Aeschylus: Eumenides

Robin Mitchell-Boyask

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781472519641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

The "Eumenides", the concluding drama in Aeschylus' sole surviving trilogy, the "Oresteia", is not only one of the most admired Greek tragedies, but also one of the most controversial and contested, both to specialist scholars and public intellectuals. It stands at the crux of the controversies over the relationship between the fledgling democracy of Athens and the dramas it produced during the City Dionysia, and over the representation of women in the theatre and their implied status in Athenian society. The "Eumenides" enacts the trial of Agamemnon's son Orestes, who had been ordered under the threat of punishment by the god Apollo to murder his mother Clytemnestra, who had earlier killed Agamemnon.In the "Eumenides", Orestes, hounded by the Eumenides (Furies), travels first to Delphi to obtain ritual purgation of his mother's blood, and then, at Apollo's urging, to Athens to seek the help of Athena, who then decides herself that an impartial jury of Athenians should decide the matter. Aeschylus thus presents a drama that shows a growing awareness of the importance of free will in Athenian thought through the mythologized institution of the first jury trial.

1

Aeschylus the Athenian

This chapter presents an overview of the career of Aeschylus, set against the birth of Athenian democracy during his teens and the two wars against Persia in which Aeschylus fought. I shall here discuss Aeschylus’ contributions to the development of tragic drama in Athens and how his dramas, especially the Oresteia, are understood as participating in the development of Athenian democracy and its institutions.

The facts of the lives of the ancient Greek poets must always be considered with great caution, for they frequently derive from anecdotes from late antiquity that are an unreliable (though often amusing) mixture of speculation, gossip, folk tale and motifs derived from the poems themselves.¹ One such story from the ancient Life involves the first performance of Eumenides itself: so terrifying were the Furies’ costumes that the pregnant women in the audience miscarried when they first caught sight of them. Now, all of the characters in Aeschylus’ Eumenides comment on the Furies’ loathsome appearance, so a particularly violent reaction from its first audience seems quite probable, but not this particular reaction: women were either not present in the theatre at all, or, if they did attend, they probably sat at the back where the sheer size of the Theatre of Dionysus would probably have made the details of the chorus’ costumes less compelling.² The death of Aeschylus also receives an amusing treatment in the biographical legends: Aeschylus, during his final trip to Sicily, met his end when an eagle, which was carrying a turtle and seeking a rock on which to smash its shell, mistakenly hurled it down at Aeschylus’ bald head and struck him dead. Turtles are popular figures in Greek folk tales and eagles figure prominently in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, so this story, while certainly possible, sounds more suspicious than others. Nonetheless, the death of Aeschylus in Gela, Sicily does seem a reliable item.

Aeschylus and the birth of democracy in Athens

Aside from the manner of his death, other details of Aeschylus’ life are fairly trustworthy, and the story of his life is very much the story of Athens’ rise. His late adolescence and adult prime saw the two seminal events in the ascent of Athens: the beginning of democracy and the wars against Persia. He was born, son of Euphorion, probably in 525/24 BC to an aristocratic family at Eleusis, a town roughly fourteen miles northwest of Athens. The celebrations of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the great religious festival in honour of the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, filled Aeschylus’ childhood with the rituals and myths of the great goddesses of fertility, death and renewal. At the time of his birth, dramas were still being performed in the Athenian Agora. The dramas themselves consisted of choral songs about a hero or god and a single, masked actor who stepped forward to represent the main character. This was the institution of the semi-legendary first dramatist, Thespis, in the decade before Aeschylus’ birth. During the time of Thespis’ activities, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus transformed an older festival in honour of the god Dionysus into the City Dionysia. Peisistratus also reorganized the Panathenaia, a quadrennial Athenian festival, into a Pan-Hellenic event, with processions, athletic competitions, and, most importantly for the young Aeschylus, recitations of Homeric epic and performances of choral poetry by poets such as Simonides and solo lyric performances by the likes of Anacreon. Athens was well on its way to being a hotbed of poetic performance and innovation.

The pace of change in Athens accelerated towards the end of the sixth century. In 508 Cleisthenes, riding a wave of popular support, routed the governing aristocrats, and instituted the democracy that characterized Athens for the next century.³ Thus, when Aeschylus was seventeen, dêmokratia, the rule of the people, was born, but its full gestation would take the rest of his life and become one of the underlying concerns of his Eumenides. Roughly ten years after democratic rule began in Athens, the dramatic performances of the City Dionysia, in which Aeschylus was already competing, moved from the Agora to the south slope of the Acropolis. The city of Athens and its theatre thus, early in the adulthood of Aeschylus, took the forms he would inhabit, save for his trips to Sicily, for the rest of his life.⁴ His plays, which would fundamentally transform the theatre, are also important documents for understanding the development of Athens in the first half of the fifth century BC. Indeed, it is in one of Aeschylus’ tragedies, Suppliants, that one finds the first surviving cluster of words that forms our word democracy: dêmou kratousa cheir (604, ‘the ruling hand of the people’).

If the decisive moment in Athenian internal affairs was the Cleisthenic revolution of 508 BC, the international watershed for Athens came when the Persians invaded Greece, eventually occupying Athens itself. In 499, around the time Athenian dramatic performances moved to the south slope of the Acropolis and Aeschylus began his career, along Asia Minor’s west coast a number of Greek cities that had been incorporated forcibly into the Persian Empire revolted against their master. It took the Persians five years to crush this rebellion, which was eventually supported by Athens. In 490 BC the Persian King Darius used this Athenian assistance as an excuse to assault the heart of Greece itself. Against their second incursion, at Marathon, Aeschylus fought, and the often unreliable Life (10) records that he arranged for the following epitaph for his tomb in Sicily:

This monument in wheat-growing Gela conceals an Athenian dead man: Aeschylus, son of Euphorion. Of his noble courage the sacred field of Marathon can tell, and the longhaired Mede, who had good cause to know.

It may well be surprising to a modern reader that Aeschylus did not want to be remembered first and foremost as the greatest tragic poet of his day, but rather as a simple, brave Athenian soldier. The pivotal battle at Salamis, at which Aeschylus also most probably fought, ended Persian hopes for the conquest of Greece. In full view of Darius’ successor Xerxes, the Athenian fleet destroyed the Persians, thus essentially ending the Persian threat. In 472 BC Aeschylus would mount his historical drama about the battle of Salamis and its aftermath, Persians.⁵

War’s presence in the surviving works of Aeschylus reflects the realities of his age and his personal experience. Aeschylus was well aware of the more mundane, even seedier, aspects of conflict, as shown in the Herald’s reports in Agamemnon (551-82) of the Greek army’s decade of suffering. He was also aware, again as is shown throughout Agamemnon, of the terrible price paid by individuals for interstate conflict, and of the fact that motives for war are often questionable. Yet he had also seen his city win great battles repeatedly and experienced their glory and the spoils of victory; hence, at the close of Eumenides, the goddess Athena, in words that often startle and annoy modern readers, seems to be a great cheerleader for the future wars that Athens will wage (864-65, 913-15).

Domestic tyranny came to an end in 508 and Persian invasion was over by 479 BC, but they never lost their grip on the Athenian, and Aeschylean, imagination during the succeeding decades. In the Athenian theatre Persians become ‘the barbarian’, the repository of all that is feared and uncivilized.⁶ As late as 422 BC, Aristophanes’ comic masterpiece Wasps portrayed a risible degree of paranoia about tyranny, showing how deeply fearful popular consciousness remained of its return.⁷ The twin fears of Persia and tyranny actively shaped Aeschylus’ Oresteia in 458 BC. Troy, located on the northwest coast of Asia Minor, falls as the trilogy opens, and seems assimilated to Persia, especially in the portrait of Agamemnon who, on his return, acts like a debauched autocratic ruler who has gone native during his decade in Troy/Persia. Following his death, Libation Bearers represents the rule of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in Argos as a tyranny that Orestes overthrows. Eumenides then glances at recent Athenian battles near Troy (397-402) and engagements with Persian forces in Libya (289-96), and its core, the trial of Orestes, seems to have something to do with current concerns about further protecting Athenian democracy. The location of Orestes’ trial, the Areopagus (‘the hill of Ares’) becomes (685-90) the camp from which the tribe of warrior women, the Amazons, launched their attack on Theseus and Athens; this allusion would doubtless have been designed to trigger Athenian memory that the Persians also used the Areopagus as a base to attack the Acropolis, especially since Amazons were conceptually linked with Persians in Athenian thought.⁸ Some time in the decade after the Oresteia’s production and the death of Aeschylus, during the absolute height of Athenian imperial power, Pericles, the great Athenian politician and general, would build adjacent to the Theatre of Dionysus an enclosed music hall, his Odeion, whose pyramidal roof imitated that of a Persian tent. The environs of the Theatre of Dionysus, the artistic home of Aeschylus, thus became part of the commemoration of the Athenian defeat of Xerxes.⁹ As Aristophanes’ Frogs shows, Aeschylean tragedy itself will, at the end of the fifth century, late in the Peloponnesian War, come to signify the Athens that was able to bring down the greatest power the world had known.

The career of Aeschylus

Aeschylus, like his successors Sophocles and Euripides, was a prolific dramatist, composing between 82 and 90 individual plays. A catalogue transmitted by several medieval manuscripts of the seven surviving plays list 73 titles, but at least nine more were known to ancient scholars. The Suda, an encyclopaedia of antiquity from the Byzantine era, credits him with 90. Since Athenian playwrights did not produce their dramas individually, but in groups of four at the City Dionysia, Aeschylus must have competed there roughly 22 times. He probably made his debut in 499/98 (or 496) and won his first victory in 484, but his earliest surviving tragedy, Persians, dates from 472, when he was a mature artist in his early 50s. Of his 82 or 90 plays, only seven survive (or six, if, as most now believe, Prometheus Bound was either only in part by Aeschylus or wholly by another, now anonymous poet); aside from Prometheus Bound, we have the three dramas of the Oresteia, Persians, Suppliants, and Seven against Thebes.¹⁰

Save for Persians, all of the surviving works attributed to Aeschylus are believed to have been parts of tetralogies, four plays performed in sequence on the same programme and related in plot.¹¹ Each poet who competed in the City Dionysia presented not just three tragedies, but also a satyr play, a comic burlesque that is generally believed to have lampooned the preceding more serious trio. Aeschylus was renowned for his satyr plays. The Oresteia is commonly known as a trilogy because its satyr play, Proteus, has been lost. Proteus depicted the efforts of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus in Egypt to secure information from the shape-shifting sea god Proteus, an episode found in Homer’s Odyssey (4.351-75).¹² Aeschylus, who may have invented the tetralogic form, composed tetralogies at least ten of the 22 times he competed. This seems to have been his preferred mode of composition, since it afforded him the large canvas on which he could depict his great themes of justice, societal change and the evolution of the kosmos.¹³ The loss of the plays that accompanied Suppliants, Seven against Thebes and Prometheus Bound certainly cripples our ability to understand their survivors.

The success of Aeschylus both at home and abroad was considerable. Ancient testimonials report that he had either 13 or 28 victories; the latter total must include posthumous victories, but the run of 13 victories in 22 tries is a remarkable achievement in itself. His fame and curiosity about the world brought him at least twice to Sicily, the western edge of the Greek world, which, while it lacked the political ferment of Athenian democracy, was still a worthy cultural rival to Aeschylus’ home.

Some time between 472 and 468 Aeschylus was invited to the court of Hieron I at Syracuse to revive his prize-winning Persae, and, in honour of the new city of Aetna, which Hieron had built at the volcano’s foot, Aeschylus produced his Aetnaetae or The Women of Aetna (now lost). Sicily and Hieron’s court were during this decade a centre of learning and literature, frequented by leading philosophers (Xenophanes and Empedocles), and poets (Aeschylus’ colleague the early dramatist Phrynicus, Simonides and perhaps Pindar). After this invigorating experience Aeschylus returned to Athens, and found himself in 468 defeated by Sophocles, then only 28 years old and making his debut. Plutarch’s Life of Cimon (8) tells a story (which, again, may or may not be true) that the audience argued so bitterly about this competition that Cimon and several other generals were called upon to adjudicate, replacing the chosen judges. Cimon, we shall see, figures in the political background of Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Plutarch goes on to say that an annoyed Aeschylus then left Athens for Sicily forever, which, of course, would have made the Oresteia’s production ten years later somewhat difficult. Sometime after his victory with the Oresteia and the fall of the Sicilian tyrants, Aeschylus returned to Sicily and died at Gela in 456.

The evidence suggests not an angry aging artist, but an Aeschylus reinvigorated by his Sicilian experience and the challenge from the younger Sophocles. From the decade following his defeat by Sophocles, we retain five of his plays, all of them victorious. From the years between the production of Persians in 472 and his death in 456, we know of 24 plays composed by Aeschylus, who was also quick to adapt innovations by Sophocles and others. Aristotle tells us that Sophocles introduced the third actor and scenery (Poetics 1449a19). It is not clear from Aristotle’s skeletal comments whether ‘scenery’ means the use of the small building at the back of the acting area (skênê) or simply the painting of it. As we shall see in the next chapter, Aeschylus either instituted the skênê for the Oresteia, or took it over from a contemporary and quickly made it his own from the Oresteia’s opening lines. It is generally believed that Sophocles began to use a third actor only shortly before the Oresteia’s production, since Aeschylus deploys him so sparingly in its first two plays, though to great effect.¹⁴ In Eumenides, Aeschylus clearly commands the use of three speaking actors, although during the trial Apollo, Orestes and Athena tend each to address mainly the chorus and jury and not the other two actors.

Aeschylus thus intensifies his work late in life, in the context of intellectual and cultural ferment. His decision to return to Sicily shows a man eager for new experiences and knowledge, working at the peak of his powers until the unexpected end, whether it came as a result of an eagle and a turtle, or something more dignified.

Aeschylus’ successful career even extended beyond his natural life. So great was his reputation that his works received the unique privilege of new productions in dramatic competitions after his death. His two sons, Euphorion and Euaeon, became poets in their own right after their father’s death, and the former is said to have won four victories with his father’s work. His nephew Philocles beat the Sophoclean programme that included Oedipus Tyrannus and founded a theatrical dynasty that endured for a century. Aristophanes’ comedy, Frogs, which dates from the end of the fifth century, ended with the god Dionysus returning Aeschylus from the Underworld to Athens to save the city through h...