The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies (15 page)

Homer might agree, but Aeschylus’ vision of our destiny is larger. In
The Eumenides
he has worked loose from his master, to engage more freely with him and surpass him at the last. In this final
Odyssey,
after the bloody returns of Agamemnon and Orestes, it is a goddess who journeys home and brings her people to a point where vendettas may yield to justice once for all. As we move away from an
Iliad,
from a city razed by men and gods to a city they restore - a league of cities formerly hostile - the
Oresteia
presents a sweeping homeward turning, a universal harvest home. It is tragedy becoming epic in its affirmation and its scope. The ultimate
pathos
breeds the ultimate
mathos,
never losing sight of the labour and the danger still to come, not even in conclusion.

Originally the trilogy ended with a satyr-play called
Proteus,
also based on the Odyssey. Although it has not survived, it probably reenacted the adventures of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, who had been driven to Egypt by the storm that struck the fleets. It would have explained his absence at the time of the assassination and showed another son of Atreus - in a clearly lighter vein - coming to grips with destiny and its powers. Proteus was the Old Man of the Sea, the prophet of Poseidon (invoked at the outset of
The Eumenides
); and by wrestling with his shifting, slippery flux - now lion, now serpent, boar, tree, the sea itself - Menelaus wrings a prophecy of his future ‘with golden Rhadamanthos at the world’s end’, as Fitzgerald translates Homer, ‘where all existence is a dream of ease’. But in Aeschylus the theme of hard-won transformation, the harnessing of elemental forces, may have bound the satyr-play and trilogy together. For all its optimism, the
Proteus
may have reminded the Athenians that their lives were based on conflict, indeed that Athena had prevailed over Poseidon for possession of their city. So in the trilogy we reach an accommodation with the earth, but the sea, like Poseidon in the
Odyssey,
may remain to be placated. Almost all that remains of the buoyant
Proteus
, in fact, is one of Aeschylus’ more violent images - ‘a wretched struggling dove on the wing for food, /crushed by the winnowing fans, its breast split open’ - and a grim reminder of ‘a masterwork, irresistible, hard to strip away’.

Conflict remains the medium of our destiny in the
Oresteia.
Here it is always anxious spring, yet always harvest too. Sown in tears and reaped in joy, Dionysus is continuously dismembered and reborn. How could the trilogy embody so much grief and so much joy at once? Perhaps it arose at a time, never again recovered, when tragedy was so inspired by Dionysus it could re-enact his death and resurrection in one dramatic span. Perhaps the suffering of the Greeks seemed totally constructive - out of the Persian wars emerged a truly stronger nation. Art and history might conspire, the birth of tragedy and the birth of democracy might be one.

Aeschylus is the creator of tragedy and, as Thomson describes him, ‘a democrat who fought as well as wrote’. His epitaph may tell us so:

He fought with his tragedies, his compatriot George Seferis has said, as if they were weapons that might keep his country free. And his soldiery of song, like that of the old men of Argos, grew as he grew older. We may surmise from what remains - seven out of perhaps ninety plays - that he turned from dread to hope, as Herington suggests, and that he probed, ever more deeply, the bond between the two. It was a triumph of concentration, perfected after he had reached the age of fifty. In
The Persians
the invaders are destroyed and Athens gathers strength. The Suppliant Maidens are coerced into a union with society, reflecting a fruitful union of the Heavens and the Earth. And this bond between destruction and creation, this symbiosis, lies at the heart of Aeschylus’ last work, the
Prometheia
and the
Oresteia.

The latter, created two years before his death and awarded first prize by his city, represents the maturity of Aeschylus and Athens. It is a kind of national biography, and he rehearsed it in public as a playwright who directed and actually performed his work. Aeschylus the actor emulated Aeschylus the poet; he galvanized his words upon the stage. We may imagine him striving together with Orestes, torn by the forces that contended for his world, the archaic against the modern, and eager to unite them. For Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, close to the Mysteries, yet Athens was his city. One of the ancient nobility, he was also a democrat - a fine amphibian, adapted to the present and the past. He epitomized Ortega’s man of antiquity: ‘before he did anything, [he] took a step backwards, like the bullfighter who leaps back to deliver his mortal thrust’. As Aeschylus portrays the founding of the Areopagus, he may seem to endorse the latest, radical reforms that curbed its jurisdiction to cases of homicide, but he also recalls its older senatorial powers that had been stripped, he urges against all innovations in the court, and lends it a broad humanitarian cast that should govern life to come. A conservative democrat, he conserves his origins by competing with them, evincing their potential for the future.

Aeschylus is the great religious visionary. He makes old myths new with all the arrogance of the Chosen. He may well have been the first to present the Furies on the stage, then identify them as the Furies, Semnai and Eumenides in one. Imagine him as the leader of his chorus - an old man, rising up from the elders of the city, he rejuvenated his native spirits at the last, his ‘children always young’. They were impulsive, aggressive, at times irrational, yet he redeemed their fierce vitality through his art; he trained them into song and social value. For he had a mission too: to make the crisis between the Furies and the gods the origin not only of the Areopagus but of Athens in her prime. Ultimately like Athena, he reclaimed the energies of his mothers for the greatness of his fathers. It was as if he had returned to his birthplace, where he prayed, as Aristophanes had him pray, ‘O Demeter, you who nursed my heart, /make me worthy of your mystic rites.’ Never an initiate himself, it seems, he proved his worth as a kind of initiating priest who led those rites in his own inimitable ways - in the savage parody of
Agamemnon,
the tragic parody of The Libation Bearers, finally the sacred parody of The
Eumenides,
where the closing pageant is a civic marriage of men and gods, the civic birth of Athens. The Mysteries of Eleusis leave us rapt as saints. The Mysteries of Aeschylus, breaking out of ritual into drama, lead us towards a living waking vision, a state of consciousness where we must act as citizens. Aeschylus recasts the secrets of the Mysteries in spectacular public form. This was heresy, and legend tells that he was brought to trial, perhaps for this offence, but he won his freedom by appealing to his performance at Marathon or seeking refuge at the altar of Dionysus. Or both, we may say, since his exploits for democracy and the religious power of his art were intertwined. His
authadeia
had merged with his
megaloprepeia;
his arrogance became magnificence in the service of his maker. At the end of the Oresteia, when the joy of the people blends with the Escorts’ song of praise to the gods, Aeschylus might say with the Psalmist, ‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory.’

Aeschylus had achieved pure unity of being, the Mean in art and life. Athens granted him a kind of immortality. A public decree insured the reproduction of his work, and after he died his work won many victories - in effect his tragedies became enshrined. Yet in life the man was restless, striving to the end. One of the old breed, politically disenchanted perhaps, probably no longer at home in an Athens captious, brilliant, somewhat over-ripe, he died in Sicily, ‘the America of the day’, as Lattimore describes it, ‘the new Greek world, rich, generous and young’. He was approaching seventy. Some say he had gone to produce his Oresteia. ‘Old men ought to be explorers,’ as Eliot advises,

Aeschylus’ rite of passage is our own. The final act
of mimesis
is our re-creation of his world. We may see the house of Atreus become the house of Athens and the city of mankind. We see as Cassandra sees. Civilization rises from barbarity and it is perishable, its progress is the fruit of human struggle, a new barbarity may engulf the future. Yet seeing is believing, too. An act of commemoration is asking for commitment from us all, a spirit of desire far from Aristotle’s blend of pity and fear that purges us of both emotions, ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’. In the Oresteia we are not purged, we are over-mastered by the spirit of Dionysus - ‘Heaven blazing into the head’. It is not pity and fear but reverence and terror, tragic joy, the only spirit that could lead a people to
become
a myth by charging myth with all the fullness of their hearts. Here tragedy stands between the ecstasy from which it may have risen and the spectacle it would become. Here tragedy sounds a call to action. The torches blaze. The drums begin. The riders of Athens mount. Ahead are ‘girls and mothers, /trains of aged women grave in movement’. And following them the audience and ourselves. Athena leads us towards a creation always new. The end of the Oresteia is simply our beginning. Performance is all. ‘Cry, cry in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on.’

 

ROBERT FAGLES
W. B. STANFORD

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

Be like me! - amid the incessant flux of appearances, eternally creating, eternally driving into life, in this rushing, whirling flux eternally seizing satisfaction - I am the Great Mother !

- NIETZSCHE,
The Birth of Tragedy

WATCHMAN
CLYTAEMNESTRA
HERALD
AGAMEMNON
CASSANDRA
AEGISTHUS
CHORUS, THE OLD MEN OF ARGOS
AND THEIR LEADER
Attendants of Clytaemnestra
and
of Agamemnon,
bodyguard of Aegisthus

 

WATCHMAN:

Dear gods, set me free from all the pain,
the long watch I keep, one whole year awake ..
propped on my arms, crouched on the roofs of Atreus
like a dog.
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,
I know them, when they rise and when they fall ...
and now I watch for the light, the signal-fire
breaking out of Troy, shouting Troy is taken.
So she commands, full of her high hopes.
That woman - she manoeuvres like a man.

 

And when I keep to my bed, soaked in dew,
and the thoughts go groping through the night
and the good dreams that used to guard my sleep ...
not here, it’s the old comrade, terror, at my neck.
I mustn’t sleep, no -

Look alive, sentry.

And I try to pick out tunes, I hum a little,
a good cure for sleep, and the tears start,
I cry for the hard times come to the house,
no longer run like the great place of old.

 

Oh for a blessed end to all our pain,
some godsend burning through the dark -

I salute you!
You dawn of the darkness, you turn night to day -
I see the light at last.
They’ll be dancing in the streets of Argos
thanks to you, thanks to this new stroke of-
Aieeeeee!
There’s your signal clear and true, my queen!
Rise up from bed - hurry, lift a cry of triumph
through the house, praise the gods for the beacon,
if they’ve taken Troy . . .
But there it burns,
fire all the way. I’m for the morning dances.
Master’s luck is mine. A throw of the torch
has brought us triple-sixes - we have won!
My move now —

Just bring him home. My king,
I’ll take your loving hand in mine and then . . .
the rest is silence. The ox is on my tongue.
Aye, but the house and these old stones,
give them a voice and what a tale they’d tell.
And so would I, gladly . . .
I speak to those who know; to those who don’t
my mind’s a blank. I never say a word.