Aeschylus: ‘The Eumenides’

 The last play in the trilogy has a great opening scene. The Pythia, the priestess who speaks Apollo’s oracles, is giving the audience a calm — almost dull — lecture on the history of the oracle and is telling how she spends her day when she opens the temple doors, looks inside and turns back, terrified.

She’s seen Orestes, smeared with blood from the purification rites of the god, surrounded by sleeping Furies, who are so horrible they’re hard to describe. They are kind of like gorgons, the Pythia says, “and they snore with breath that drives one back.”

Apollo’s power has weakened them and put them into a deep sleep. But the ghost of Clytemnestra wakes the sleeping Furies and harangues them, telling them to get back to the job of hounding Orestes, her son and killer, to his grave.

Apollo is revolted by the Furies. He drives them out of the temple, threatening to shoot his bow, using flying snakes instead of arrows.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto points out that dike, the Greek word we usually translate as “justice,” was retributivejustice. Clytemnestra took justice by killing her husband Agamemnon, who had killed one of their daughters. Their son, Orestes, took justice by killing his mother. The Furies were determined to take justice on Orestes.

If “justice” is simply retribution or vengeance, it can never end.

Following Apollo’s counsel, Orestes flees to Athens, where Athena conducts a trial. The Furies are prosecutors. Apollo is defense counsel.

Athena picks 12 Athenian citizens as jurors. She says that if they split, she will decide for Orestes.

The Furies, goddesses of the older generation, are enraged at Athena, threatening to poison the Athenians and Attica. 

Athena lets them vent and gradually converts them to a more merciful idea of justice — one that excludes vengeance and demands judgment by an impartial court. However, Athena doesn‘t want to exclude fear entirely from social life — people should fear doing wrong.

The Furies, transformed into the Kindly Ones, still have a role. Where they were focused on strife among kin, now they are to be concerned with strife within the state.

Athena says working with human beings is a bit like tending a garden — it’s as much about encouraging good growth and good behavior as in discouraging the bad.

Among the wonders of The Eumenides are these lines, spoken by Athena:

 

No anarchy, no rule of a single master. Thus

I advise my citizens to govern and to grace,

and not to cast fear utterly from your city. What

man who fears nothing at all is every righteous?

 

Aeschylus likes that theme and repeats it. Between anarchy and a tyrant is some kind of reasonable government in which good citizens fear to wrong each other.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Eumenides is on pp. 90-99. 

The Eumenides, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Aeschylus I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 133-171. The quotation is on p. 160.