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The Problem of the Eumenides of Aeschylus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

R. W. Livingstone
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Extract

In the play of Aeschylus the problem before the first jury of the Areopagus was this. A man kills his mother at the order of a god, because she killed his father. Can he be held guilty for an act which racial custom demanded and a god sanctioned? And yet, shall matricide go unpunished, or can that man claim to escape from the Erinyes, whose right and duty to avenge a mother is no less certain than a son's right and duty to avenge his father? The jury could not make up their minds: their votes were equally divided. It is hardly easier for us to give a clear answer to the problem which puzzled those Athenians; and we have a further problem which they were spared—what did Aeschylus think? on what grounds did he acquit Orestes? what did he mean by his solution?

Editors and critics have answered these questions differently. Sidgwick holds that in the Eumenides ‘the stage is lifted from earth to heaven: it is the powers of light, Apollo and Athena, who are active to protect the morally innocent against the powers of darkness, the Erinyes and the shade of Clytaemnestra, who persecute the technically guilty. The lower view, that guilt lies in the deed, is embodied in the pursuing Furies, and here conflicts with the higher view that the innocent heart must be saved…. The gods of light fight with the gods of darkness, and overcome.’ Verrall's explanation is allied to this but more refined. He sees in the play the conflict of two Rights—of justice absolute and inexorable with the relative justice of a civic community—of the lex talionis with equity; and he sees in the reconcilement of the Eumenides a mysterious identification of Vengeance and Grace.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , 1925 , pp. 120 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1925

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References

1 794–5. Here and elsewhere I quote from Sidgwiek's text.

2 85 f.

3 Dr. Cysarcius in Tristram Shandy maintains a somewhat similar view.

4 735 f.

5 Cambridge Praelections, pp. 84–85, 90.

6 The play would be a finer work of art if Aeschylus had adopted the legend which Verrall argues was the original one, and had made the disappointed fiends return by a chasm in the earth to their infernal home (cf. Eur. El., 1270).

7

8

9 I quote in extenso the first of these passages. Let the reader suppose himself to have no clue to the meaning of these lines, and to know only that they contain a plea either for the Areopagus or for the functions of the Erinyes. Then let him read them and consider to which they seem most appropriate. He will, I believe (if he ignores line 512), give his vote to the first of these alternatives.

(512) |.

10 D V. Solonis, 8, 19.

11

12

The application of these words to the contemporary situation is obvious. But what meaning can they have in the play? Why should the Erinyes be supposed likely to go to ‘a foreign country’ And why in any circumstances should they—detached and impartial deities whose business is punishment, not love, least of all —be likely to love Athens?

13 Thus 796–797 may refer to a contemporary inquiry from Delphi.

14 It may be argued that if the Areopagus lost its powers in 462 B.C., allusions to it in a play acted three and a half years later would fall flat. The conclusive answer to this objection is that allusions to it are present in any case. And naturally. The ground-swell of political revolution long outlasts the original storm. In our own nation, so calm, so. callous in accepting accomplished facts, the agitations that led to the Reform Bill disturbed, if they did not convulse, England for many years after 1832. And the Athenian was not calm and compromising, but emotional and intransigent. Indeed the opening of the archonship to the Zeugitae, which closes the first phase of fifth-century democratic reform, was carried in the very year of the Oresteia.