Oresteia #

In 458 B.C., Aeschylus produced the Oresteia, the greatest tragic drama in human history. It is a window into the evolution of Athenian justice, the principles underlying its law, and the threats to justice inherent in human passions. The play is a transcendental plea. For democratic justice. The third part of the trilogy its final act portrays a courtroom trial in which the mental state of the defendant is central with all the elements of what today we call legal insanity.

The Oresteia, immortalized and carried the message of justice through millennia. This powerful drama kept alive the idea of humanistic justice, through the eclipse of the Roman Empire and submersion in the Dark Ages, through the Renaissance when the classics resurfaced, to the British Isles, and to our courtrooms. The Oresteia became the vital voice of Solon’s justice that enabled it to survive. Isaac Ray Corner, A history of justice: origins of law and psychiatry, Walter A. Bordenn

The story begins with the mythical explanation of the Trojan War. Eris, the Greek goddess of strife (the Roman Discordia), uninvited to the Marriage celebrations of Thetis and Peleus, crashed it regardless and cunningly dropped a golden apple with the inscription “to the fairest” into a feast, inciting three goddesses—Hera, Athena and Aphrodite—to bicker over who deserved it. Zeus knew better than to judge the contest and passed it onto Paris, a son of Priam of Troy, herding sheep in Greece, is bribed by 3 contending goddesses, granting the apple to Athene, who promised the most beautiful woman in the world would fall in love with him, thus launching the ten-year Trojan War, when Helen, wife of Menalaus does just this.

As all the Greek kings had a compact to ensure Helen’s return if abducted, Menalaus requested his bother Agamemnon to marshal a force. Homer’s epic, The Iliad opens as Agamemnon, has gathered a flotilla at Aulis, leading to Helen’s epitaph – a face that launched a thousand ships. The gods (Diana) however demanded a sacrifice of a virgin before the winds would allow the fleet to sail.

To demonstrate the legitimacy of his supremacy, Agamemnon calls for his youngest daughter, Iphigenia on the pretext of her marrying Achilles. Unsuspectingly Clytemnestra complies.

When Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia as an offering for good sailing conditions to Troy, Clytemnestra is enraged and spends the next ten years brooding her revenge. “Blood will have blood”.

After other disputes over concubines, Agamemnon returns home after ten years with his booty, Cassandra, from the Trojans. Clytemnestra welcomes him home with libations and offers him a soothing bath where she brutally and bloodily stabs him.

Orestes is tormented by the Erinyes, or Furies, deities that avenge patricide and matricide. He, at the instigation of his sister Electra and the god Apollo, has killed their mother Clytemnestra, who had killed their father, King Agamemnon, who had killed his daughter and Orestes’s sister, Iphigenia. Orestes finds a refuge and a solace at the new temple of Apollo in Delphi, and the god, unable to deliver him from the Erinyes’ unappeasable wrath, sends him along to Athens under the protection of Hermes, while he casts a drowsy spell upon the pursuing Erinyes in order to delay them.

In Athens, Athene, the goddess of Wisdom attempts to cauterise the relentless cycle of revenge. She does so by summoning an impartial jury of twelve Athenian citizens to hear the reasons of the case for and against Orestes. When the jury ends in a tie, Athens casts the deciding vote for compassion and mercy and healing rather than continued violence.

To Aeschylus, divine justice uses human motives to carry out its decrees. Chief among these motives is the desire for vengeance, which was basic to the ancient Greek scheme of values. In the one complete extant trilogy, the Oresteia, this notion of vengeance or retaliation is dominant. Retaliation is a motive of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Orestes. But significantly, the chain of retaliatory murder that pursues Agamemnon and his family ends not by a perfect balance of blood guilt, not by a further perpetuation of violence, but rather through reconciliation and the rule of law as established by Athena and the Athenian courts of justice.

Revenge is readily characterised as a failure of reason. But that’s not quite true. It is, in fact, a failure to hear reason. Today’s political debate consists of lobbing hand-grenades at each other’s entrenched positions.

With rising geopolitical instability, the value of reason couldn’t be higher. Yet we find ourselves in a vacuum of rhetoric where, according to Scott Morrison, a “miracle” is our best hope and being a “quiet Australian” the noblest virtue. Rendering Australians as mute devotees is a dangerous abandonment of the engaged lineage of political dialogue that figures such as Freudenberg worked so hard to enshrine.

Trump’s language and personal attacks also militate against reasoned debate.

The Erinyes become transformed into the Eumenides - the kindly ones and Justice purges crimes to absolution.

This breaks the endless cycle of violence ushering a new age of calm dispassionate Justice.

The Father of Drama: #

Aeschylus wrote approximately 90 plays, including satyr plays as well as tragedies; of these, about 80 titles are known. Only seven tragedies have survived entire.

Aeschylus’ influence on the development of tragedy was fundamental. Previous to him, Greek drama was limited to one actor (who became known as the protagonist, meaning first actor, once others were added) and a chorus engaged in a largely static recitation. (The chorus was a group of actors who responded to and commented on the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation.) The actor could assume different roles by changing masks and costumes, but he was limited to engaging in dialogue only with the chorus. By adding a second actor (the deuteragonist, or second actor) with whom the first could converse, Aeschylus vastly increased the drama’s possibilities for dialogue and dramatic tension and allowed more variety and freedom in plot construction.

Although the dominance of the chorus in early tragedy is ultimately only hypothesis, it is probably true that, as Aristotle says in his Poetics, Aeschylus “reduced the chorus’ role and made the plot the leading actor.” Aeschylus was an innovator in other ways as well. He made good use of stage settings and stage machinery, and some of his works were noted for their spectacular scenic effects. He also designed costumes, trained his choruses in their songs and dances, and probably acted in most of his own plays, this being the usual practice among Greek dramatists.

But Aeschylus’ formal innovations account for only part of his achievement. His plays are of lasting literary value in their majestic and compelling lyrical language, in the intricate architecture of their plots, and in the universal themes which they explore so honestly. Aeschylus’ language in both dialogue and choral lyric is marked by force, majesty, and emotional intensity. He makes bold use of compound epithets, metaphors, and figurative turns of speech, but this rich language is firmly harnessed to the dramatic action rather than used as mere decoration. It is characteristic of Aeschylus to sustain an image or group of images throughout a play; the ship of state in Seven Against Thebes, the birds of prey in Suppliants, the snare in Agamemnon.

More generally, Aeschylus deploys throughout a play or trilogy of plays several leading motifs that are often associated with a particular word or group of words. In the Oresteia, for example, such themes as wrath, mastery, persuasion, and the contrasts of light and darkness, of dirge and triumphal song, run throughout the trilogy. This sort of dramatic orchestration as applied to careful plot construction enabled Aeschylus to give Greek drama a more truly artistic and intellectual form.

Aeschylean tragedy deals with the plights, decisions, and fates of individuals with whom the destiny of the community or state is closely bound up; in turn, both individual and community stand in close relation to the gods. Personal, social, and religious issues are thus integrated, as they still were in the Greek civilization of the poet’s time.

Theodicy (i.e., the justifying of the gods’ ways to men) was in some sense the concern of Aeschylus, though it might be truer to say that he aimed through dramatic conflict to throw light on the nature of divine justice. Aeschylus and his Greek contemporaries believed that the gods begrudged human greatness and sent infatuation on a man at the height of his success, thus bringing him to disaster. Man’s infatuated act was frequently one of impiety or pride (hubris), for which his downfall could be seen as a just punishment. In this scheme of things, divine jealousy and eternal justice formed the common fabric of a moral order of which Zeus, supreme among the gods, was the guardian.

But the unjust are not always punished in their lifetime; it is upon their descendants that justice may fall. It was this tradition of belief in a just Zeus and in hereditary guilt that Aeschylus received, and which is evinced in many of his plays. The simplest illustration of this is in Persians, in which Xerxes and his invading Persians are punished for their own offenses. But in a play such as Agamemnon, the issues of just punishment and moral responsibility, of human innocence and guilt, of individual freedom versus evil heredity and divine compulsion are more complex and less easily disentangled, thus presenting contradictions which still baffle the human intellect.

Finally, to Aeschylus, divine justice uses human motives to carry out its decrees. Chief among these motives is the desire for vengeance, which was basic to the ancient Greek scheme of values. In the one complete extant trilogy, the Oresteia, this notion of vengeance or retaliation is dominant. Retaliation is a motive of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Orestes. But significantly, the chain of retaliatory murder that pursues Agamemnon and his family ends not by a perfect balance of blood guilt, not by a further perpetuation of violence, but rather through reconciliation and the rule of law as established by Athena and the Athenian courts of justice.

Aeschylus is almost unequaled in writing tragedy that, for all its power of depicting evil and the fear and consequences of evil, ends, as in the Oresteia, in joy and reconciliation. Living at a time when the Greek people still truly felt themselves surrounded by the gods, Aeschylus nevertheless had a capacity for detached and general thought, which was typically Greek and which enabled him to treat the fundamental problem of evil with singular honesty and success.