Oresteia
The trilogy
Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides by Aeschylus, translated by Gilbert Murray
A brief interlude on fate and justice. In theory, people like justice, but of course they want there to be no unpleasantness about it. And they want to get away with all the things they do. Universal justice is universal surveillance, too, which by and large people do not want. They want other people to face justice, but not necessarily they. The mills of god, for instance (the mills that grind very finely indeed), if the metaphor were real, would be for many a terrifying concept — never getting away with anything, no matter how trivial. Hence some, indeed most, people do not wish to think about it. Just in case it might be true.
In the furies that pursue Orestes, we have the most vivid portrayal of a kind of justice: relentless, unsleeping, violent, savagely eager. Years earlier, in the bluntness and delight of Clytemnestra, once she has murdered her husband Agamemnon, we have justice of a kind. She has killed her husband for the crime of sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, to the gods, to undo a wrong he did to Artemis.
Yes, Clytemnestra’s crime was murder, treacherously conceived and done. But it was also vengeance for a real crime our sources never for a moment deny. We are meant to feel, as Clytemnestra does when she hears of her husband’s arrival — the victor of the great war for Troy — a tension, a vibration. I know what elemental justice would imply has to be done, of course. But I do not know if I should do it.
The arrival of the princess Cassandra, a clairvoyant, only makes Clytemnestra’s job harder.
She will see the future, this woman. She might foil the plan. I must, of course, kill her too, and hope that either her sight fails her or that she goes willingly to a bloody death she has foreseen.
It must be justice if such a crime can be done: crime to avenge another crime — but Agamemnon’s own crime was done to please and propitiate the gods. And after all — is not pleasing and propitiating the gods the goal of all mortals bound to earth?
Clytemnestra succeeds. Agamemnon is killed. What Clytemnestra can then do, with her new husband Aegisthus, is apparently to rule Mycenae. But blood will have blood, and only some years later, Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, will arrive to begin his own search for vengeance and justice. He will kill Aegisthus for the murder and supplanting of his father; he will hesitate before killing his mother. It seems to impious, too cruel. But he will be urged on. Does she not, herself, deserve justice for the killing and the betrayal she has done?
Orestes will be pursued by the Furies for what he did — the inevitable consequence of following death with death in mechanistic sequence.
The plays of other tragedians, for instance Euripides, are grimmer and more personal than these. Aeschylus is less interested in the terror of fate, the inevitability of tragedy in every life — at least in these plays — than he is about more impersonal, abstract things. The trial of Orestes, at the end of The Eumenides, is almost a lesson in basic law. Orestes is not to face death as justice. There will be trials from now on, on this style, the goddess says. And what verdicts they produce, if honest, will have the strength of the gods behind them.
Gilbert Murray translates in an interesting way. He includes many notes, some of them justifying his particular quirks of interpretation and defending them from other possibilities. At other times, he almost confesses. The plays, they did not survive in manuscript sources with the characters confidently named. We never got stage directions left down to us. Forgive all, forgive it. Murray’s style is oracular. He does not permit simple sayings to enter into his metres, which are rather tight and possibly a little forbidding. His notes often have enjoyable tangents which discuss related ideas: for example, the chants of victory or grief which the chorus might have taken from real life; the nature of Athenian stage decoration. When and if it might be reasonable for a character to go through a door or not.
The deal between the Furies, renamed the Kindly Ones, and mankind — brokered by the goddess — appears to produce a kind of contract between man and the supernatural. Perhaps it’s akin to the covenant made by the god of the Old Testament with Noah on behalf of all mankind. If you do as I say, I will not destroy you, and justice shall be done, according to my rules. Man has, of course, no option save extinction but to accept. Such is life.