The Oresteia — themes & analysis

The Oresteia opens in the middle of a story that began two generations before the first scene. Tantalus fed his son to the gods. The gods cursed the line. Pelops won his bride by treachery and was cursed again by the man who helped him. Pelops's son Atreus killed his brother Thyestes's children and served them to their father at a banquet of supposed reconciliation. Thyestes's surviving son Aegisthus grew up on the memory of that meal. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter at Aulis. By the time the watchman appears on the palace roof of Argos, the blood-debt is incalculable.

The chorus in Agamemnon meditates on this pattern in some of the densest poetry in Greek literature: the doer is doomed to suffer, the deed once done is fixed forever in time, and the stones of the house cry out for the blood that has soaked them. The curse is not magical in the simple sense — it is structural. When a wrong is done and its perpetrator escapes, someone who loves the victim carries the grievance forward. When that person takes revenge, they create another victim, and another griever, and the cycle continues without any possible termination from within the family.

Aeschylus's diagnosis is precise: the cycle cannot be broken by any further act of justice within the family, because every act of vengeance is also an act of injustice from the point of view of the person it falls on, who will in turn be avenged. The first two plays demonstrate this with the killing of Agamemnon and then the killing of Clytemnestra. Both killers are in some sense right. Both killings produce further violence. The only answer is to take the case out of the family entirely — which is what the third play does.

The Oresteia is therefore a myth about the institutional prerequisites for civilization. The family curse ends not because someone makes a morally better decision than their predecessors, but because Athena invents an institution capable of absorbing the dispute. The Areopagus court is not just a plot resolution. It is the answer to the structural problem the curse represents.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (the curse recalled — the parodos), Scene 4 (the first stasimon on doom), Scene 10 (Clytemnestra's exultation), Scene 24 (the trial ends the cycle).

The central moral difficulty of the Oresteia is that every act of violence in it is also an act of justice. Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon because he killed Iphigenia — child for child, life for life. Orestes killed Clytemnestra because she killed Agamemnon — parent for parent, obedient to Apollo's command. Each killing satisfies what Greek law called the law of the blood feud. And the chorus cannot settle, across all three plays, which killing was more justified, because neither argument can be refuted on the terms both parties share.

Clytemnestra's speech after the murder of Agamemnon is the key passage. She does not hide or minimize what she has done. She stands over the body and lays out her case: she acted in justice, not in passion; the blood she spilled answers the blood he spilled; the curse has moved through her by its own logic and she is its instrument. The chorus disagrees but cannot refute her. Her grievance is real. Her reasoning is the reasoning of the blood feud. And the blood feud, in the world of the first two plays, is the only available framework.

What the third play argues, through the institution of the jury, is that justice cannot be administered by the parties to a dispute. Clytemnestra was wronged and is therefore disqualified from judging her own case. Orestes was wronged and is disqualified from judging his. Apollo and the Furies represent competing principles and are equally partial. Only an institution standing outside all the parties — twelve Athenian citizens chosen by lot — can make a determination that both sides are obligated to accept. The determination may be wrong on the merits (the jury is tied; Athena's reasoning for her casting vote has been disputed for two and a half millennia). What matters is not that it is correct but that both sides accept its authority. That is what a legal system is.

Where to follow it: Scene 10 (Clytemnestra's defence), Scene 15 (Orestes's justification), Scene 24 (the arguments at trial), Scene 26 (Athena's decision).

The chorus of Argive elders, in the opening scene, describes Clytemnestra as a woman with the counsel of a man — and they mean it as a compliment, in the Greek way. She has held Argos for ten years while her husband has been at Troy. She has organized the beacon-relay from Troy to Argos — a chain of fires stretching across the Aegean — so that she will know the moment Troy falls. The first play's first scene, before she appears, is a watchman bewildered by her intelligence and half-afraid of what he knows.

When she does appear, she is in complete command. She announces the fall of Troy to the chorus before the herald arrives to confirm it. She greets her husband with a speech of welcome so polished and so calculated that it takes him several exchanges to detect the danger, and by then he is already walking across the purple cloth. The purple carpet scene — in which she persuades the reluctant king to tread on robes meant only for gods — is the play's fulcrum. She knows it is impious. That is the point. She wants the gods to mark what she is about to do as a counter-impiety answering his sacrifice of their daughter.

After the murder she is magnificent. She does not weep or excuse herself. She stands over the body and gives the most uncompromising defence of the blood feud in the trilogy. She is wrong in the sense that the trilogy ultimately shows the blood feud cannot resolve the situations it produces. But within the terms of the blood feud she is right. And Aeschylus never lets the audience forget that Iphigenia is real, that the sacrifice at Aulis was real, and that whatever Clytemnestra has become, she became it standing at an altar in a harbour watching her daughter die.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (the beacon speech), Scene 7 (the purple carpet), Scene 10 (after the murder), Scene 20 (her ghost wakes the Furies).

The Furies (Erinyes) predate the Olympian gods. In Hesiod they are born from the blood of the wounded Uranus when Cronus castrates him — the first violence in the world produces the first avengers. They dwell under the earth. They pursue anyone who spills the blood of a blood relation. They do not distinguish between justified and unjustified killings within the family: if a son kills a mother, whatever his reasons, they come for him. They are not a punishment. They are the mechanism of a world in which the deepest bond is the blood bond, and the deepest crime is its violation.

In the Eumenides they appear on stage as a sleeping pack around Orestes's suppliant body at Delphi, and the priestess's description of them is the most frightening passage in the trilogy. She cannot compare them to anything — not Gorgons, not Harpies. They are wingless, black, and altogether abominable. Apollo drives them away with the force of his bow. They follow Orestes to Athens and prosecute the case against him with complete conviction: he spilled his mother's blood; that is their mandate; the verdict is not in dispute.

What makes the third play so careful — and so difficult — is that Athena does not banish the Furies or prove them wrong. She reasons with them. She offers them an honoured place beneath the Areopagus, a new role as guardians of the city's prosperity and fertility, a new name: the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. What she is arguing is that their principle — the avenging of blood — is not abolished by the new institution of the court. It is incorporated into it. The court gives their principle a new, controlled form. They do not lose their power. They lose only the right to exercise it without authorisation. The procession that ends the trilogy escorts them by torchlight to their new shrine under the hill. They accept. The cycle ends.

Where to follow it: Scene 18 (the Furies appear to Orestes), Scene 19 (the Furies at Delphi), Scene 20 (the binding song), Scene 26 (Athena's persuasion).

The founding of the Areopagus court, midway through the Eumenides, is the most carefully composed moment in the trilogy. Orestes has arrived at Athens as Athena's suppliant. The Furies have followed him. Apollo has followed them. Athena faces three serious claims and two divine advocates in direct opposition. She could, as a goddess, simply rule. She refuses. The matter, she says, is too grave for any single mind, mortal or immortal, to resolve by authority alone. She summons twelve Athenian citizens and constitutes them as a court.

Her speech founding the court is the trilogy's political centrepiece. She charges the jurors not to drive fear from the city — fear here meaning the awe citizens feel before their own law — and not to corrupt their institutions either with novelty or with tyranny, but to hold to the middle course in which the city's safety lies. She names the hill: it will be called forever the hill of Ares, the Areopagus, and on it will sit the court she now founds to judge cases of homicide. The Athenian audience in 458 BCE is sitting on that hill while she says this.

The trial proceeds. The Furies prosecute: did you kill your mother? Orestes admits it. Apollo defends: by divine command. The Furies: a mother's blood outweighs a husband's. Apollo: the father is the only true parent; the mother is only the soil in which the seed grows. The votes are counted. They are tied. Athena casts the deciding vote for acquittal — on the ground, which has puzzled readers ever since, that she herself has no mother and is therefore inclined to favour the male line. Modern scholarship has argued for a century about whether her reasoning is supposed to convince anyone, and a strong case can be made that it is not meant to — that the tied vote is the structural point. Justice must be administered even when the merits cannot be resolved. The institution must work even when the arguments cannot be settled. That is the invention the trilogy is celebrating.

Where to follow it: Scene 22 (Athena announces the court), Scene 24 (the trial), Scene 25 (the vote), Scene 26 (the reconciliation).