The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies (13 page)

Principle must turn to practice; Orestes must be judged. And as the judges rise to cast their ballots, Apollo and the Furies rise to such vituperative heights that this
Theogony
may erupt into a clash between Zeus and the Fates themselves if Athena does not cast her ballot as she does:

The one who has just endorsed the Mean could scarcely strike a more one-sided, more Olympian stance. We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets the Earth from which she sprang,’ Jane Harrison laments, ‘always from the lips of the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial.’ Yet we may hear some other things as well, though the issues are complex, and certainty is probably out of reach. Athena may be defending Zeus, at any rate, less than she is admitting her undeniable kinship with the Father and the masculine gods. Nor is she fully espousing Apollo’s male biology with its social, political extensions. She may say, in effect, the murder of a husband by a wife is worse than the murder of a mother by a son, and so she may lend support to the ties of marriage, a civic institution, rather than the ties of blood. But, according to her statement, it is precisely in marriage that her loyalties are not exclusively with the male. And rather than totally justify Orestes for his crime, she simply cannot favour Clytaemnestra for hers - a statement of negative preference.

Then why does Athena cast her ballot for Orestes? Her critics will argue that she yields to religious pressures and sexual politics, and her judgement is not only biased but predetermined. ‘Even if the vote is equal, Orestes wins.’ Yet her ability to sense an equality in this case, plus her firm independence of her fellow-jurors, may also point to her judiciousness and rigour. She may have decided on Orestes less from bias, we suggest, than to exemplify - with great precision - the origin of the Athenian practice that acquitted all defendants who received an equally divided vote. Whereas a later age would ascribe Athena’s action to mercy pure and simple, however, Aeschylus would have her act according to the mercy of her means, her strict sense of equity. For the blanket pardon that Apollo orders would contravene the facts, painstakingly gathered throughout the trial, and the facts are what compel Athena’s decision now. Not only the fact of her kinship with the gods, but the more important fact that they drove Orestes, however willing to avenge his father, to commit his terrible act of matricide. Understandably torn between the rights and wrongs of the case, the jury appears to be deadlocked (or so it appears to us as we explain in the note on line 767). And Athena will uphold Orestes’ crime as justifiable homicide, but not innocence outright. Even in her statement of acquittal - ‘The man goes free, /cleared of the charge of blood. The lots are equal’ - her words reveal that, despite Orestes’ innocence, Orestes’ guilt remains.

That is a contradiction as arbitrary as the will of Zeus himself, and perhaps the very point Athena wants to make. By maintaining the moral ambiguity of Orestes’ action, she maintains the gods’ continuing involvement in its consequences. ‘With all my heart I am my Father’s child’ - Athena is obedient to, and responsible for, her father. Not for Apollo, who leaves unceremoniously, certain perhaps of victory, though this is moot and the Furies will receive a settlement he would despise. No, Athena is responsible for her father, especially for improving his sense of right and wrong, and this is a burden she has just begun to feel. As Kitto says of the trial, ‘as a debate it is poor; as conflict it is magnificent.’ It is so dramatic. Its issue cannot be resolved, it can only be experienced. The law is only medial; its contradictions call for the harmony, the social justice that is its goal. If Athena’s position here is too one-sided, too Olympian, she must right the balance. She is ‘all for the male, in all things but marriage’. And now marriage - unions of every sort become Athena’s labour, and through these unions she will justify her father.

Her model is Orestes. Adopted by her city, the outlaw is reborn. He returns to Argos, his patrimony, where he redeems his murderous fathers as a just, lawful prince. Thanks to the gods, especially Third Saving Zeus who unites the Olympians and the forces of the Earth. For Orestes is his mother’s son as well, and as he swears an alliance between Argos and Athens, he regenerates his bond with Clytaemnestra. He will curse the men who break his oath, even if he must rise up from the grave, and bless the ones who keep it. He returns to his mother’s powers of love and hate, transforming them into a fondness that empowers, a curb that regulates society. He resolves his parents’ strife. He is a successful version of Oedipus; neither the banished king of Sophocles nor the wounded private citizen of Freud, by suffering his filial traumas Orestes has regained his throne. He is the pathology of his people, yet he grows into the victor of the
polis
, his people’s great good health. He is a martyr in the first sense of the word, a living witness, and a far cry from later martyrs who will leave the living centres of their world. Far from Sartre’s Orestes in The Flies - the scapegoat who carries off our guilt to an isolated life of fierce, self-gratifying freedom. Far from the Orestes in
The Family Reunion -
the passionate pilgrim who takes ‘the only way out’, in Eliot’s words, ‘purgation and holiness’, and an even sharper abdication from his people. In the
Oresteia
the ordeals of Orestes are an
aristeia,
a heroic proof of human victory, individual and social. The tragic hero becomes an epic hero, and his exploits never end; legends of further trials still cling to his future, and further triumphs, too. Through Orestes we may glimpse a union of the Titans and the gods. Cursing and blessing both, he promises to be
eumenês -
he may prepare us for the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, the fury of the justice of the gods. His passion play is the crux of the Mysteries before us, casting us towards the larger birth, the larger sacred marriage still to come.

But first the larger agony. As Athena frees Orestes she inflames the Furies. Like him and his mother, she declares a victory for justice that only provokes the forces of the curse. Now Athena must be tried, and again the prosecution will begin. The Furies cry in pain and turn their pain into the lawless bloody tide they dreaded most. They are like Demeter in her fury, forced to destroy the world, unless Athena can assuage them. She reminds them that the vote was tied, the verdict merely acknowledged Zeus’s power; but that is what they deplore, and even when Athena offers them thrones beneath the earth, they repeat their cries against the younger gods. So she threatens them with the lightning-bolt she trained against the Titans - a threat of power politics, yet a reluctant one as well, no sooner made than modulated with her offer of the land’s first fruits. And the Furies’ rage in turn, now that it can only hurt themselves, modulates to anguish. Both are dispensing with their rage, in short; their consciences are making them creative. Lest Athena abuse the older gods, she offers them still more, a conscious social role - ‘do great things, feel greatness, greatly honoured’. She pleads that they remain and prosper, for if she fails, both sides will lose. Now the tragic choice is not a choice of evils but the effort to secure a total victory, and under this pressure Athena discovers herself, her godly power. It is Persuasion,
Peitho,
not the compulsion of Helen or the temptation of Clytaemnestra, but compassion, the power Cassandra first expressed and now Athena turns to action.

For the third time in the trilogy
Peitho
rises to conduct a swift exchange, but in this persuasion scene the prize is mutual. Through compassion Athena sees that her opponents’ strength and weakness are her own. She resembles Prospero in
The Tempest
less than some have thought - she might find him condescending when he turns to Caliban and says, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,’ and self-righteous when he pardons the rebels in his kingdom:

Athena reasons with their mutual fury; she helps them find the virtue in their vengeance, its vital energy. She makes
life
their mutual province, and she wins the Furies over. For she returns them to what they always wanted, what they always were, and in the process she reclaims her own maternal roots - Athena, the spirit of the hearth, savage in defence of all she fosters, not unlike a Fury. They have shared their terms, their values, even their tragic burdens, and now they share the resolution of their trial. It is very moving, like a dialogue of mother and daughter, power and potential, Demeter and Kore reunited. The Furies will generate life; Athena will lead that life to social victory. Together they express a ‘blessed rage for order’.

Together they sing a final binding-song of blessings, founding a new
sunoikia,
a federation that expands the first federation of Theseus into a new cosmology. We begin with prophecy and the gods. The Furies foresee a new union between the Earth and Sky, while Athena, mediating between them and her citizens, will bring the Furies’ vision to fruition. Yet as they shower down their blessings, she reasserts their regulatory powers, their severity, for this is like a Thesmophoria of the Furies. They are like the women singing spells that ban and bless at harvest, dispensing joy for some and blinding pain for others. That is our fate, the enduring possibility of tragedy in our lives, but the Furies’ second round of blessings shows us how to counteract its harshness. As spirits of fertility they invigorate the rite of marriage - the Olympian rite Apollo unsuccessfully defended - and as they ally themselves with Zeus and Hera they unite with the Fates as guardians of our laws. It is a grand alliance, thanks to
Peitho,
as Athena tells us; thanks above all, the Furies tell us, to ourselves. By rejecting civil strife and promoting brotherhood we can turn their love-in-hate into a national code of conduct:

The crux of this binding-song is man. What begins as prophecy ends in a public exhortation of us all. In the third, final round of blessings the Furies urge us to rejoice in the gods’ gifts, but only as we use our native gifts and ‘achieve humanity at last’.

The play ends as it began, with the evolution of a culture. But in Delphi we simply foresee our fate, in Athens we create it. These are the Mysteries of Athens, and the sacred marriage here is a wedding of opposites overwhelming in their joy. Vengeance yields to regeneration, the Furies yield to Athena and embrace. Together they complete their rites of passage. Athena becomes what she would become in Plato: the Kore always among us, the virgin brilliant in armour and exulting in our dances - in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, she is ‘war’s miracle begetting that of peace’. She is the Kore in her fruitfulness, what’s more, and as her children imitate her ways, she becomes an image of their psychic wholeness, too. Aeschylus has warmed Athena’s civic discipline, her imposing statuesque authority, with love. She is magnificently human, the spirit of Athens incarnate in the unions that consummate the
Oresteia.

A great procession forms, not unlike the Panathenaic Procession that moved throughout the city at every harvest to celebrate Athena’s birth and consecrate her gift of human culture. As if that gift derived from other roots as well, the Metics, the resident aliens, were yearly clad in crimson robes and included in the torchlit march. Like Metics imported for their strengths, the Furies are also clad in crimson, but they are invested as permanent citizens and then renamed Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, who never cease to be the Furies too. The parts of their nature wed and, as they join the torchlit march that conducts them to their shrine beneath the Areopagus, they also become the Semnai Theai, the Awesome Goddesses who sanctify the law. Only in Athens can the Furies be the Semnai and Eumenides in one. That is the measure of the city’s breadth - passionate and lawful and magnanimous. Athena’s citizens are wedded to these spirits, and their common issue is justice, a union of rigour and resilience. Their issue is ‘neither anarchy nor tyranny’ but
isonomia,
social balance. It is the Mean, democracy.

The
Oresteia
ends in a great mutual victory. At last, as Athena urged, there is no ‘brutal conquest’ of light over darkness, patriarchy over matriarchy, Olympians over Titans and the Earth. In this
Theogony
all enjoy the triumph they desired - ‘All-seeing Zeus and Fate embrace.‘ The old antagonists, Will and Necessity, have been married by Persuasion, and according to Aeschylus (and Pythagoras and Plato) they produce the world. The
Oresteia
is like a story of creation, yet as the cosmic forces grow creative they become more human and humane. It is in our progress from savagery to democracy, it would seem, that the gods may find the balance which they lacked, and earn a better warrant for authority. In the words of Aeschylus’ most expansive couplet, ‘Zeus is the air, Zeus is the earth, Zeus is the heaven, /Zeus is all in all, and all that lies beyond’ - but not until he turns from the use of power politics to the rights of humankind. In the old
Theogony
he acquired power; in the new
Theogony
he refines it. And if Zeus is not a character in the Oresteia, capable of improvement, his spokesmen clearly do improve, from Apollo, rationality belligerent, to Athena, the force of reason victorious. She had always been Zeus’s ultimate weapon; her birth in armour protected him against his father’s sorry fates. Now she legitimates her father, and she does so in profoundly human terms. As if Orestes were her model, she enacts her father’s will with the energies of her mother, Mêtis, Wisdom. And so the Oresteia culminates in a union of male and female strengths, a healthy unisexuality of the spirit. It seems the opposite of Clytaemnestra at the start - the terrifying hermaphrodite - yet the final unions may remind us of her maternal powers, too. If the finale recalls the Panathenaia, a harvest festival, Athena’s birth may issue, in effect, equally from the brow of the Father and the depths of Mother Earth.