Libation Bearers, Aeschylus develops the key themes of conflicting duties and irreconcilable claims that he began in Agamemnon. Unfortunately, his opening speech is damaged in the manuscript; we do not know how many lines are missing. A few other lines survive in commentaries on other authors.

As it stands now, he speaks only nine lines before seeing his sister Electra and the chorus approach and hiding to observe them. This play takes its name from its chorus, who are slave women in the palace at Argos. At the tomb, Electra sees a lock of hair and footsteps that Orestes has left. She exclaims that the hair matches her own.

She sets her feet in the footprints and finds that the shape is similar. Orestes comes out of hiding and tells her who he is. Once inside, he will kill Aegisthus and Clytaemestra. After he explains this plan to Electra, she disappears from the play. The actor who had played Electra will reenter as Clytaemestra.

When Aegisthus arrives, he immediately enters the palace and is killed by Orestes. Her intelligence and resolution have not slackened since Agamemnon; she calls for an axe to kill Orestes. When confronted with Orestes himself, however, she stresses her motherhood. In lines that without question recall the plea of the aged Queen Hecuba of Troy to her son Hector in the Iliad, Clytaemestra asks Orestes to take pity before the breast he suckled at as a baby.

She then tries rhetorical skill to dissuade him, but eventually he leads her into the palace and kills her. When Orestes hesitates, his companion, Pylades, reminds him that he must kill Clytaemestra. As he did with Cassandra in Agamemnon, Aeschylus has led the audience to assume that Pylades is a silent character. She refers to a dream she had, in which she nursed a snake at her breast.

Orestes accepts her interpretation that he is the snake and leads her into the house to die. He does not claim that he is right to kill her, however. Instead, he says that she was wrong to kill and now must suffer wrong. Orestes displays the bodies of Clytaemestra and Aegisthus to the chorus and does, now, claim that he was right to kill them.

Within a few lines, however, his confidence begins to ebb away.

Female Acts in Greek Tragedy

He fears madness; he says that he is like a charioteer who has gone off track. Clearly the question of whether he was right or not is difficult even for Orestes to answer. He also says that he will go to Apollo as a suppliant and ask for protection. Orestes rushes out, pursued by the invisible Furies, and the chorus wonders where the Curse of the House of Atreus will end.

A court system must be inaugurated. Orestes appears as the first defendant on a murder charge in the first trial ever held. Apollo is, in effect, his defense lawyer; the Furies are the prosecution; and Athena serves as judge. Athena reiterates the idea of conflicting claims to justice that has run throughout the earlier plays. She appoints a jury of Athenian citizens to hear the case.

After Apollo and the Furies both present their arguments, the jurors vote. Two separate interpretations of how the jurors voted can be made, depending on the number of jurors. In actual legal practice, a tied vote amounted to an acquittal, so either way, Athena casts the deciding vote and establishes the precedent for acquittal in case of a tie. The number of jurors who vote makes a difference in interpretation.

Scholars will probably continue to disagree on this point.

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Orestes leaves to live a normal life. This trial and acquittal also apparently bring an end to the age of heroes; Orestes and his descendants fade into normality. Aeschylus reshapes the traditional mythic material both to describe and to demonstrate the value of the Athenian court system.

More than that, his treatment of these issues is linked to a particular political development of his own day. Athens in the fifth century B. Aeschylus and his audience were undoubtedly aware that their court system did not really stretch back to the age of heroes. On this site, an actual council met, whose power was very important in the sixth century but decreased in the fifth. In , just four years before the performance of The Oresteia, the powers of the Areopagus council were radically decreased.

Before this time, the council had dominated most areas of Athenian government. Now its areas of authority were reduced to trying cases of homicide, arson, and malicious wounding. In the Eumenides, then, Aeschylus seems to be responding to these reforms of He is perhaps chiding the reformers for showing disrespect to an ancient institution.

He is perhaps reminding the members of the Areopagus council that they still have a crucial role to play in Athens. Finally, in addition to the main conflict between the claims of the oikos and the claims of the polis, the shifting power between the sexes is another conflict raised throughout the trilogy. Eumenides provides a resolution here, as well. The entire trilogy displays a binary system in which female and male are only one contrasting pair in a whole set of opposites. On one side are blood vengeance, irrationality, night, earth, wildness, uncontrolled anger, the ancient chthonic goddesses, and femaleness in general.

ISBN 13: 9780691094922

On the other side are justice, reason including logic and rhetoric , day, sky, civilization, moderation, the younger Olympian gods, and maleness in general. These oppositions come to a head in the conflict between the Furies, ancient daughters of the Night who had no father, and Apollo, the eternally young god of civilization and reason, son of the sky god Zeus. Apollo here asserts a key desire of Greek male culture that we shall see again: that men should be able to reproduce without women, that one half of the binary system simply did not exist.

In this schematization of opposites, two figures do not fit: Clytaemestra, who embodies much of the conflict of the trilogy, and Athena, who ultimately resolves it. Clytaemestra in the Agamemnon is, in a fundamental and disturbing sense, both male and female. Athena is the perfect solver of this dilemma. She is female, but her characteristics and outlook are noticeably male. As the patron goddess of Athens, she is associated with war and justice, both of which are male attributes. She is a daughter born from a father, with no mother.

This resolution very firmly asserts the primacy of the male in all ways. The younger Olympian gods have won the day. However, the older chthonic goddesses do not disappear, nor are they powerless; rather, they are integrated into the system imposed by the new order.

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McClure, Spoken Like a Woman, chapter 3, pp. Considering the implications of either a tied vote by the jurors or one in which they vote to convict Orestes, which possible interpretation do you think is more likely, given the overall tenor of The Oresteia?

Can you think of any issues raised throughout The Oresteia that are not addressed by the resolution at the end of Eumenides? Are any important questions left unanswered? Aeschylus was renowned in antiquity for his use of spectacular visual effects.

First and foremost, The Oresteia draws our attention to the skene building. From the earliest age of tragedy, some sort of structure probably existed in which the actors changed masks and costumes. At some point, however, a permanent wooden structure, still called a skene, was erected at the back of the orchestra. In The Oresteia, however, our attention is drawn to the skene building and its presence throughout the trilogy.

Agamemnon opens with the Watchman speaking from the roof of the skene. If a permanent skene had not been used before, this opening in itself would have been a startling effect. Throughout Agamemnon, the House is increasingly important.

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