The Oresteia of Aeschylus

Pointing to the FURIES.

these obscenities! - I’ve caught them, beaten them down with sleep. They disgust me. These grey, ancient children never touched by god, man or beast - the eternal virgins. Born for destruction only, the dark pit, they range the bowels of Earth, the world of death, loathed by men and the gods who hold Olympus.

Where will it end? -
where will it sink to sleep and rest,
this murderous hate, this Fury?

ORESTES:
No dreams, these torments, not to me, they’re clear, real - the hounds of mother’s hate.

CHORUS:
No man can go through life and reach the end unharmed. Aye, trouble is now, and trouble still to come.

There is no refuge, none to take you in.
A pariah, reviled, at long last you die,
withered in the grip of all this dying.

The truth still holds while Zeus still holds the throne:
the one who acts must suffer -
that is law. Who can tear from the veins
the bad seed, the curse? The race is welded to its ruin.

Oh all through the will of Zeus,
the cause of all, the one who works it all.
What comes to birth that is not Zeus?
Our lives are pain, what part not come from god?

LEADER:
You’re brave, believe me, full of gallant heart.

CASSANDRA:
Only the wretched go with praise like that.

But if you see it coming, clearly - how can you go to your own death, like a beast to the altar driven on by god, and hold your head so high?

LEADER:
And Apollo’s anger never touched you? - is it possible?

CASSANDRA:
Once I betrayed him I could never be believed.

CASSANDRA:
The nightingale - O for a song, a fate like hers!
The gods gave her a life of ease, swathed her in wings,
no tears, no wailing. The knife waits for me.
They’ll splay me on the iron’s double edge.

LEADER AND CHORUS:
Why? - what god hurls you on, stroke on stroke
to the long dying fall?
Why the horror clashing through your music,
terror struck to song? -
why the anguish, the wild dance?
Where do your words of god and grief begin?

CASSANDRA:
Oh no, what horror, what new plot,
new agony this? -
it’s growing, massing, deep in the house,
a plot, a monstrous - thing
to crush the loved ones, no,
there is no cure, and rescue’s far away and -

CASSANDRA:
God of the long road, Apollo Apollo my destroyer- you destroy me once, destroy me twice -

LEADER:
She’s about to sense her own ordeal, I think. Slave that she is, the god lives on inside her.

CASSANDRA:
God of the iron marches, Apollo Apollo my destroyer- where, where have you led me now? what house -

Why cry to Apollo? He’s not the god to call with sounds of mourning. [...]

Again, it’s a bad omen. She cries for the god who wants no part of grief.

- only the gods deserve the pomps of honour and the stiff brocades of fame. To walk on them . . . I am human, and it makes my pulses stir with dread.

As Aeschylus says in a famous fragment, ‘god plants an aitia [responsibility] in a man when he wants to destroy a house entirely; nevertheless a man must not be reckless with his words.’ Agamemnon and his gods are metaitioi, co-responsible, yet there is something in this man that may rival his gods for murderous self-righteousness. It is his Atê, his frenzy and his ruin, his crime and punishment in one - ‘the madness of doom’ in Werner Jaeger’s phrase, and Agamemnon’s ruling spirit. He not only conspires with the storm that strikes the fleets, he excels it with the violence of the curse.

Before the hymn Agamemnon’s murder of Iphigeneia seemed ordained, but the hymn implicitly evokes his power of choice. He is torn for a moment - how to choose between child-murder and dereliction of duty? ‘Pain both ways and what is worse?’ It is the tragic choice of evils. And it may be predetermined supernaturally by the gods and genetically by Agamemnon’s nature - being his father’s son, he is bound to choose the worst.

‘Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end.’ The ominous refrain beats drum-like through the opening stanzas. What glory can be wrung from so much grief?

Aeschylus presents our lives not only as a painful series of recognitions but as an initiation into stronger states of consciousness. Perhaps most great tragedy conveys this double thrust of shattering and confirmation. Tragedy is a challenge and a trap, a vehicle for our character and our fate. It was Apollo, as Oedipus tells his friends, who multiplied his pains, ‘but the hand that struck my eyes was mine and mine alone’...

...his tragic spirit of suffering and regeneration.

The ecstasy of Dionysus became ennobling. He became Olympian; he shared Apollo’s shrine at Delphi. The suffering god was transformed into a saviour, but not in the way of later martyrs who reject this life. Dying into life, into more coherent, vibrant forms of life was the way of Dionysus and his people.

Through Dionysus, in other words, men might be restored, not by escaping their nature but by embracing it, not by expiating their guilt but by exercising it constructively. Here was a father, an authority who challenged us to challenge him. Only by acting out our fantasies against him - by ritualistically dismembering his body and partaking of his strength - could we become ourselves, human, seasoned, strong.