Background - Aeschylus
The Curse of the House of Atreus
The story of the House of Atreus is the central narrative of Greek drama. Almost every story – from the birth of the Gods to the Trojan War to the ascension of Athens – is driven by the story of this extremely unfortunate family. What follows are only some highlights; the connections are endless, as are the variations on the stories.
We begin with the Titans, the children of Uranus and Gaia (Sky and Earth); Gaia was both Uranus’ wife and mother. Cronos ascended to the throne when he castrated his father with an adamantine sickle provided by his mother/grandmother. Cronos threw Uranus’ genitals into the sea; the drops of blood that fell to Earth gave birth to the Furies (Erinyes). More on them later.
Cronos was said to have consumed his children at birth, lest they overthrow him as he had his own father. His wife and sister Rhea was enraged by this practice, and, when she was about to be delivered of Zeus, fled to Crete where she gave birth in the cave Dicte. Rhea then presented Cronos with a stone wrapped in a cloth which he swallowed, thinking it Zeus. Zeus was suckled by the goat Amalthea, and his nannies were the nymphs Adrastia and Ida. After he grew up, Zeus succeeded in taking control of the universe from Cronos and compelled him to regurgitate the eaten children, who then became the Olympian gods (with some exceptions).
Zeuss was the father of Tantalus by the nymph Plouto. Tantalus had the extraordinary honor of being allowed to serve food to the gods. One night, in order to test their ominiscience, he served the gods his son Pelops. Demeter alone failed the test and ate what she was offered – the explanation is that she was distracted because her daughter Persephone was in the underworld, having been kidnapped by Hades. (This is the Greek story of how winter came to the world.) As a result, when Pelops was restored to life by the outraged gods, his shoulder was missing and was replaced by an ivory prosthetic. Tantalus was punished by being sent to the lowest depths of Hades where for all eternity he would stand up to his waist in a stream, next to a tree full of beautiful fruit. But whenever he reaches for a fruit the tree pulls away, and whenever he bends to drink the water avoids his touch. Thus he suffers eternal hunger and thirst.
Pelops was only one of Tantalus’s three children. The other two were Niobe and Broteas. Broteas was a famous hunter who refused to honor Artemis. Artemis then drove him mad, causing him to immolate himself on her alter. Niobe and Amphion had fourteen children. In a moment of arrogance, Niobe bragged about her seven sons and seven daughters at a ceremony in honor of Leto, the daughter of the titans Coeus and Phoebe. She mocked Leto, who only had two children, the gods Apollo and Artemis. Leto did not take the insult lightly, and in retaliation, sent Apollo and Artemis to earth to slaughter all of Niobe's children. Apollo killed the seven sons and Artemis killed the seven daughters with her lethal arrows. At the sight of his dead sons, Amphion either committed suicide or was also killed by Apollo for wanting to avenge his children's deaths. Niobe fled to Mt. Siplyon in Asia Minor. There she turned to stone and from the rock formed a stream from her ceaseless tears. Niobe's children were left unburied for nine days because Zeus had turned all of the people of Thebes into stone. Only on the tenth day did the gods have pity and entomb her children.
Meanwhile, back to Pelops. When it came time for Pelops to marry, he chose Hippodamia, the daughter of Oenomaus, king of Pisa. Unfortunately, the king lusted after his own daughter and contrived to murder all her more appropriate suitors during a (fixed) race. Pelops had to win this race to Mt. Olympus in order to win his bride, and he did -- by loosening the lynchpins in Oenomaus' chariot, thereby killing his wife’s father. Pelops and Hippodamia had two twin sons, Thyestes and Atreus. And here things start to get messy.
Atreus, Thyestes, and their mother Hippodamia were exiled by their father Pelops for murdering their half-brother Chrysippus in their desire for the throne of Olympia. They took refuge in Mycenae, where Hippodamia hanged herself while Atreus and Thyestes ascended to the throne as stewards while king Eurystheus -- their brother-in-law – was off fighting a war. Eurystheus had meant for their stewardship to be temporary, but it became permanent after his death in battle. When he died, Atreus finagled control of the kingdom. Thyestes seduced Atreus' wife, Aerope, and stole Atreus' golden fleece. When the people of Mycenae decided the owner of the fleece would be king, Thysestes took the throne. Then Aterus got Thyestes to agree he would abdicate when the sun ran backward; Zeus reversed the course of the sun, and Thyestes had to abdicate, at which point he was banished by Aterus.
When Atreus discovered his wife had been unfaithful with Thyestes, he called his brother back, and served him a feast of which the main course was Thyestes’ two sons. Thyestes then laid the famous curse on Atreus and his house.
Thyestes later went to the Oracle in Delphi and asked how he could be avenged; she told him that his avenger could only be a son born to him and his dauther Pelopia. Thyestes raped Pelopia, who gave birth to Aegisthus.
Atreus had two sons, Menelaus and Agamemnon, who married the royal Spartan sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra. Helen was captured by Paris, thereby starting the Trojan War. Agamemnon and Menelaus launched a fleet of ships, but were stopped at the Island of Aulis by adverse winds raised by Poseidon. A seer explained that Agamemnon had offended Artemis and must sacrifice his daughter to propitiate the deity. Agamemnon tricked Clytemenestra into sending their daughter Iphigenia to Aulis, where she was sacrificed to the goddess. At that point the winds came up and the ships sailed to Troy.
The war lasted 10 years during which time Clytemnestra took a lover: Aegisthus, the one born from Thyestes’ act of incest for the specific purpose of taking revenge on Atreus. Clytemenestra also sent her son, Orestes, away. Agamemnon returned from the war with a concubine, the Trojan princess Cassandra. Cassandra had been cursed by Apollo: she had the gift of divination, but no one would ever believe her prophecies. When Agamenmon returned home to Mycenae, Cassandra foretold death and horror, and no one believed her. Thereupon Cassandra and Agamemnon were murdered by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
Orestes, having first obtained the blessing of Apollo, returned home and ran into his sister Electra at the grave of their father. He swore to exact revenge on his mother for killing his father and sleeping with her . . . uh, grandnephew? True to his word, Orestes killed both Clytemenestra and Aegisthus. All the previous murders, acts of cannibalism, and acts of incest were bad enough, but the crime of matricide triggered the Furies, who pursued Orestes and drove him mad.
Background on Aeschylus
Known as “the father of Greek tragedy,” Aeschylus is the first and arguably the greatest of the famous Greek playwrights. He wrote as many as 90 plays, of which only 6 survive. Many of his plays were written as trilogies: the Oresteaia, from which we are reading, is the only complete trilogy to survive. He is one of three major tragedians whose plays we have, along with the later writers Sophocles and Euripides. The sharp contrast is between Aeschylus and Euripides. Euripides is the “new” playwright, who rights clever, complicated, interesting plays with lots of flowery language. Aeschylus, by contrast, writes plays of brute power and horrifying impact. If you ever get the chance, see an Aeschylean play staged live!
Aeschylus lived from 524 – 455 b.c.e. (“before the common era”); the most important events in his life undoubtedly involved his participation in the wars against Persia, in which Aeschylus served with distinction including fighting at the battles of Marathon and Salamis. He also had an interesting and somewhat mysterious religious self-identification. He was an initiate into a cult of the goddess Demeter, whose teachings were secret. We know this because at one point he was put on trial on the charge of revealing those secret teachings in his tragedies, a charge from which he was acquitted based on his military service (a defense that would not save Socrates later!)
During Aeschylus’ lifetime, the Dionysian Festival of Athens was created. This was a festival whose main feature was a competition among plays: tragedies and comedies competed and were judged separately. (In case you’re wondering, all of the six surviving Aeschylean tragedies won first prize.) Aeschylus’ importance in Greek culture is illustrated by the way in which he is treated by other important writers. In 335 b.c.e. Aristotle, in The Poetics, credits Aeschylus with inventing the Greek dramatic form in many key respects, including the use of characters to illustrate conflicts on stage (but not violence, all of which takes place off stage in all Greek dramas).
Long before Aristotle, in 405 b.c.e. the comedic playwright Aristophanes, two of whose plays we will read later in the course, wrote and presented a play called The Frogs. In that play, the god Dionysus, despairing of the future of Greek drama, goes into the underworld to rescue Euripides. When he gets there, however, he finds himself judging a contest between the shades of Aeschylus and Euripides to decide which one to bring back. In the end, a scale is set up: on one side is Euripides and all of his works, on the other is two verses from Aeschylus. There is no contest: Aeschylus’ work has so much more weight that two verses are enough to outweigh everything Euripides has ever done. Aristophanes’ point here is not mysterious: he is telling his Greek audience that to get back to the virtues of an earlier era – recall the theme of “declension” in the Hebrew Bible -- they must go back to the era of Aeschylus.
[Side note: in the most surprising places, you will find people quoting the chorus of the frogs to demonstrate how literate they are. The chorus goes "brekkeka-kex, co-ax, co-ax, brekkeka-kex co-ax!" I have no idea why Aristophanean frogs sound like that. But if you try it, I think you will find that "brekkeka-kex, co-ax co-ax" lends itself very nicely to being chanted aloud while, say, walking vigorously across Library Mall in classical Greek costume.]
The experience of tragic drama for the ancient Greeks was not exactly what we think of when we talk about seeing a play. The key term – coined, much later, by Aristotle – is catharsis. In its original meaning, a catharsis was a transformative emotional experience, a traumatic moment of fear, sorrow, pity, or joy that results in an emotional cleansing. All Greek citizens and their households were required to attend the tragedies, in the belief that undergoing the experience of catharsis was beneficial. (By contrast, the comedies were considered unsuitable for women and children. With very considerable reason.) So these plays were not meant merely to impress, they were meant to be wrenching experiences with deeply important things to say to their audiences. One account of the life of Aeschylus reports that when The Eumenides was first staged, the costumes of the title characters were so frightful that children fainted, old men urinated, and pregnant women went into spontaneous labor (Mary Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets.)
The Plot of the Oresteia
The first play, Agamemnon, describes Agamemnon’s return from the Trojan War. On the way to the war, the god Poseidon had been angered against the Greeks, and had raised storms that held up the whole fleet on the Island of Aulis. To appease Poseidon, Agamemnon sent for his beloved daughter Iphegenia; when she arrived, he sacrificed her. This placated Poseidon, and the fleet was able to proceed on to Troy. But from the beginning, there is an uneasy sense of blood debt hanging over the expedition.
Then, in Troy, Agamemnon picks up a concubine named Cassandra. Cassandra is under a curse. As the story goes, she once agreed to sleep with Apollo in return for the gift of foresight. He gave her the gift, but then she refused to fulfill her part of the bargain. In revenge, Apollo cursed Cassandra in an interesting way: she would have accurate visions of the future, and no one would ever believer her. When Agamemnon comes home, with Cassandra in tow, his wife Clytemenestra murder him with the assistance of her lover Aegisthus (see the essay in the packet).
The second play, The Libation Bearers, has to do with Agamemnon’s and Clytemenstra’s son, Orestes, and daughter, Electra. Clytemenestra has been having troubling nightmares, and she sends Electra to pour libations on Agamemnon’s grave in the hope of appeasing the spirits. While there, Electra runs into her brother Orestes, just home from foreign travels, and tells him what happened. Orestes bursts into the palace and kills his mother and her lover. The Chorus exults that at last justice has been restored, but Orestes warns them not to be to quick to celebrate. "I grieve for our family, the things that were done, the suffering. / But do not envy me, I have won a tainted victory" (lines 1016-17). The word "tainted" here means blood guilt. Orestes himself says that he does not know "how it will end" (line 1021), but he announces his intention to travel to Delphi to be purified of this miasma by Apollo. In the last scene of the play, Orestes sees the Furies who have been triggered into action by the act of matricide, but no one else can see them. Orestes says that they are real, not "sights" (line 1053). He describes them as "Like Gorgons! / Black-clad, writhing with snakes!" (lines 1048-49), and "the hellhounds of [his mother's] hate" (line 1054). Orestes flees, and the play ends with the chorus asking "When will it end? When will it be calm? / When will it sleep, this fury, this Ruin?" (lines 1074-76.)
Eumenides opens with Orestes, pursued by the Furies, at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. We will learn that Apollo has indeed “purified” Orestes, but the Furies continue to hound him. Apollo cannot defeat the Furies, but he puts them to sleep and tells Orestes to flee again, this time to the temple of Athena (Apollo sends Hermes along to keep Orestes safe along the way). The remainder of the play is the confrontation between the Furies and Athena. It is worth remembering that of all the gods and goddesses, Athena is the one of whom even Zeus is a little bit afraid.
And there we begin ...
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