The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies (11 page)

We see the weave most clearly in another symbol, perhaps the living, coiling extension of the nets, that dominates this play. At first the serpent is the queen who kills the warlord in her coils, but she also presses her children to conspire against her, and the serpent in her nightmare lends Orestes will to act. The meaning of his action springs from a new bond between the serpent and the nets. The bloody robes that trammelled the bodies of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, that embody Orestes’ mission and his guilt, stimulate the snaky-headed Furies in his mind. And in a sense he is doubly invested at the end, with the Furies’ swarming cloaks as well as with the trappings of Apollo, a Nessus shirt and a habit of perfection. For Orestes may prefigure a union of the warring moral orders in the
Oresteia
- he may become the fury of the justice of the gods. As he rushes out, his language and his action work together. All that he envisions leads him on.

In
The Libation Bearers
vision enlivens action, for better and for worse. The brother and the sister embrace, yet they only foreshadow the embrace between the mother and the son. The characteristic act of
Agamemnon
is a trampling; here it is an embrace of opposites that may empower each other. Separate images from the first play grow more human and promise to combine. Blended in with the serpent and the net is the image of the eagle, the ominous bird of Zeus. Here the eagle-king has been strangled by the she-snake, but his nestlings will avenge him. This conflict between the eagles and the serpent may suggest a final triumph of the Olympians over the forces of the Earth, but Aeschylus is actually moving towards their union, and Orestes is identified with both. A stranger to the trilogy might have thought Orestes would simply avenge his father by murdering his mother - masculine will suppressing feminine energy. Not at all. Orestes must embody his mother’s energy, and it will drive him from Argos and insanity to the light. In this central play the conflict between male and female has become a dialectic struggle moving towards a resolution. That is why Aeschylus makes the murder of Aegisthus insignificant but lifts the act of matricide to paramount importance. Mother and son are agonizing out their evolution, and the mutual labour of the generations is unique to Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

In later treatments of the legend it recedes, Orestes’ resoluteness slowly crumbles, and a lethal rivalry between Clytaemnestra and Electra takes the stage. As we move from Sophocles to Euripides, from a daughter who reincarnates her mother’s proud, tragic vengefulness to one who lashes her mother’s failing powers to a maddened pitch within herself, we watch the house of Atreus degenerate. The more Clytacmnestra’s maternal energies fail in the later plays, the more the act of matricide is drained of vital impact, and her Furies finally abandon their creative struggle with the gods. What Aeschylus dramatizes as the necessary roots of justice, Sophocles views with the cruel indifference of Olympus, and Euripides condemns. The legend is demythologized in a harsh, more modem light that some find realistic, others cynical and black. ‘The crisis of our lives’ becomes a private nightmare. Evolution turns to incest, to entropy. The leap across the centuries to O’Neill and Hofmannsthal and Strauss seems brief, as the ancestral house contracts into the prison of one’s pathology and one’s past. In the opera
Elektra
the suicidal energies of the daughter, mounting into the ecstatic murder of her mother, burn out in her maenadic dance of death. In
Mourning Becomes Electra
the daughter reverts to her mother’s phantom spirit and cohabits with the dead - it is the most defeatist, deterministic version of the
Oresteia
that we have. The tale of the tribe becomes a story of the tribe’s disintegration.

But in Aeschylus the act of matricide gathers a positive momentum.
The Libation Bearers
has a headlong forward thrust. Its movement is a metaphor for Orestes’ surging will; his lust for vengeance is building into justice. Dionysus is dying into life, and here his rite of spring, ultimately unlike the Anthesteria, celebrates his dying into later, ever larger forms of life. This is the traumatic springtime of our culture. The play liberates our perspective once for all. We are breaking free of the walled, claustrophobic citadel - like Mycenae, as Henry Miller saw it, ‘one of the navels of the human spirit, the place of attachment to the past and of complete severance too’. A greater rite of passage has begun; it begins in agony, but it will end on the level, lucid heights of Athens. Only after death can Clytaemnestra pass from mother to the Furies to the Eumenides. Like the serpents in the Gorgon’s hair, their serpents imply reprisal and revival, the healing power of the gods. For the serpent was also a prototype of Zeus and it soon will lend the Furies true redemptive strength. And Orestes has a final passage, too. Through the onslaught of the Furies he becomes a purgatorial hero, the scapegoat who absorbs his people’s guilt and grows into their prince, the living promise of his father’s kingdom. Orestes must suffer into Everyman, our last, best hope. The gods and the Furies may exist without him, but it is within his conscience that they live and battle; then, like actors in a drama, they will speak and make their peace.

The crux of the
Oresteia
is the fierce embrace between the mother and the son. Only they can humanize the gods; then the gods can humanize our world. He and she cannot foresee the magnificent unions still to come - they can only create their possibility. Yet the captive women cannot even see the Furies. They see Orestes’ triumph and his torment, a baffling repetition of the curse. He seemed a saviour in the third generation, like Third Saving Zeus, or was he Death? He is both; he is the prince and outlaw, humanity in ruins and perfection. But this is a vision for the chorus just emerging. The Furies will embrace him still more fiercely and, with Athena as their leader, generate the justice of the gods.

The Eumenides
turns the darkness into light. Dionysus dies and lives again. It is the harvest of the god, the season ‘barbarous and beautiful’, when the waning year is bursting with its fruits, and loss and regeneration seem the same. The
Oresteia
ends with rites of autumn. Aeschylus may recall the Thesmophoria, when the women reap and sow, singing their spells that ban and bless, that purify the present crop and reinforce the next. The final play, as some have said, is so expansive it may even recall the Mysteries of Eleusis. These enlarged the Thesmophoria into rites so guarded, so close to the soul it was heresy to reveal their secrets, yet so democratic - open to free men and slaves alike - that they became the national religion of Greece.

The Mysteries began as a harvest rite that celebrated the gift of agriculture as the fruits of the ordeal of Demeter and her daughter. Kore or Persephone was abducted to the underworld by Hades and cost her mother ‘all that pain/To seek her through the world’. In her fury Demeter loosed a blight on the earth until Zeus interceded, won the release of Kore, and reunited her with her mother. Every year, however, Kore must descend again as the bride of Death; yet as if her potency depended on her dying, she rises in the spring and bears the grain, her grateful mother’s gift. And Demeter is admitted to Olympus, the gods of the Earth and Sky unite, rejoicing in a
Theogony
that ends in harmony rather than suppression. It may be our most moving, human story of the gods, for Demeter also gave us the Mysteries that ally us with the gods in suffering and success. The Mysteries transformed the violation of Kore, the trials of Demeter and their reunion into a threefold ritual of purgation, passion play and pageant. The celebrant might see the purging and the passion as his tribulations in this life, and the final pageant, the return of Kore, as a sacred birth, and the union of the gods as a sacred marriage that renewed him and prepared him for his death.

‘Blest is he who goes beneath the earth having seen these things,’ said Pindar. ‘He knows the end of life, he knows its god-given beginning too.’ Those who decline the rites remain among the uninitiate, ‘the unpurified mob’, as Plutarch saw them ‘who trample each other underfoot herded together in thick mire and gloom’. Not the initiate - ‘met by a marvellous light, or welcomed into open country and meadows, with singing and dancing and solemn raptures of holy music and sacred revelations; there, made perfect at last, walking at large, free and absolved, the initiate worships with crowned head, arm-in-arm with the pure and undefiled’. He is the pure beholder, purged, transfixed. The Mysteries would become the apocalypse of antiquity, an intimation of immortality, but at the time of Aeschylus they celebrated the things of this world. And the experience was a trauma of terror and reverence, of darkness broken by a blaze of torches, of ritual mounting to drama, drama resolving into vision, gods and mortals wedded here and now. As the Mysteries were absorbed by Athens, they became the force, as an ancient decree described them, that led mankind from savagery to civilization. More than agriculture, human culture was the harvest gift of Athens. Through the Mysteries she bestowed it on the world.

The
Oresteia
and the Mysteries might rival each other, not only as spectacles but as ordeals, initiations into our culture. Yet the rites of aggregation in the
Oresteia
finally admit us to society, not a visionary company. Aeschylus is civic, active, dramatic. He transforms the passion of Dionysus into the tragedy and restoration of our lives, the medium through which a culture ridden by its guilt achieves its greatness. The tragic hero, Orestes, becomes a revolutionary hero of his time. Aeschylus departs from Homer’s prince, who simply kills his father’s assassins and reclaims his native city, to enlarge the later Orestes of lyric poetry, the guilty matricide who must overcome the Furies with the arrows of Apollo. And Aeschylus departs from that physical combat to create an ethical, religious combat that surrounds Orestes and his crime with even broader meaning. The fruits of this struggle may be what no poet, perhaps no legend either, had ever brought to light - a remarkable vision of wedding and rebirth. But first, as at the outset of the Mysteries, the young initiate must suffer ‘wanderings, exhausting rushing to and fro, and anxious, interminable journeys through the darkness; then, just before the consummation itself, all the terrors, shuddering, trembling, sweat and wonder’.

Driven on by the Furies, Orestes has fled to Delphi for the purges of Apollo. Everything seems purged at Delphi, especially this strife between the forces of the Earth and the Olympians. In the priestess’ morning prayer she celebrates a peaceful evolution of the oracle and its possessors, from Mother Earth to the Titans to Apollo, who can speak for Father Zeus. Her subject is ‘cultural evolution’, we might say, as it is reflected in this happy union of the gods, their march that civilized our wildness and allows us to foresee our fate. And evolution is the subject of the drama to come, but its spirit will be harsh not peaceful, and so was the history of the Delphic shrine itself. Apollo took the Mother’s oracle by force; he butchered her sacred serpent, the Python, and this atrocity brought the Olympian to power. His priestess would rather suppress that violent history, though it seems to surface when she summons the attendant spirits of the shrine: Pallas, the warrior goddess; and Dionysus, whose maenads dismembered Pentheus; and Poseidon in his turbulence; and Zeus
Teleios,
who saw to Agamemnon’s execution. Behind the serene façade of Apollo’s temple, in other words, a pantheon of violent gods may wait to shape the coming action.

The priestess no sooner enters the sanctuary to receive her prophecy than she rushes back at once, terrified, like a child by a nightmare. And all that unfolds before us now is like a strenuous dream where ghosts may walk, our guilt and our gods may loom and struggle as if at our creation. For this is a vision of the childhood of the race and of our future - ‘greater than all [the Pythia’s] embarkations past’, and far beyond her powers of expression. At the Navel of the Earth she finds Orestes and the Furies, motionless as a still life, mysterious. Orestes holds a suppliant’s branch in one hand, wreathed with a shining, pious tuft of wool, but in the other hand a bloody sword - bloody from his mother’s wounds or from Apollo’s purges, or both, since purging contaminates the purger and Apollo’s shrine is polluted either way. The Furies arc still more ambiguous. Neither Gorgons nor Harpies, they arc terrifying precisely because they arc not supernatural; they arc women of a sort, and so their transformation into Eumenides will be both more miraculous and more natural at the last. Even now they surround Orestes like a
lochos,
an ambush pressing for revenge, but a
lochos
is a bed of childbirth, too, and there may be other tics between them. Some legends say that the Navelstone is the tomb of the Python, and if so the blood on Orestes’ sword may serve to revive the blood-guilt of Apollo. The first possessors of Delphi may have risen from the dead to seek revenge. Another watch has seen another sign, another interchange of men and women, but now the gods of the Sky and forces of the Earth have joined the action. There is a light in the darkness of Apollo’s temple. Is it the dawn of civilization or the advent of a new barbarism? Gods and men together will determine its significance.

The doors open. Over Orestes and the Furies stands Apollo, the god of prophecy, purgation and the law. According to popular belief his powers are ‘external’ in a strong sense: his prophecies are fiats, his purges are ritualistic, and his laws enforce our peaceful coexistence with the gods, essentially through our skills of self-effacement and restraint. ‘Nothing in excess’ is Apollo’s creed, and he had become its hero, lucid, formal, intellectual, civilized, through his victory over all that was dark, amorphous, irrational, primitive, the Earth. But Aeschylus has spared Apollo that struggle, and Apollo’s powers, never tempered from within, may be eroded. Clearly his purges have begun to dissolve Orestes’ blood-guilt and insanity, but his purges may be superficial. He knows, or thinks he knows, these Furies for what they are - emissaries of ‘the world of death’ - so he stupifies them for a moment, only to make them livelier as Orestes’ pangs of conscience. Clearly the purges of Delphi formed a bridge from the blood vendetta to social justice (they ‘detoxified’ the murderer, preparing him for common courts of law), but because they were simply ritualistic, some believe they impeded the advance of ethics, and Aeschylus increases this impression. Apollo orders Orestes on to Athens less for a probing, moral restoration than for a kind of magic absolution of his crime. Apollo the Healer has a power of referral, the Justicer knows ‘the rules of justice’, but as Orestes may imply - in a surprising imperative - the god must learn compassion.