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Oresteia #1-3
Oresteia
The Oresteia is the only trilogy of tragedy plays to survive from Ancient Greece. Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides have established the enduring themes of Greek tragedy--the inexorable nature of Fate, the relationship between justice, revenge, and religion. In this family history, Fate and the gods decree that each generation will repeat the crimes and endure the suffering of their forebears. When Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, their son Orestes must avenge his father's death. Only Orestes' appeal to the goddess Athena saves him from his mother's Furies, breaking the bloody chain; together gods and humans inaugurate a way of just conduct that will ensure stable families and a strong community.
The Oresteia is majestic as theater and as literature, and this new translation seeks to preserve both these qualities. The introduction and notes emphasize the relationship between the scenes, ideas, and language that distinguishes this unique work.
The Oresteia is majestic as theater and as literature, and this new translation seeks to preserve both these qualities. The introduction and notes emphasize the relationship between the scenes, ideas, and language that distinguishes this unique work.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 459
About the author
Aeschylus
1,482 books1,004 followersGreek
Αισχύλος
, Esquilo in Spanish, Eschyle in French, Eschilo in Italian, Эсхил in Russian.
Aeschylus (c. 525/524 BC – c. 456 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
Only seven of Aeschylus's estimated 70 to 90 plays have survived. There is a long-standing debate regarding the authorship of one of them, Prometheus Bound, with some scholars arguing that it may be the work of his son Euphorion. Fragments from other plays have survived in quotations, and more continue to be discovered on Egyptian papyri. These fragments often give further insights into Aeschylus' work. He was likely the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy. His Oresteia is the only extant ancient example. At least one of his plays was influenced by the Persians' second invasion of Greece (480–479 BC). This work, The Persians, is one of very few classical Greek tragedies concerned with contemporary events, and the only one extant. The significance of the war with Persia was so great to Aeschylus and the Greeks that his epitaph commemorates his participation in the Greek victory at Marathon while making no mention of his success as a playwright.
Aeschylus (c. 525/524 BC – c. 456 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
Only seven of Aeschylus's estimated 70 to 90 plays have survived. There is a long-standing debate regarding the authorship of one of them, Prometheus Bound, with some scholars arguing that it may be the work of his son Euphorion. Fragments from other plays have survived in quotations, and more continue to be discovered on Egyptian papyri. These fragments often give further insights into Aeschylus' work. He was likely the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy. His Oresteia is the only extant ancient example. At least one of his plays was influenced by the Persians' second invasion of Greece (480–479 BC). This work, The Persians, is one of very few classical Greek tragedies concerned with contemporary events, and the only one extant. The significance of the war with Persia was so great to Aeschylus and the Greeks that his epitaph commemorates his participation in the Greek victory at Marathon while making no mention of his success as a playwright.
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September 2, 2024
So the boys asked the Sibyl, "What do you want?"
And the Sibyl said, "I want to die!"
Petronius, Satyricon.
The God Apollo, speaking through the mouth of the Sibyl, is decrying Rome's corruption. So here, Orestes bewails his father, the King's sin. But he quickly learns you can't fight Sin with sin.
Orestes was so ME, in the Seventies. Calamity followed calamity for me, as for him. The Eumenides that Fate followed up with kept me "pinned and wriggling" on a Procrustean bed for fifty long years afterward.
That Agenbite of Inwit, in my seventies, has nearly abated, down to a faint feeling of being ill at ease. I had to sacrifice fun to find love.
The Oresteia is no fun either. Neither is life - excepting, for some, their toys, and for a few, the enduring legacy of love in their lives.
And Orestes has sinned and must do penance. As must we all.
My Prof in that Freshman Year at uni was the eminently and affably unassuming Head of the tiny Classics Department. Pity, that. Ancient Lit has much to tell us if we only had the ears to hear it.
Things about the tragedy of life, for example.
If you're not acquainted with tragedy in your life you're cruising for a bruising! Sooner or later. Tragedy breeds humility, another thing we don't believe in any more. Alas again.
So Orestes learns humility the hard way.
The hard way, unfortunately, for many of us who'd never learn about tragedy any other way, is also the best way.
And your misfortune will finally turn to love, as mine did.
There ARE Happy Endings.
But to get there, like Goldilocks, we must first go through a Dark, Evil Forest:
A LONG, LONG, LONG way from our loving Grandmother's House.
And the Sibyl said, "I want to die!"
Petronius, Satyricon.
The God Apollo, speaking through the mouth of the Sibyl, is decrying Rome's corruption. So here, Orestes bewails his father, the King's sin. But he quickly learns you can't fight Sin with sin.
Orestes was so ME, in the Seventies. Calamity followed calamity for me, as for him. The Eumenides that Fate followed up with kept me "pinned and wriggling" on a Procrustean bed for fifty long years afterward.
That Agenbite of Inwit, in my seventies, has nearly abated, down to a faint feeling of being ill at ease. I had to sacrifice fun to find love.
The Oresteia is no fun either. Neither is life - excepting, for some, their toys, and for a few, the enduring legacy of love in their lives.
And Orestes has sinned and must do penance. As must we all.
My Prof in that Freshman Year at uni was the eminently and affably unassuming Head of the tiny Classics Department. Pity, that. Ancient Lit has much to tell us if we only had the ears to hear it.
Things about the tragedy of life, for example.
If you're not acquainted with tragedy in your life you're cruising for a bruising! Sooner or later. Tragedy breeds humility, another thing we don't believe in any more. Alas again.
So Orestes learns humility the hard way.
The hard way, unfortunately, for many of us who'd never learn about tragedy any other way, is also the best way.
And your misfortune will finally turn to love, as mine did.
There ARE Happy Endings.
But to get there, like Goldilocks, we must first go through a Dark, Evil Forest:
A LONG, LONG, LONG way from our loving Grandmother's House.
April 21, 2019
Seeing the Oresteia on stage is an overwhelming experience to say the least.
Reading and discussing the drama at university felt like going through the Disney version of it by comparison. Hearing the screams, seeing the blood and madness, following real people on their anxious road down to hellish destruction while they stare at you - the audience - with blind eyes - that is almost more than one can bear, even if one is familiar with the intertwined plays beforehand.
Violence leads to more violence in a brutal chain reaction. That is a curse that the family of Atreus experiences in three consecutive steps. Agamemnon has to choose between political and military success and his "love" for his daughter Iphigenia. He chooses to be a "leader" over being a human, so he sacrifices his daughter on the way to Troy, and thus kicks off the action thriller. Klytamnestra, his wife, follows the call of revenge, as does Orestes, the son. Electra, on the sidelines, cheers on her brother when he kills his mother, and thus participates in the "honour" killings.
Spirals of violence are not unusual in the history of mankind, but unluckily, we don't possess the Greek dramatic device of a deus ex machina to set the score straight and suggest a solution that leads to better understanding and rule of law. Or could one see the international organisations formed after the Second World War, like the UNO or later the EU, as such attempts at reining in the blood lust of humiliated and hurt humanity?
Of eternal contemporary relevance, the Oresteia is hard to stomach but important to consider!
Must read - a classic even after two and a half millennia!
Reading and discussing the drama at university felt like going through the Disney version of it by comparison. Hearing the screams, seeing the blood and madness, following real people on their anxious road down to hellish destruction while they stare at you - the audience - with blind eyes - that is almost more than one can bear, even if one is familiar with the intertwined plays beforehand.
Violence leads to more violence in a brutal chain reaction. That is a curse that the family of Atreus experiences in three consecutive steps. Agamemnon has to choose between political and military success and his "love" for his daughter Iphigenia. He chooses to be a "leader" over being a human, so he sacrifices his daughter on the way to Troy, and thus kicks off the action thriller. Klytamnestra, his wife, follows the call of revenge, as does Orestes, the son. Electra, on the sidelines, cheers on her brother when he kills his mother, and thus participates in the "honour" killings.
Spirals of violence are not unusual in the history of mankind, but unluckily, we don't possess the Greek dramatic device of a deus ex machina to set the score straight and suggest a solution that leads to better understanding and rule of law. Or could one see the international organisations formed after the Second World War, like the UNO or later the EU, as such attempts at reining in the blood lust of humiliated and hurt humanity?
Of eternal contemporary relevance, the Oresteia is hard to stomach but important to consider!
Must read - a classic even after two and a half millennia!
Read
June 23, 2015
Let good prevail ! So be it ! Yet what is good ? And who is God?
As many deeply conservative societies have discovered time and time again - societies in which there is only one right order and this order is warranted by the highest authorities recognized by the society - when change comes, and come it always must,(*) not only do those in power tumble, but the authority of the gods/priests, ancestors, laws, whatever the highest authorities happen to be in that society, comes into question. New myths, new gods/priests, new stories must be told to justify and establish, reassure and mollify the people whose ideological or religious supports have been pulled out from beneath them. In the city of Athens during the Golden Age, this was done in the agora - the marketplace - and in the theaters.
In his lifetime Aeschylus (ca. 525 - 456 BCE) witnessed the invasion of Attica by huge Persian armies, the bold abandonment of the fortified city of Athens and withdrawal, twice, of the Athenian people behind the wooden walls of the Athenian navy, and the multiple defeats of the Persians and their allies (including other Greeks) by the hugely outnumbered Athenians and their Greek allies.(**) He also witnessed the political transition from tyranny to isonomy to democracy in Athens and the concurrent growth of Athens from just another small, unimportant Greek city-state to major power. He himself contributed greatly to the transition of Greek tragedy from a religiously inspired performance/rite involving a chorus and a single actor to something we his distant descendants can recognize as powerful theater.
During the transition from tyranny to democracy, when first the middle class (essentially landowning farmers and artisans) and then the lower class (the thetes) acquired a direct voice in Athenian politics, political activity was carried out not only in the agora, the popular assembly and the Council of Five Hundred, but it was also performed on stage.
Remains of the Theater of Dionysus Eleuthereus, where Aeschylus' dramas were performed
Indeed, the theater was so important in Athenian public life that plays were produced at all the most important public festivals and addressed conflicts troubling the Athenian policy makers; the populace flocked to see them and talk about them. In 461 BCE the last step to democracy in Athens was initiated with the stripping of all but ritual responsibilities from the Aeropagus, a body of men drawn essentially from the city's aristocracy. The lower and middle classes formed the overwhelming majority on the remaining decision making organs of the state and were therefore in power, for a while.
Curiously enough, while all this innovation was going on, in Athens one of the most damaging epithets was "innovator." So the men who willed the demotion of the Aeropagus, led by Ephialtes (who was later murdered for his trouble), had to argue that the Aeropagus had usurped its powers (quite false) and thus the removal of the aristocrats from the center of power was a return to the status quo ante (even more false - but we all know that democratic decision-making has precious little to do with the truth). The Athenians needed a more efficacious justification for this change. They also needed a soothing of the many riled spirits brought about in the populace by all these changes. In the Oresteia,(***) first performed in 458, Aeschylus did all of this and much, much more.
During this Golden Age playwrights wrote trilogies, which were intended, performed and perceived by audiences as coherent wholes. The Oresteia is the only one which has come down to us intact. The three plays are structured together with both dramatic and ideological intent.
At the end of the Trojan War, Agamemnon returns victorious to his palace. But ten years earlier, in order to thwart the will of Artemis and still the fierce winds keeping the fleet on the Greek shore, he had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, and his wife, Clytemnestra, has neither forgotten nor forgiven. She slays him horrifically, and now it is their son, Orestes, who is obliged by the received morality to revenge his father by killing his mother. High drama and madness ensues, but behind all that excitement is the structure of Aeschylus' purpose - justify the new order, the new morality.
At the very outset of the trilogy the chorus recalls that even the gods have changed and changed again, from the rule of Ouranos through that of Kronos to Zeus with son killing father before the father could do the same to the son. And one cannot be sure of doing the right thing by obeying a god, since the gods themselves disagree about right and wrong. Uncertainty has been established: perhaps the received ways are mutable.
I'm not going to try to summarize the complicated plot and recall the many striking characters. From this beautiful, moving and complex masterpiece I just want to draw out here the one theme I've been working on in this review. When Orestes kills Clytemnestra at Apollo's urging, the Erinyes, the Furies - representing the old order, the old morality - hasten to avenge the matricide by tearing Orestes apart. But Apollo and Athena, representing the new order and morality, intervene. The passages involving the Furies are particularly haunting, both dramatically and poetically. The new order is confirmed with a trial in which Athena casts the deciding vote - Orestes is acquitted. Athena convinces the Furies to accept the verdict, and they are then given a place of honor (though not power) and agree to ensure the city's prosperity. The old is replaced by the new, honored and bound into the polis; all's well that ends well (except for the house of Atreus). Despite Aeschylus' efforts, Athens' new democracy did not last long, but that is another story...
(*) As Sophocles has Ajax say in the eponymous play:
Long, immeasurable time brings everything hidden to light and hides what is apparent. Nothing is not to be expected. Change is the law of the world.
(**) Aeschylus was in the battle at Marathon and most probably also at Salamis. In fact, the epitaph on his gravestone, possibly written by himself, mentions Marathon and not his plays:
This tomb the dust of Aeschylus doth hide,
Euphorion's son and fruitful Gela's pride
How tried his valour, Marathon may tell
And long-haired Medes, who knew it all too well.
(***) Read in the translations of Robert Fagles and of Philip Vellacott; Fagles' is more terse and colloquial, while Vellacott's is more "literary," more redolent of older, elevated diction. Both are very readable, but I do prefer Vellacott's.
Rating
http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/118...
February 9, 2017
This is pretty fantastic. I'm surprised. I think I like this old Greek trilogy of plays better than all the others that I've read. That's including Oedipus. :P
The translation is pretty awesome, the tragedy is beautiful, and the underlying theme of justice and the balance of power between men and women is stark and heavy.
But isn't it about murder and eye-for-an-eye taken to extremes? Yeah, but it's still more than that.
It's mainly about honoring your children and honoring your parents. It's not as twisted as some of the other Greek plays, but it is pretty horrific. Agamemnon kills his daughter, his wife kills him. Her son kills her. But wait! Apollo sanctions his killing. Alas, the Furies do not. So now we have the older gods versus the new. Parents and children at each other's throats again.
Totally beautiful.
And here we all thought that Zeus only caused chaos, too! To think that he'd welcome the Furies into his court as honored equals.
(Personally, I think it was just a political move. I'm pretty sure that the Furies scared him shitless, too. :)
Great stuff!
The translation is pretty awesome, the tragedy is beautiful, and the underlying theme of justice and the balance of power between men and women is stark and heavy.
But isn't it about murder and eye-for-an-eye taken to extremes? Yeah, but it's still more than that.
It's mainly about honoring your children and honoring your parents. It's not as twisted as some of the other Greek plays, but it is pretty horrific. Agamemnon kills his daughter, his wife kills him. Her son kills her. But wait! Apollo sanctions his killing. Alas, the Furies do not. So now we have the older gods versus the new. Parents and children at each other's throats again.
Totally beautiful.
And here we all thought that Zeus only caused chaos, too! To think that he'd welcome the Furies into his court as honored equals.
(Personally, I think it was just a political move. I'm pretty sure that the Furies scared him shitless, too. :)
Great stuff!
November 20, 2023
This play has memorable scenes of great dramatic intensity, like when Clytemnestra faces his son, among others. The comments in this edition are fascinating and offer real meaning to the idioms and cultural references of a people so close to us and ancient.
September 2, 2019
The Greeks had an intoxicating culture, or at least it seems to us. All of the iniquities and superstitions of the ancient people have been buried or lost, leaving only the perfect skeletons of buildings and the greatest of their literary productions. As a result, they strike us as a race of superpeople. This trilogy certainly furthers this impression, for it is a perfect poetic representation of the birth of justice and ethics out of the primordial law of retaliation.
The most basic ethical principal is loyalty. We are born into a family, establish reciprocal relationships with friends, become a contributing member of a mutually supporting group, and so naturally feel bound to treat this network of people with the proper respect and kindness. But loyalty has several problems. First, one’s family, friends, and group are largely determined by chance—and who is to say that our family and friends are the most worthy? Second, loyalty does not extend outside a very limited group, and so does not preclude the horrid treatment of others. And, as the Greek plays show us, the bounds of loyalty can sometimes cross, putting us in a situation where we must be disloyal to at least one person.
This is the essential problem of Antigone, where the titular character must choose between loyalty to her city or to her dead brother, who betrayed the state. This is also the problem faced by Orestes, who must choose between avenging his father and treating his mother properly. In Sophocles’ play, the problem proves intractable, leading to yet another string of deaths. But Aeschylus shows that by submitting the bonds of loyalty to a higher, impartial court that we can resolve the contradictions and put an end to the endless series of mutual retaliations that loyalty can give rise to.
The rise of judicial procedures, and of concepts of ethics that extend beyond loyalty to fairness, was a crucial step in the rise of complex societies. Aeschylus has given us an immortal dramatization of this epochal step. But, of course, this play is more than a philosophical or historical exercise. It is a work of high drama and poetry, worthy to stand at the first ranks of literature for its aesthetic merit alone. The Greeks continue to enchant.
The most basic ethical principal is loyalty. We are born into a family, establish reciprocal relationships with friends, become a contributing member of a mutually supporting group, and so naturally feel bound to treat this network of people with the proper respect and kindness. But loyalty has several problems. First, one’s family, friends, and group are largely determined by chance—and who is to say that our family and friends are the most worthy? Second, loyalty does not extend outside a very limited group, and so does not preclude the horrid treatment of others. And, as the Greek plays show us, the bounds of loyalty can sometimes cross, putting us in a situation where we must be disloyal to at least one person.
This is the essential problem of Antigone, where the titular character must choose between loyalty to her city or to her dead brother, who betrayed the state. This is also the problem faced by Orestes, who must choose between avenging his father and treating his mother properly. In Sophocles’ play, the problem proves intractable, leading to yet another string of deaths. But Aeschylus shows that by submitting the bonds of loyalty to a higher, impartial court that we can resolve the contradictions and put an end to the endless series of mutual retaliations that loyalty can give rise to.
The rise of judicial procedures, and of concepts of ethics that extend beyond loyalty to fairness, was a crucial step in the rise of complex societies. Aeschylus has given us an immortal dramatization of this epochal step. But, of course, this play is more than a philosophical or historical exercise. It is a work of high drama and poetry, worthy to stand at the first ranks of literature for its aesthetic merit alone. The Greeks continue to enchant.
June 28, 2019
Ma io povera stolta cosa posso mai scrivere di questa Opera? mi sono veramente sentita super ignorante, non ricordo piu' niente di ciò che ho studiato ....... ho fatto una fatica bestia, ma ho veramente goduto ogni passaggio della tragedia di Clitennestra e soprattutto della povera Ifigenia...
Agamennone, mi spiace, l'ho odiato da subito....( ragionando da madre del 21°sec.!!)
Per la seconda e la terza parte.....ho dovuto chiedere aiuto ovunque, persino alle figlie liceali, che fatica!! Le Coefore e Le Eumenidi le ho trovate complicate e piene di incastri e personaggi a cui il mio povero cervello non riusciva proprio a stare dietro....
Mia figlia, presa da pietà, mi ha allungato la dispensa facilitata per il Liceo...
Ho detto tutto!!
( ho proprio dimenticato tutto quello che ho studiato al Classico... che vergogna!!)
Agamennone, mi spiace, l'ho odiato da subito....( ragionando da madre del 21°sec.!!)
Per la seconda e la terza parte.....ho dovuto chiedere aiuto ovunque, persino alle figlie liceali, che fatica!! Le Coefore e Le Eumenidi le ho trovate complicate e piene di incastri e personaggi a cui il mio povero cervello non riusciva proprio a stare dietro....
Mia figlia, presa da pietà, mi ha allungato la dispensa facilitata per il Liceo...
Ho detto tutto!!
( ho proprio dimenticato tutto quello che ho studiato al Classico... che vergogna!!)
Read
June 30, 2019"I have suffered into truth"
"You know the rules, now turn them into justice."
"The outrage stands as it stands, you burn to know the end..."
"Never try to cut my power with your logic."
"We spoil ourselves with scruples, long as things go well."
"Old men are children once again, a dream that sways and wavers into the hard light of day."
...Which is all to say that this trilogy is bananas and savage and graceful, and that Aeschylus was doing Shakespeare things about two thousand years before Shakespeare. More thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-boc...
"You know the rules, now turn them into justice."
"The outrage stands as it stands, you burn to know the end..."
"Never try to cut my power with your logic."
"We spoil ourselves with scruples, long as things go well."
"Old men are children once again, a dream that sways and wavers into the hard light of day."
...Which is all to say that this trilogy is bananas and savage and graceful, and that Aeschylus was doing Shakespeare things about two thousand years before Shakespeare. More thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-boc...
March 23, 2017
I can only vouch for this Robert Fagles' translation, but yes, astonishingly gripping after more than 2,400 years.
February 8, 2022
For people who didn't notice Marina Hyde's column in today's Guardian:
Having been instrumental in forcing the last two prime ministers out of office, Boris Johnson is on a hat-trick. Can he do it? Can Big Dog play his cards in such a way that a third prime ministerial scalp will be his – his in more ways than one? The answer feels like a hard yes, but this never-ending Greek tragedy is certainly taking its time. How’s your stamina? Like me, you maybe feel the Boristeia is dragging on a bit. Seemingly three plays in, Shagamemnon is still with us.
May 2, 2020
And the blood that Mother Earth consumes
clots hard, it won’t seep through, it breeds revenge
and frenzy goes through the guilty,
seething like infection, swarming through the brain.
I’d give this ten stars. The trilogy creates an arc, a link from blood sacrifice and burnt offerings to the nascent construct of something resembling jurisprudence. Superstition giving way begrudgingly to law. While the final trial isn’t exactly one by peers, it is amazing to contemplate. This trilogy is simply wicked in all senses of the term. The sacrifices made for good fortune in the Trojan War are a bit too close to home and an eloquent vengeance awaits the conquering hero when he returns from the trenches to rebuke accolades and be greeted instead with just desserts.
I was astonished. As I noted I’ve felt my entire life like Cassandra.
clots hard, it won’t seep through, it breeds revenge
and frenzy goes through the guilty,
seething like infection, swarming through the brain.
I’d give this ten stars. The trilogy creates an arc, a link from blood sacrifice and burnt offerings to the nascent construct of something resembling jurisprudence. Superstition giving way begrudgingly to law. While the final trial isn’t exactly one by peers, it is amazing to contemplate. This trilogy is simply wicked in all senses of the term. The sacrifices made for good fortune in the Trojan War are a bit too close to home and an eloquent vengeance awaits the conquering hero when he returns from the trenches to rebuke accolades and be greeted instead with just desserts.
I was astonished. As I noted I’ve felt my entire life like Cassandra.
February 28, 2021
Una de las grandes piezas maestras del Teatro Griego, que muestra un panorama muy oscuro e ineludible a los personajes que se involucran en esta historia. Es patético, a pesar de todo lo que representa Agamenón, en cuanto a defectos, cómo un héroe griego recién llegado puede tener semejante destino. Pero luego le toca el turno a los hijos de éste Orestes y Electra para tomar protagonismo. Orestes es un gran personaje y vaya qué antiguo puede haber sido esta obra y cómo puede ser modelo, si no estructuralmente, sí en el argumento y en la humanidad del propio Orestes, sus miedos, sus recelos, su gran culpa. Claro que la humanización con Esquilo no alcanza su máximo punto, pero eso no le quita para nada lo trágico y legendario.
June 9, 2022
2014 Version
Yet another version of ‘The Oresteia’, this time produced by BBC3 and broadcast in 2014. I love Greek myths and especially the stories surrounding the House of Atreus and this was a fairly good modernization with a short introduction to each of the three plays. Agamemnon, the first play, was excellent, ‘The Libation Bearers’, the second one, was good, while ‘the Furies’, the final play, was a little disappointing. Despite the drop off, it was well worth the time spent listening. If you have never had to suffer a classical education, it might be worth reading a wiki or summary of the House of Atreus to get the best out of the experience. This is not a spoiler as the original audiences were already well versed in the myths and were more interested in what Aeschylus did with those myths.
Yet another version of ‘The Oresteia’, this time produced by BBC3 and broadcast in 2014. I love Greek myths and especially the stories surrounding the House of Atreus and this was a fairly good modernization with a short introduction to each of the three plays. Agamemnon, the first play, was excellent, ‘The Libation Bearers’, the second one, was good, while ‘the Furies’, the final play, was a little disappointing. Despite the drop off, it was well worth the time spent listening. If you have never had to suffer a classical education, it might be worth reading a wiki or summary of the House of Atreus to get the best out of the experience. This is not a spoiler as the original audiences were already well versed in the myths and were more interested in what Aeschylus did with those myths.
January 9, 2017
Foreword
Acknowledgements
A Reading of 'The Oresteia': The Serpent and the Eagle
--Agamemnon
--The Libation Bearers
--The Eumenides
The Genealogy of Orestes
Select Bibliography
Notes
Glossary
Acknowledgements
A Reading of 'The Oresteia': The Serpent and the Eagle
--Agamemnon
--The Libation Bearers
--The Eumenides
The Genealogy of Orestes
Select Bibliography
Notes
Glossary
July 31, 2011
....Just passed the Libation Bearers. Aeschylus has a way with ironic, monumental dialogues which portend tremendous climaxes. The language is so deep and seeps into the interaction- apparantly he suggests that there are no good options in life, merely the best of the worst, and that one must take their place amid the roil. Wisdom. This resonates with me, in the way that a drama read on the page will, as I imagine the perfect language and staging to bear witness to it....bigger review to follow, as it deserves much more than this.
....Finished. Five stars throughout. Coruscatingly direct, rich, earthy, and sublunary. Wisdom writing as mythology as poetry as black drama as cultural history. The trilogy is, I think, an actual example of literature as a catharsis for a national, cultural wound. Athens is seething after the trauma of the Trojan War.
Aeschylus, a former decorated solider himself, writes not only a gripping moral tragedy of family but of historical moment. The poise is unbearable at times. IF you surrender to the language and the momentum of the situation, of the irreversible circumstances, the annihilating power of the story and the words will blow you away.
This is written almost 2500 years ago and, yes the cliche is true- it's ripped from the headlines. Or more precisely the secret heart of the headlines. it's all there: inter-familial rage, impossible situations which call for revenge, justified killers who are justified in killing justified killers, war, the aftermath of war, sexual infidelity, gender roles, mourning, pulic/private, individual/political conflicts...
The narrative arc slopes upward again and again and falls and settles into an empty stage of dust, rumblings and omens of retributions and unbalanced scales calling for justice. Like any good drama it suspends disbelief in midair as you watch characters you know are only going to move closer to their predetermined end while holding on to the edge of your seat to see what happens next.
The characters are strong and tastefully lit. They've seeped into our collective unconscious, our cultural heritage- noble, tormented, insecure and niaeve Agamemnon, bitter and cunning and oppressed and grand Clytemnestra, sleazy and arrogant Aegisthus. Then you've got the weatherbeaten Chorus, the frenzied truth-telling doomed moonchild Cassandra, Electra of the offerings and doubt. Haunted, determined Orestes plagued by the truly gruesome, grotesque Furies with snakes in their hair and blood dripping from their eye sockets...Athena, Apollo...
Hell, we can easily include the citizens of Greece itself, sitting in the Theater of Dionysus itself, which just happens to be carved into the side of a hill. The chorus is addressing the assembled audience, certainly, and the Gods and Furies are (or can be) as well. There's some meta here, no doubt about it.
It can be applied in a variety of circumstances; Bobby Kennedy quoted from the first play on the night MLK was shot to the black community in Philadelphia, Karl Marx reread it every year, Eugene O'Neil adapted it for a modern stage, Freud was all over it, Yeats and Faulkner and Nietzsche made plenty of hay out of referencing it.
There is much to be said about the play itself, its role in Greek society, how it exhibits the transition from revenge and blood-feud to democracy and self-governance, the history of the cultural mythologies surrounding it.
About...now would be the time for me to admit that I really have no fucking idea how these ideas play out in the grand scheme of ancient history or on the political stage of Aeschylus's time. Not really anything more than some half-digested and barely-remembered diatribes some teachers of mine went on back in undergrad. My fault for all this, not theirs, no sir.
Lucky for me (and you, too, dear reader!) the introduction and background appears in the form of translator Fagles' and scholar Stanford's "The Serpent And The Eagle" an eloquent, erudite and informative nigh- hundred page prose poem.
But don't take my word for it:
"War, war, the great gold-broker of corpses
holds the balance of the battle on his spear!
Home from the pyres he sends them,
home from Troy to the loved ones,
heavy with tears, the urns brimmed full,
the heroes return in gold-dust,
dear, light ash for men: and they weep,
they praise them, 'He had skill in the swordplay,
'He went down so tall in the onslaught,'
'All for another's woman.' So they muster
in secret and rancour steals
towards our staunch defenders, Atreus' sons.
And there they ring the walls, the young,
the lithe, the handsome hold the graves
they won in Troy; the enemy earth
rides over those who conquered."
"Who- what power named the name that drove your fate?-
what hidden brain could divine your future,
steer that word to the mark,
to the bride of spears,
the whirlpool churning armies,
Oh for all the world a Helen!"
"Victory, you have sped my way before,
now speed me to the last."
"The nightingale- O for a song, a fate like hers!
The gods gave her a life of ease, swathed her in wings,
no tears, no wailing. The knife waits for me.
They'll splay me on the iron's double edge."
"Oh, the torment bred in the race,
the grinding scream of death
and the stroke that hits the vein,
the haemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,
the curse no man can bear."
"Red from your mother's womb I took you, reared you...
nights, the endless nights I paced, your wailing
kept me moving- led me to a life of labour,
all for what?
And such care I gave it...
baby can't think for itself, poor creature.
You have to nurse it, don't you? Read its mind,
little devil's got no words, it's still swaddled.
Maybe it wants a bite or a sip of something,
or its bladder pinches- a baby's soft insides
have a will of their own. I had to be a prophet.
O I tried, and missed, believe you me, I missed,
and I'd scrub its pretty things until they sparkled.
Washerwoman and wet-nurse shared the shop.
A jack of two trades, that's me,
and an old hand at both...
and so I nursed Orestes,
yes, from his father's arms I took him once,
and now they say he's dead,
I've suffered it all, and now I'll fetch that man,
the ruination of the house- give him the news,
he'll relsih every word."
"Lift the cry of triumph O! the master's house
wins free of grief, free of the ones
who bled its wealth, the couple stained with murder,
free of Fate's rough path.
He came back with a lust for secret combat,
stealthy, cunning vengance, yes,
but his hand was steered in open fight
by the god's true daughter,
Right, Right we call her,
we and our mortal voices aiming well-
she breathes her fury, shatters all he hates.
Life the cry of triumph O! the master's house
wins free of grief, free of the ones
who bled its wealth, the couple stained with murder,
free of Fate's rough path.
Apollo wills it so!-
Apollo, clear from the Earth's deep cleft
his voice came shrill. 'Now stealth will master stealth!'
And the pure god came down and healed our ancient wounds,
the heavens come, somehow, to life our yoke of grief-
Now to praise the heaven's just command.
Look, the light is breaking!
The huge chain that curbed the halls gives way.
Rise up, proud house, long, too long
your walls lay fallen, strewn along the earth."
"This, this is our right,
spun for us by the Fates,
the ones who bind the world,
and none can shake our hold.
Show us the mortals overcome,
insane to murder kin- we track them down
till they go beneath the earth,
and the dead find little freedom in the end.
Over the victim's burning head
this chant this frenzy striking frenzy
lightning crazing the mind
this hymn of Fury
chaining the senses, ripping across the lyre,
withering lives of men!
Even at birth, I say, our rights were so ordained.
The deathless gods must keep their hands far off-
no god may share our cups, our solemn feasts.
We want no part of their pious white robes-
the Fates who gave us power made us free.
Mine is the overthrow of houses, yes,
when warlust reared like a tame beast
seizes near and dear-
down on the man we swoop, aie!
for all his power black him out!-
for the blood still fresh from slaughter on his hands.
So now, striving to wrench our mandate from the gods,
we make ourselves exempt from their control,
we brook no trial- no god can be our judge."
"But for me to suffer such disgrace...I,
the proud heart of the past, driven under the earth,
condemned, like so much filth,
and the fury in me breathing hatred-
O good Earth,
what is this stealing under the breast,
what agony racks the spirit?...Night, dear Mother Night!
All's lost, our ancient powers torn away by their cunning,
ruthless hands, the gods so hard to wrestle down
obliterate us all."
"A spell-
what spell to sing? to bind the land for ever? Tell us.
Nothing that strikes a note of brutal conquest. Only peace-
blessings, rising up from the earth and the heaving sea,
and down the vaulting sky let the wind-gods breathe
a wash of sunlight streaming through the land,
and the yield of soil and grazing cattle flood
our city's life with power and never flag
with time. Make the seed on men live on,
the more they worship you the more they thrive.
I love them as a gardener loves his plants,
these upright men, this breed fought free of grief.
All that is yours to give.
And I,
In the trials of war where fighters burn for fame,
will never endure the overflow of Athens-
all will praise her, victor city, pride of man."
"Yes and I ban
the winds that rock the olive-
hear my love, my blessing-
thwart their scorching heat that blinds the buds,
hold from our shores the killing icy gales,
and I ban the blight that creeps on fruit and withers-
God of creation, Pan, make flocks increase
and the ewes drop fine twin lambs
when the hour of labour falls.
And silver, child of Earth,
secret treasure of Hermes,
come to light and praise the gifts of god."
And that's not even the ending. Not quite. Sorry to go on like this but I wanted to see what I'd have to do to come close to using up all the allotted characters I have left. (9,000 more to go...) It's worth the rant.
I was very curious several times throughout reading this as to how the play would actually be staged to avoid the kind of overshadowed clumsiness staged productions tend do to the text. Sometimes I think plays are better read within the theater of the mind. You can hear the voices of the characters in your own imagination, the stage is set the way it seems to you. The blocking, music and camera angles are totally your call, as well, so in an odd way there's very little blocking you from perfect immersion.
Best to read it alone, aloud by water, because it contains the ancient, roiling toll of the sea.
September 13, 2015
agamemnon - cel ucis de nevastă în baie
după 10 ani de război troian, agamemnon, după ce a cucerit bogata cetate troia, se-ntoarce acasă.
criminala clitemnestra
prefăcându-se că nu mai putuse de dorul lui, nevastă-sa, clitemnestra, îl întâmpină pe covor roșu. dar ea e sora curviștinei elena care-a provocat războiul, și n-are scrupule, așa că-l omoară pe agamemnon în cadă, la prima baie, în mod sadic. o omoară și pe una dintre amantele pe care învingătorul și-o adusese cu el, pe prorocița blestemată să nu fie crezută, casandra. iată, criminala sadică, cum povestește isprava:
CLITEMNESTRA
Atunci, zăcând, el își dă duhul, iar sângele, țâșnind din rănile străpunse, mă împroașcă, picături întunecate, nu mai puțin plăcute pentru mine, decât e roua sclipitoare, dar dumnezeiesc, pentru semințele din muguri. (p.79)
iaca și amantul
aflăm apoi că în vremea asta, cât timp bărba-su se războia departe, ea și-a tras amant, pe vărul mai laș al soțului, egist. nu era el prea bun la războaie - căci n-a plecat la troia - însă era expert, se pare, în sexul cu femeia altuia iar mai apoi convingerea ei să-l omoare.
ceea ce corul bătrânilor cetății îi reproșează:
Ești o muiere! Ai rămas acasă, pândind să se
întoarcă luptătorii din război!
Ai pângărit culcușul unui bărbat de seamă, ai pus
la cale moartea maimarelui oștirii! (p.89)
oare merita războinicul agamemnon să fie ucis de nevastă-sa în baie, după 10 de ani de lupte cu troienii?
- ucigașa zice că da, pentru că și-a jertfit fiica, pe ifigenia, înainte de plecarea la război.
- amantul ucigașei zice că da, pentru că tatăl lui agamemnon i i-a servit tatălui lui egist, la masă, pe propriii copii la dejun, așa că blestemat să fie!
Va dăinui o lege, cât Zeus va dăinui pe tron:
„Vinovatului pedeapsă!“ (p.86)
hoeforele
a doua piesă e cea mai slabă din trilogie. are două părți principale:
1) una în care cei doi copii orfani de tată - oreste și electra - își plâng peste ani tatăl
2) oreste, fiul ucisului agamemnon, îndemnat de oracolul din delphi, își ucide mama și pe amantul acestuia, egist.
nimic spectaculos.
eumenidele - cea mai mișto piesă a lui eschil
fără îndoială, mai abitir decât prometeu înlănțuit, eumenidele (binevoitoarele) este cea mai șmecheră din piesele lui eschil.
de ce?
cine erau eriniile?
pentru că personajele sunt eriniile (furiile la romani), care pornesc după ucigașul de mamă, oreste, să-l înnebunească de cap, ca pedeapsă pentru matricid.
eriniile sunt personaje horror, care fac parte din zeitățile vechi, născute (potrivit theogoniei lui hesiod) din picăturile de sânge scurse în gaia, de la castrarea lui uranos.
sunt ființe înaripate, cu șerpi împletiți în păr sau în mâini și au în mâini torțe sau bice.
au lăcaș în erebos sau în tartaros.
Născute pentru rele, hălăduiesc în umbra din care
se împărtășește răul și sub pământ, în Tartaros,
de oameni urgisite și de zeii din Olimp. (p.151)
rolul eriniilor este de a-i pedepsi pe oameni: pe prorocii care prevestesc prea mult, dar mai ales pe criminali, care zdruncină echilibrul omenirii și care trebuie să purifice prin canoane, dacă nu înnebunește.
cum le „rezolvă“ atena pe erinii și le face blânde?
ele nu se supun zeilor, nici chiar lui zeus, și se iau în gură chiar cu apolo sau cu atena. doar că șmechera atena le transformă din răuvoitoare în binevoitoare, care-i binecuvântează pe greci. astfel, folosindu-se de unealta tribunalului aeropagilor, soarta lui oreste este luată din mâna eriniilor (a blestemului crimei) și dată pe mâna oamenilor.
este o acțiune de îmblânzire a stihiilor originare, a schimbării legilor talionului în legile jurisprudenței. iar oreste este prilejul oportun.
nu mai spun despre prezența în piesă a templului de la delphi, centrul lumii elene, unde preoteasa pythia, muritoarea care ședea deasupra crăpăturii din pământ care emana aburi, și care profețea destinele elenilor, se sperie ea însăși de erinii.
iată ce spun eriniile despre dreapta măsură:
- Nici anarhie, nici puteri despotice, iată măsura. (p.180)
- Neîngrădit de teamă, care muritor mai știe să rămână drept? (p. 180)
- Nu te-nvoi să-ți petreci în
orânduire anarhică viață,
dar nici sub noime despotice,
Cumpănește în toată măsura,
așa-i rânduiala divină
împotriva puterii cu toane. (p.171)
- Cel care, singur, fără să fie silit,
se poartă cu dreptate,
va dobândi fericirea;
el nu va pieri niciodată cu totul,
În schimb, răzvrătitul obraznic,
care a strâns, împotriva dreptății,
de-a valma, atâtea grămezi
de comori ticăloase,
fără-ndoială, va fi nevoit
să-și coboare pânza, cu vremea,
când va sta îngrozit
lângă verga corăbiei ruptă. (p.172)
dincolo de acțiunea plină de personaje mitologice și de zei, eschil pune niște probleme. este, dincolo de poet, un filozof care aduce în mintea spectatorilor idei și probleme ce țin de viața oamenilor în genere și de cea de zi cu zi.
după 10 ani de război troian, agamemnon, după ce a cucerit bogata cetate troia, se-ntoarce acasă.
criminala clitemnestra
prefăcându-se că nu mai putuse de dorul lui, nevastă-sa, clitemnestra, îl întâmpină pe covor roșu. dar ea e sora curviștinei elena care-a provocat războiul, și n-are scrupule, așa că-l omoară pe agamemnon în cadă, la prima baie, în mod sadic. o omoară și pe una dintre amantele pe care învingătorul și-o adusese cu el, pe prorocița blestemată să nu fie crezută, casandra. iată, criminala sadică, cum povestește isprava:
CLITEMNESTRA
Atunci, zăcând, el își dă duhul, iar sângele, țâșnind din rănile străpunse, mă împroașcă, picături întunecate, nu mai puțin plăcute pentru mine, decât e roua sclipitoare, dar dumnezeiesc, pentru semințele din muguri. (p.79)
iaca și amantul
aflăm apoi că în vremea asta, cât timp bărba-su se războia departe, ea și-a tras amant, pe vărul mai laș al soțului, egist. nu era el prea bun la războaie - căci n-a plecat la troia - însă era expert, se pare, în sexul cu femeia altuia iar mai apoi convingerea ei să-l omoare.
ceea ce corul bătrânilor cetății îi reproșează:
Ești o muiere! Ai rămas acasă, pândind să se
întoarcă luptătorii din război!
Ai pângărit culcușul unui bărbat de seamă, ai pus
la cale moartea maimarelui oștirii! (p.89)
oare merita războinicul agamemnon să fie ucis de nevastă-sa în baie, după 10 de ani de lupte cu troienii?
- ucigașa zice că da, pentru că și-a jertfit fiica, pe ifigenia, înainte de plecarea la război.
- amantul ucigașei zice că da, pentru că tatăl lui agamemnon i i-a servit tatălui lui egist, la masă, pe propriii copii la dejun, așa că blestemat să fie!
Va dăinui o lege, cât Zeus va dăinui pe tron:
„Vinovatului pedeapsă!“ (p.86)
hoeforele
a doua piesă e cea mai slabă din trilogie. are două părți principale:
1) una în care cei doi copii orfani de tată - oreste și electra - își plâng peste ani tatăl
2) oreste, fiul ucisului agamemnon, îndemnat de oracolul din delphi, își ucide mama și pe amantul acestuia, egist.
nimic spectaculos.
eumenidele - cea mai mișto piesă a lui eschil
fără îndoială, mai abitir decât prometeu înlănțuit, eumenidele (binevoitoarele) este cea mai șmecheră din piesele lui eschil.
de ce?
cine erau eriniile?
pentru că personajele sunt eriniile (furiile la romani), care pornesc după ucigașul de mamă, oreste, să-l înnebunească de cap, ca pedeapsă pentru matricid.
eriniile sunt personaje horror, care fac parte din zeitățile vechi, născute (potrivit theogoniei lui hesiod) din picăturile de sânge scurse în gaia, de la castrarea lui uranos.
sunt ființe înaripate, cu șerpi împletiți în păr sau în mâini și au în mâini torțe sau bice.
au lăcaș în erebos sau în tartaros.
Născute pentru rele, hălăduiesc în umbra din care
se împărtășește răul și sub pământ, în Tartaros,
de oameni urgisite și de zeii din Olimp. (p.151)
rolul eriniilor este de a-i pedepsi pe oameni: pe prorocii care prevestesc prea mult, dar mai ales pe criminali, care zdruncină echilibrul omenirii și care trebuie să purifice prin canoane, dacă nu înnebunește.
cum le „rezolvă“ atena pe erinii și le face blânde?
ele nu se supun zeilor, nici chiar lui zeus, și se iau în gură chiar cu apolo sau cu atena. doar că șmechera atena le transformă din răuvoitoare în binevoitoare, care-i binecuvântează pe greci. astfel, folosindu-se de unealta tribunalului aeropagilor, soarta lui oreste este luată din mâna eriniilor (a blestemului crimei) și dată pe mâna oamenilor.
este o acțiune de îmblânzire a stihiilor originare, a schimbării legilor talionului în legile jurisprudenței. iar oreste este prilejul oportun.
nu mai spun despre prezența în piesă a templului de la delphi, centrul lumii elene, unde preoteasa pythia, muritoarea care ședea deasupra crăpăturii din pământ care emana aburi, și care profețea destinele elenilor, se sperie ea însăși de erinii.
iată ce spun eriniile despre dreapta măsură:
- Nici anarhie, nici puteri despotice, iată măsura. (p.180)
- Neîngrădit de teamă, care muritor mai știe să rămână drept? (p. 180)
- Nu te-nvoi să-ți petreci în
orânduire anarhică viață,
dar nici sub noime despotice,
Cumpănește în toată măsura,
așa-i rânduiala divină
împotriva puterii cu toane. (p.171)
- Cel care, singur, fără să fie silit,
se poartă cu dreptate,
va dobândi fericirea;
el nu va pieri niciodată cu totul,
În schimb, răzvrătitul obraznic,
care a strâns, împotriva dreptății,
de-a valma, atâtea grămezi
de comori ticăloase,
fără-ndoială, va fi nevoit
să-și coboare pânza, cu vremea,
când va sta îngrozit
lângă verga corăbiei ruptă. (p.172)
dincolo de acțiunea plină de personaje mitologice și de zei, eschil pune niște probleme. este, dincolo de poet, un filozof care aduce în mintea spectatorilor idei și probleme ce țin de viața oamenilor în genere și de cea de zi cu zi.
February 8, 2020
i read now no. 2. the main conflict between son and mother. the erotic freedom of the women - the mother is destructive for the son, as he is suppose to get the heritage. "you killed my father, how can i live with you?"
amazing conflict. great writing. still.
a lot of build up for me as i write a new thriller.
amazing conflict. great writing. still.
a lot of build up for me as i write a new thriller.
June 18, 2023
AGAMEMNON is a chilling revenge play, the first play of a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus, one of the few Ancient Greek dramatists whose work has survived from antiquity. The trilogy was first produced in the spring of 458 BCE in the city of Athens.
Agamemnon, in the works of Homer, is the brutal king of the Achaeans during the Trojan War, and this play is about his return home after Troy has been defeated and utterly destroyed. This play, however, is not directly related to the Iliad or his rivalry with Achilles, but about the outcome of his past actions and to the myth of the House of Atreus.
The House of Atreus is cursed. The story is gruesome and this might not be the right place to deal with it in detail: it involves murders, adultery, incest, infanticide and cannibalism. Agamemnon is the fourth generation of this cursed House. The myth tells of wrongs done to avenge old wrongs which lead to newer wrongs, a veritable chain of evil and derangement.
So Agamemnon returns home victorious from the Trojan War and has to face a new war, a domestic war. He has to face his wife Clytemnestra, who is very, very, very angry. You see, Agamemnon found himself in trouble when he wanted to launch his fleet at Aulis. Adverse winds prevented the huge fleet of Achaeans from sailing to Troy. A seer tells Agamemnon that only one thing would stop the bad winds. He had to slaughter his own daughter, young Iphigeneia, to appease Artemis, and all would be well. Agamemnon accepts without resistance.
Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigeneia. The Achaeans took young Iphigenia out to the ocean, and forced her over an altar there. They gagged and murdered her, so that the winds would take them to Troy, so that the war in Troy could start in earnest. After the horrendous sacrifice, the Achaeans were able to sail off to Troy in order to exact their vengeance and bring Helen back.
Clytemnestra has not forgotten or forgiven this evil deed and for ten years she has been waiting to exact her own vengeance. She has taken a lover, Aegisthus, who will help her out. Clytemnestra rejoices when Agamemnon returns home safely, but not because she loves him. She wants to kill him herself, and she does.
AGAMEMNON is about the violent death of a returning conqueror. He has murdered his daughter, sailed off to Troy, proved a nightmare to the city for a decade, pissed off Achilles -the real hero of the Iliad- and then, after defeating Troy, destroyed it, killed its inhabitants, and made Cassandra, its princess, into a personal sex slave. But we all know that the story doesn't end with the toppling of a cruel tyrant. The next two plays will deal with the aftermath.
Agamemnon, in the works of Homer, is the brutal king of the Achaeans during the Trojan War, and this play is about his return home after Troy has been defeated and utterly destroyed. This play, however, is not directly related to the Iliad or his rivalry with Achilles, but about the outcome of his past actions and to the myth of the House of Atreus.
The House of Atreus is cursed. The story is gruesome and this might not be the right place to deal with it in detail: it involves murders, adultery, incest, infanticide and cannibalism. Agamemnon is the fourth generation of this cursed House. The myth tells of wrongs done to avenge old wrongs which lead to newer wrongs, a veritable chain of evil and derangement.
So Agamemnon returns home victorious from the Trojan War and has to face a new war, a domestic war. He has to face his wife Clytemnestra, who is very, very, very angry. You see, Agamemnon found himself in trouble when he wanted to launch his fleet at Aulis. Adverse winds prevented the huge fleet of Achaeans from sailing to Troy. A seer tells Agamemnon that only one thing would stop the bad winds. He had to slaughter his own daughter, young Iphigeneia, to appease Artemis, and all would be well. Agamemnon accepts without resistance.
Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigeneia. The Achaeans took young Iphigenia out to the ocean, and forced her over an altar there. They gagged and murdered her, so that the winds would take them to Troy, so that the war in Troy could start in earnest. After the horrendous sacrifice, the Achaeans were able to sail off to Troy in order to exact their vengeance and bring Helen back.
Clytemnestra has not forgotten or forgiven this evil deed and for ten years she has been waiting to exact her own vengeance. She has taken a lover, Aegisthus, who will help her out. Clytemnestra rejoices when Agamemnon returns home safely, but not because she loves him. She wants to kill him herself, and she does.
AGAMEMNON is about the violent death of a returning conqueror. He has murdered his daughter, sailed off to Troy, proved a nightmare to the city for a decade, pissed off Achilles -the real hero of the Iliad- and then, after defeating Troy, destroyed it, killed its inhabitants, and made Cassandra, its princess, into a personal sex slave. But we all know that the story doesn't end with the toppling of a cruel tyrant. The next two plays will deal with the aftermath.
October 23, 2020
BBC Radio 3 adaptation by Simon Scardifield, Ed Hime & Rebecca Lenkiewicz
I've had a couple of false/slow starts with the written Oresteia this year, so to tick off a 'Classic Tragedy' category in a reading challenge, I listened to this production of the three plays, which is packaged with an old half-hour In Our Time episode about Aeschylus' trilogy. (I'd have preferred a production using Robert Fagles' translation, to read along, but couldn't track one down.) The blurb for the Audible edition says that Edith Hall introduces each play; as I listened to the four separate segments online I didn't hear that, but Hall is one of the speakers in the In Our Time discussion. The whole lot adds up to four and a half hours, and all speakers are engaging and dramatic, so it works well as an audiobook that can be taken in almost effortlessly whilst doing other things.
At time of writing I've not read further than the early part of Agamemnon (before the eponymous king speaks), so I can't compare most of these radio versions with a translation that strives to be more faithful to the original - but from that opening, and other info I already knew about the plays (including from part of of Fagles' introduction, and a lecture series by Peter Meineck), it's clear these are modern versions with noticeable differences. Each of the three plays is adapted by a different writer; I'm not sure whether it's because I'm more familiar with Agamemnon that I found the first one most engaging, or if it was simply that Scardifield's version of the first play was the best of these three.
Quotes here are from audio, and may not be exact as they came from notes typed in a hurry using abbreviations.
To make the watchman's opening narrative and exposition more natural, Scardifield has given him a new young assistant, a former shepherd lad. As this teenager has just started the job, the older watchman tells him about their task, the beacons they are to look out for, and a bit about the history of the war. The radio format allows for flashbacks to the beginning of the war, including soldiers waiting and grumbling as the ships are stuck in port, Calchas' proclamations, and Iphigenia being lured with a promise of marriage to Achilles. The two watchmen are fleshed out as characters; the older one is an ex-fisherman and also set up some of the beacons on other islands. The young lad is starstruck on meeting Clytemnestra and Aegisthes. It was a bit blurry to me which voices constituted the chorus, but the adaptation gives a strong sense of a working-class presence in the play when, after the watchmen have informed Clytemnestra of the beacon, they get talking to an older woman in the street, who was once a prostitute in the soldiers' camp before the army sailed.
The adaptation has these mechanicals performing a sacrifice of Clytemnestra's best heifer on her behalf, which I wasn't sure about, but at any rate their conversation was interesting. There's the typical mix of opinions you find among working-class characters in a contemporary adaptation, some more religious and respectful of leaders, others resentful and opinionated about, for example, men coming home as ashes in jars. (Again, Ancient Greek history isn't an area I specialised in, so whilst this felt like a deliberate analogy for modern experiences, I can't say for certain.) We get typical contemporary comments on Classical religion like "gods that go about sticking their deathless dicks in anything that takes their fancy".
I was surprised how much Cassandra protested, as of course she'd know it would make no difference, but Ancient Greek tragedy is a very different emotional mode for starters. I liked the choice of accents here. Calchas - the representative of the archaic religious world the trilogy marks a move away from - is the most noticeably old-school posh in these productions, the sort of voice you'd have once expected Classical tragedy to be spoken in almost entirely. Other characters are northern English, though the royals more lightly, leaning towards RP - and Cassandra is played by a Romanian actress using her accent to emphasise she is from a different society to the Argives.
It is all effortlessly immersive with a strong sense of drama and strong personalities, as it should be. Additions, such as Menelaus throwing his and Helen's bed into the sea and sobbing and brooding on the beach for two days, had the right high tragic feel, as did lines like "as fate thunders past I just want to feel its breeze, instead I feel like I'm strapped to its wheels". I was glad also that it made the play feel historically specific and situated, as I hadn't wanted to dwell on the weight of its universality at the moment. Yet this version was one of those that seemed to add to the original rather than reductively boxing it in, as some radically modern versions of ancient classics can. (The more I read about Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf the less keen I am on the idea of it.) I was taken aback when I listened to a short clip of Scardifield discussing his Agamemnon adaptation that he homed in on the same words "specific" and "universal" that I'd found myself thinking about when listening to the play. The writer achieved his aims then.
The Libation Bearers needs context for a lot of modern Western readers who aren't already well-versed in Greek history. It almost goes without saying these days that one would understand why Clytemnestra wanted to avenge Iphigenia, and to assume there would have been solidarity with the dead sister among her surviving siblings, even if they were also frightened of their mother. Yet this is not, of course, the attitude of Electra and Orestes. Their sense that it was much worse for their mother to kill their father than it was for their father to kill their sister is related to the Greek idea - contradictory to modern science, that the father was the true parent, as mentioned in The Furies. (And that in theory at least, men could even reproduce alone as with Zeus producing Athena.) It is thoroughly contextualised by Hall in In Our Time, though I didn't listen to this until afterwards: Electra only appears in the first half of play, performing libations, and then the mourning song with Orestes once they are reunited: unlike her mother, she only speaks the words that proper, well-behaved girls do - religious & mourning language and thereafter is sidelined for the conflict between male and powerful, transgressive female. But as Orestes is fundamentally a dutiful son, he, as Hall points out, he needs his mate to talk him into killing Clytemnestra. Ed Hime's adaptation seemed to do its job fine but it didn't wow me the way Scardifield's Agamemnon did - though this could have been because I had least pre-existing knowledge of this play out of the three here.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's version of The Furies uses a narrator, which on the one hand seemed like cheating slightly, but also makes the action easy to follow for those unfamiliar with the basic plot. (There was quite a bit about it in Meineck's lectures so I was already aware of it.) Last week I read this article and review by Emily Wilson, about the Oresteia and new translations (thanks to Alwynne for posting it). Wilson complains about the heavy preponderance of Oresteia translations by men and the lack of feminist commentary on the Furies / Eumenides in the editions under review, and so it was interesting to stumble into one of the few versions put into English by a woman playwright. Because of this I particularly noticed the grand dramatic vehemence of the Pythia in arguing with Apollo about him trampling over ancient divinities, in warning about how men think so much of themselves in life but are dust when they die, and how she talks sarcastically about the higher value put on the death of a father; she proclaims that Orestes should wander like a neglected outcast. And likewise Apollo's attempt to banish the Furies (who were also characterised at the beginning of the play by a stench) to places of torture and execution, and the phrasing that they are not not women, but creatures, and should live in caves with lions, aberrations. Athena, presented by Aeschylus as a just and neutral force (though one who gets short shrift from some modern commentators), says here that the system of trial she brings is "counsel untouched by thought of gain" and she decides she "shall not call the death of Clytemnestra worse", also addressing the Pythia respectfully by acknowledging "you are far older". The Pythia accedes, and there is another invocation of fertility as primarily male, as Athenians are promised near the end, "Your flocks will multiply. Pan will teach them to bear twins."
I don't tend to get on very well with Emily Wilson's commentary, in pieces like the LRB review linked above or in her Odyssey introduction, and Edith Hall on In Our Time made similar points in a way that I found more amenable and interesting. I had no idea from Wilson's article of the historical context of what she says there, whereas Hall explains that "since de Beauvoir, feminist scholars and also those of the psychoanalytic school like Melanie Klein" (and, another speaker added, even since Karl Marx), "the Oresteia has been taken as the charter myth of male domination, slamming the door on women in western culture, art and society until Nora walked out of the Doll's House". She later adds that it is also "the charter myth of the state and of trial by jury", that fear is now supposed to be of the state's justice system, not of the family - and another says that it transforms ancient myth into civic myth.
(And in symbolically authorising an impersonal, centralised system over kin networks, it paves the way for Westernisation itself, as per The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich - although that traces the practical origins of the process to first-millennium Christian prohibitions on cousin marriage, with, so far at least, insufficient discussion of the extent to which these were actually enforced.)
However, Hall didn't answer the question I found myself with after reading Wilson's piece: why could this even have been a turning point for women? I see no reason to have expected it to have been: in mythological terms it's going from a system in which a king could sacrifice his daughter without being stopped, to a system of court and law in which women also had very little say or power. The type of system changed but its gender politics didn't.
Perhaps there is a mythological memory/analogy of greater equality between the sexes before the rise of Bronze Age city states. Archaeological research on the strength evident from prehistoric women's bones"suggests that the sexual differentiation of labor became greater or more formalized after the Neolithic than during it." (Quote from here. Study here.) But that isn't the story of the actual Oresteia: Clytemnestra is already aberrant in its world; it is goddesses and other supernatural female beings who have power equivalent to their male counterparts, not typical mortal women. The civilised and gender-ambiguous Athena can be contrasted with the wild and chthonic Furies and Pythia - but she also contrasts, as a patron of Athens, with the wild and chthonic and male Poseidon. If it's anything it's another increment rather than a door slamming suddenly.
Even Fagles' introduction has an almost incantatory spiritual heft which seems bold and unusual for a Penguin Classic these days - a very welcome relic of the 1970s as far as I'm concerned (so I'm sorry to hear talk of his translation being superseded as the contemporary default by the Oliver Taplin edition). Whilst there were a few seismic moments in these adaptations, that mode wasn't sustained in the same way. Yet it also made them more approachable at a time when I wasn't up for several days' worth of reading in the heightened ancient tragic mode.
I'd certainly recommend these recordings if you enjoy modern prose adaptations like this - though as to how close the bulk of them are to the originals, you'll need to get a verdict from someone who knows those better.
I've had a couple of false/slow starts with the written Oresteia this year, so to tick off a 'Classic Tragedy' category in a reading challenge, I listened to this production of the three plays, which is packaged with an old half-hour In Our Time episode about Aeschylus' trilogy. (I'd have preferred a production using Robert Fagles' translation, to read along, but couldn't track one down.) The blurb for the Audible edition says that Edith Hall introduces each play; as I listened to the four separate segments online I didn't hear that, but Hall is one of the speakers in the In Our Time discussion. The whole lot adds up to four and a half hours, and all speakers are engaging and dramatic, so it works well as an audiobook that can be taken in almost effortlessly whilst doing other things.
At time of writing I've not read further than the early part of Agamemnon (before the eponymous king speaks), so I can't compare most of these radio versions with a translation that strives to be more faithful to the original - but from that opening, and other info I already knew about the plays (including from part of of Fagles' introduction, and a lecture series by Peter Meineck), it's clear these are modern versions with noticeable differences. Each of the three plays is adapted by a different writer; I'm not sure whether it's because I'm more familiar with Agamemnon that I found the first one most engaging, or if it was simply that Scardifield's version of the first play was the best of these three.
Quotes here are from audio, and may not be exact as they came from notes typed in a hurry using abbreviations.
To make the watchman's opening narrative and exposition more natural, Scardifield has given him a new young assistant, a former shepherd lad. As this teenager has just started the job, the older watchman tells him about their task, the beacons they are to look out for, and a bit about the history of the war. The radio format allows for flashbacks to the beginning of the war, including soldiers waiting and grumbling as the ships are stuck in port, Calchas' proclamations, and Iphigenia being lured with a promise of marriage to Achilles. The two watchmen are fleshed out as characters; the older one is an ex-fisherman and also set up some of the beacons on other islands. The young lad is starstruck on meeting Clytemnestra and Aegisthes. It was a bit blurry to me which voices constituted the chorus, but the adaptation gives a strong sense of a working-class presence in the play when, after the watchmen have informed Clytemnestra of the beacon, they get talking to an older woman in the street, who was once a prostitute in the soldiers' camp before the army sailed.
The adaptation has these mechanicals performing a sacrifice of Clytemnestra's best heifer on her behalf, which I wasn't sure about, but at any rate their conversation was interesting. There's the typical mix of opinions you find among working-class characters in a contemporary adaptation, some more religious and respectful of leaders, others resentful and opinionated about, for example, men coming home as ashes in jars. (Again, Ancient Greek history isn't an area I specialised in, so whilst this felt like a deliberate analogy for modern experiences, I can't say for certain.) We get typical contemporary comments on Classical religion like "gods that go about sticking their deathless dicks in anything that takes their fancy".
I was surprised how much Cassandra protested, as of course she'd know it would make no difference, but Ancient Greek tragedy is a very different emotional mode for starters. I liked the choice of accents here. Calchas - the representative of the archaic religious world the trilogy marks a move away from - is the most noticeably old-school posh in these productions, the sort of voice you'd have once expected Classical tragedy to be spoken in almost entirely. Other characters are northern English, though the royals more lightly, leaning towards RP - and Cassandra is played by a Romanian actress using her accent to emphasise she is from a different society to the Argives.
It is all effortlessly immersive with a strong sense of drama and strong personalities, as it should be. Additions, such as Menelaus throwing his and Helen's bed into the sea and sobbing and brooding on the beach for two days, had the right high tragic feel, as did lines like "as fate thunders past I just want to feel its breeze, instead I feel like I'm strapped to its wheels". I was glad also that it made the play feel historically specific and situated, as I hadn't wanted to dwell on the weight of its universality at the moment. Yet this version was one of those that seemed to add to the original rather than reductively boxing it in, as some radically modern versions of ancient classics can. (The more I read about Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf the less keen I am on the idea of it.) I was taken aback when I listened to a short clip of Scardifield discussing his Agamemnon adaptation that he homed in on the same words "specific" and "universal" that I'd found myself thinking about when listening to the play. The writer achieved his aims then.
The Libation Bearers needs context for a lot of modern Western readers who aren't already well-versed in Greek history. It almost goes without saying these days that one would understand why Clytemnestra wanted to avenge Iphigenia, and to assume there would have been solidarity with the dead sister among her surviving siblings, even if they were also frightened of their mother. Yet this is not, of course, the attitude of Electra and Orestes. Their sense that it was much worse for their mother to kill their father than it was for their father to kill their sister is related to the Greek idea - contradictory to modern science, that the father was the true parent, as mentioned in The Furies. (And that in theory at least, men could even reproduce alone as with Zeus producing Athena.) It is thoroughly contextualised by Hall in In Our Time, though I didn't listen to this until afterwards: Electra only appears in the first half of play, performing libations, and then the mourning song with Orestes once they are reunited: unlike her mother, she only speaks the words that proper, well-behaved girls do - religious & mourning language and thereafter is sidelined for the conflict between male and powerful, transgressive female. But as Orestes is fundamentally a dutiful son, he, as Hall points out, he needs his mate to talk him into killing Clytemnestra. Ed Hime's adaptation seemed to do its job fine but it didn't wow me the way Scardifield's Agamemnon did - though this could have been because I had least pre-existing knowledge of this play out of the three here.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz's version of The Furies uses a narrator, which on the one hand seemed like cheating slightly, but also makes the action easy to follow for those unfamiliar with the basic plot. (There was quite a bit about it in Meineck's lectures so I was already aware of it.) Last week I read this article and review by Emily Wilson, about the Oresteia and new translations (thanks to Alwynne for posting it). Wilson complains about the heavy preponderance of Oresteia translations by men and the lack of feminist commentary on the Furies / Eumenides in the editions under review, and so it was interesting to stumble into one of the few versions put into English by a woman playwright. Because of this I particularly noticed the grand dramatic vehemence of the Pythia in arguing with Apollo about him trampling over ancient divinities, in warning about how men think so much of themselves in life but are dust when they die, and how she talks sarcastically about the higher value put on the death of a father; she proclaims that Orestes should wander like a neglected outcast. And likewise Apollo's attempt to banish the Furies (who were also characterised at the beginning of the play by a stench) to places of torture and execution, and the phrasing that they are not not women, but creatures, and should live in caves with lions, aberrations. Athena, presented by Aeschylus as a just and neutral force (though one who gets short shrift from some modern commentators), says here that the system of trial she brings is "counsel untouched by thought of gain" and she decides she "shall not call the death of Clytemnestra worse", also addressing the Pythia respectfully by acknowledging "you are far older". The Pythia accedes, and there is another invocation of fertility as primarily male, as Athenians are promised near the end, "Your flocks will multiply. Pan will teach them to bear twins."
I don't tend to get on very well with Emily Wilson's commentary, in pieces like the LRB review linked above or in her Odyssey introduction, and Edith Hall on In Our Time made similar points in a way that I found more amenable and interesting. I had no idea from Wilson's article of the historical context of what she says there, whereas Hall explains that "since de Beauvoir, feminist scholars and also those of the psychoanalytic school like Melanie Klein" (and, another speaker added, even since Karl Marx), "the Oresteia has been taken as the charter myth of male domination, slamming the door on women in western culture, art and society until Nora walked out of the Doll's House". She later adds that it is also "the charter myth of the state and of trial by jury", that fear is now supposed to be of the state's justice system, not of the family - and another says that it transforms ancient myth into civic myth.
(And in symbolically authorising an impersonal, centralised system over kin networks, it paves the way for Westernisation itself, as per The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich - although that traces the practical origins of the process to first-millennium Christian prohibitions on cousin marriage, with, so far at least, insufficient discussion of the extent to which these were actually enforced.)
However, Hall didn't answer the question I found myself with after reading Wilson's piece: why could this even have been a turning point for women? I see no reason to have expected it to have been: in mythological terms it's going from a system in which a king could sacrifice his daughter without being stopped, to a system of court and law in which women also had very little say or power. The type of system changed but its gender politics didn't.
Perhaps there is a mythological memory/analogy of greater equality between the sexes before the rise of Bronze Age city states. Archaeological research on the strength evident from prehistoric women's bones"suggests that the sexual differentiation of labor became greater or more formalized after the Neolithic than during it." (Quote from here. Study here.) But that isn't the story of the actual Oresteia: Clytemnestra is already aberrant in its world; it is goddesses and other supernatural female beings who have power equivalent to their male counterparts, not typical mortal women. The civilised and gender-ambiguous Athena can be contrasted with the wild and chthonic Furies and Pythia - but she also contrasts, as a patron of Athens, with the wild and chthonic and male Poseidon. If it's anything it's another increment rather than a door slamming suddenly.
Even Fagles' introduction has an almost incantatory spiritual heft which seems bold and unusual for a Penguin Classic these days - a very welcome relic of the 1970s as far as I'm concerned (so I'm sorry to hear talk of his translation being superseded as the contemporary default by the Oliver Taplin edition). Whilst there were a few seismic moments in these adaptations, that mode wasn't sustained in the same way. Yet it also made them more approachable at a time when I wasn't up for several days' worth of reading in the heightened ancient tragic mode.
I'd certainly recommend these recordings if you enjoy modern prose adaptations like this - though as to how close the bulk of them are to the originals, you'll need to get a verdict from someone who knows those better.
January 28, 2018
"... que cidade ou homem poderá venerar a Justiça, se viver sem sombra de medo no seu coração?"
Atreu e Tiestes são irmãos gémeos. Quando Atreu (rei de Micenas) descobre que o irmão é amante da sua mulher, decide vingar-se: mata os filhos de Tiestes e convida-o para um banquete, dando-lhos a comer. Salva-se o mais novo, Egisto.
Atreu é pai de Agamémnon. Durante o tempo em que este esteve ausente, na guerra de Tróia, Egisto torna-se amante da mulher do primo, Clitemnestra, e planeia vingar-se do crime cometido por Atreu, matando Agamémnon.
Antes de partir para Tróia, Agamémnon, sacrifica à deusa Ártemis, a sua filha Ifigénia. Clitemnestra nunca lhe perdoou a morte da filha e alia-se a Egisto na vingança.
No fim da guerra, Agamémnon regressa a casa, acompanhado por Cassandra, princesa de Tróia, e são assassinados por Clitemnestra e Egisto.
Após a morte de Agamémnon, o filho, Orestes, é enviado para casa de um tio de onde regressa anos depois com a incumbência, ordenada por Apolo, de vingar a morte do pai. É ajudado por Electra, que odeia a mãe e nunca lhe perdoou ter assassinado o pai, ansiando por vingança.
Depois de Orestes matar Clitemnestra e Egisto é perseguido pelas Erínias - as vingadoras dos crimes de sangue, neste caso o de matricídio.
Em julgamento, presidido pela deusa Atena, Orestes é absolvido e as Erínias são transformadas em Euménides (Benevolentes) - seres da justiça e não da vingança.
Oresteia são três peças de teatro sobre crime e castigo; vingança e justiça; julgamento e absolvição.
Em Agamémnon é representado o assassinato de Agamémnon e de Cassandra por Clitemnestra e Egisto; em Coéforas a morte de Clitemnestra e de Egisto por Orestes e em Euménides o remorso e o julgamento de Orestes.
(François Perrier - The Sacrifice of Iphigenia)
(Evelyn De Morgan - Cassandra)
(Pierre-Narcisse Guérin - Clytemnestra and Agamemnon)
(John Collier - Clytemnestra)
(William Blake Richmond - Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon)
(Bernardino Mei - Orestes slaying Aegisthus and Clytemnestra)
(John Downman - The Ghost Of Clytemnestra Awakening The Furies)
(Franz Stuck - Orestes And The Erinyes)
Atreu e Tiestes são irmãos gémeos. Quando Atreu (rei de Micenas) descobre que o irmão é amante da sua mulher, decide vingar-se: mata os filhos de Tiestes e convida-o para um banquete, dando-lhos a comer. Salva-se o mais novo, Egisto.
Atreu é pai de Agamémnon. Durante o tempo em que este esteve ausente, na guerra de Tróia, Egisto torna-se amante da mulher do primo, Clitemnestra, e planeia vingar-se do crime cometido por Atreu, matando Agamémnon.
Antes de partir para Tróia, Agamémnon, sacrifica à deusa Ártemis, a sua filha Ifigénia. Clitemnestra nunca lhe perdoou a morte da filha e alia-se a Egisto na vingança.
No fim da guerra, Agamémnon regressa a casa, acompanhado por Cassandra, princesa de Tróia, e são assassinados por Clitemnestra e Egisto.
Após a morte de Agamémnon, o filho, Orestes, é enviado para casa de um tio de onde regressa anos depois com a incumbência, ordenada por Apolo, de vingar a morte do pai. É ajudado por Electra, que odeia a mãe e nunca lhe perdoou ter assassinado o pai, ansiando por vingança.
Depois de Orestes matar Clitemnestra e Egisto é perseguido pelas Erínias - as vingadoras dos crimes de sangue, neste caso o de matricídio.
Em julgamento, presidido pela deusa Atena, Orestes é absolvido e as Erínias são transformadas em Euménides (Benevolentes) - seres da justiça e não da vingança.
Oresteia são três peças de teatro sobre crime e castigo; vingança e justiça; julgamento e absolvição.
Em Agamémnon é representado o assassinato de Agamémnon e de Cassandra por Clitemnestra e Egisto; em Coéforas a morte de Clitemnestra e de Egisto por Orestes e em Euménides o remorso e o julgamento de Orestes.
(François Perrier - The Sacrifice of Iphigenia)
(Evelyn De Morgan - Cassandra)
(Pierre-Narcisse Guérin - Clytemnestra and Agamemnon)
(John Collier - Clytemnestra)
(William Blake Richmond - Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon)
(Bernardino Mei - Orestes slaying Aegisthus and Clytemnestra)
(John Downman - The Ghost Of Clytemnestra Awakening The Furies)
(Franz Stuck - Orestes And The Erinyes)
August 30, 2014
Even compared to other Greek tragedies, the Oresteia stands out. It's not just about the family drama or the bloody cycle of revenge. It's more than that. It's about peering deeply into the darkness of the human soul, stripping any semblance of control over one's destiny, and seeing what would result--madness.
Orestes was driven by forces more ancient and far bloodier than his mere judgment. In a society divinely centered on the family, Orestes was ordained to avenge his father's death, even if it meant killing his own mother. What is a man to do? If he doesn't kill his mother, the furies of his father would pursue him. If he does kill his mother, same story. Hardly fair, as his father Agamemnon was the one who sparked this vicious chain of events in the first place by sacrificing his daughter so that the Achean fleet could sail to Illium. The lack of control, being tossed this way and that like a lone battered ship caught in a divine storm, the uncertainty of life and yet the certainty of eternal torment--such is the definition of hell.
In such a system, how will the House of Atreus, a house of kings and heroes, survive itself?
When I studied the play, many found Athena's judicial intervention jarring and strange, especially since the first two plays centered around emotionally charged brutality and violent justice. In comparison, the resolution of the trilogy seems cold, a stark contrast to the previous two plays. But it is in this intervention that Aeschylus really delivers his message to Greece. Bound by its own traditions and practices, the House of Atreus would ultimately collapse in on itself. But when subjected to a common, binding law determined by moral and impartial judges was the House of Atreus salvaged. A court system and laws, created by the people, established order where there was madness. In the end, man can find his own way, even if divine forces seek to drive us to another fate.
In these plays, Aeschylus wrested our destiny away from the gods and placed the strands of our fate in our hands. Though it might be a fleeting moment of control, even if we are truly the chess pieces of the gods, Aeschylus reminds us to a certain extent, our fates are our own.
Orestes was driven by forces more ancient and far bloodier than his mere judgment. In a society divinely centered on the family, Orestes was ordained to avenge his father's death, even if it meant killing his own mother. What is a man to do? If he doesn't kill his mother, the furies of his father would pursue him. If he does kill his mother, same story. Hardly fair, as his father Agamemnon was the one who sparked this vicious chain of events in the first place by sacrificing his daughter so that the Achean fleet could sail to Illium. The lack of control, being tossed this way and that like a lone battered ship caught in a divine storm, the uncertainty of life and yet the certainty of eternal torment--such is the definition of hell.
In such a system, how will the House of Atreus, a house of kings and heroes, survive itself?
When I studied the play, many found Athena's judicial intervention jarring and strange, especially since the first two plays centered around emotionally charged brutality and violent justice. In comparison, the resolution of the trilogy seems cold, a stark contrast to the previous two plays. But it is in this intervention that Aeschylus really delivers his message to Greece. Bound by its own traditions and practices, the House of Atreus would ultimately collapse in on itself. But when subjected to a common, binding law determined by moral and impartial judges was the House of Atreus salvaged. A court system and laws, created by the people, established order where there was madness. In the end, man can find his own way, even if divine forces seek to drive us to another fate.
In these plays, Aeschylus wrested our destiny away from the gods and placed the strands of our fate in our hands. Though it might be a fleeting moment of control, even if we are truly the chess pieces of the gods, Aeschylus reminds us to a certain extent, our fates are our own.
February 12, 2018
The penguin classics version is to be particularly recommended - The translation works very well and the 90 page introduction is just brilliant.
As for the plays, well...they are essential reading obviously. And like all great works in translation, one should really read 2 or 3 different versions in order to get as close as possible to the “original”. The Fagles translation should certainly be one of those versions.
As for the plays, well...they are essential reading obviously. And like all great works in translation, one should really read 2 or 3 different versions in order to get as close as possible to the “original”. The Fagles translation should certainly be one of those versions.
October 30, 2011
Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy of Greek tragedy plays, performed in 458 BCE - two years before Aeschylus's death in 456 BCE. This review summarises all three plays as a trilogy, and because I think that it's easier to read them if you know what to expect, I do give away all the relevant plot points.
The first play, "Agamemnon", is about betrayal: King Agamemnon returns home to Argos after the successful sacking of Troy (in modern-day Turkey), only to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Agamemnon's cousin, Aegisthus, who had taken over Agamemnon's rule in his absence. Clytemnestra is wrathful because her husband sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to placate the god Artemis and secure calm winds for the voyage to Troy, and kills Agamemnon in his bath. They also murder Cassandra, his spoils of war, the prophetess cursed to never be believed who sees her own death but is, of course, disbelieved. Such is the curse of Agamemnon's family continued.
The second play, "Libation Bearers", is about just revenge, or deliverance. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon's son Orestes returns from another kingdom where he was sent to live, having learned from the oracle Loxias of his mother's murderous betrayal. Through Loxias he is given leave by the god Apollo to exact revenge by killing his mother and her lover. When he arrives at the palace he goes first to the tomb of his father to pay his respects; there he encounters his sister Electra, also in mourning. With the help of the palace servants, he disguises himself as a traveller bearing news of his own death so as to trick his way inside and see Aegisthus privately. He slews him and then his mother, who knows she is going to her death but does not fight it.
The third play, "Eumenides", is about justice and change - it displays a new way of seeking justice, that in a new court-of-law, with the verdict decided by a group of citizen jurors in Athens. The Furies are hounding Orestes, demanding payment for the matricide. Orestes seeks out Apollo's temple and Apollo's protection, and then Athena (Pallas Athena), goddess of war, wisdom and justice (among many other things). Athena decides to hold a trial to hear the case, with the Furies the prosecution and Apollo defending Orestes. Athena casts her own vote in Orestes' favour, and the result is a tie: Orestes goes free. The Furies threaten to destroy the land but Athena placates them instead into protecting it, and decrees that henceforth a trial by jury shall always be used to decide such cases.
That's the general overview of this trilogy of Greek tragedies, though there is a lot more going on in the details. I did struggle a bit, reading these short plays, because it's so hard for me to concentrate these days. I found my mind wandering continuously, thoughts intruding, and even when I made the effort to focus I often had to re-read passages several times and then admit defeat. The notes do help, but the fact remains that I had trouble with the structure of many lines, that like obscure poetry they alluded me. Full of metaphor and requiring a great deal of knowledge to get the mythic and historical references, a lot of "Agamemnon" in particular was hard to follow, in particular the Chorus' chants, like when they tell the story of the family curse (I only know that's what it's about from reading the intro and some notes. Other names are often used - like Ilion, for Troy, or Pallas, for Athena - and like an optical illusion the lines seem to double in on themselves so you don't know what the hell is really being said, or so it seems to me, like it's a language I don't know. It gives me a headache.
Yet, on that note, it also made me wonder (an intruding thought among many), how these plays would have been heard by ordinary people, just as Shakespeare's plays were heard by the poor and uneducated as much as the rich - regardless, they all understood them, didn't they? I mean, the style of speech was understandable in all its convolutions and beseechings. We struggle to follow all the lines in Shakespeare today - it just makes me really recognise how much verbal language has changed, verbal English (I know Greek isn't English, but the translation honours the original). But I digress.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this story. We've all heard the story of Troy even if you haven't read The Illiad, and you've probably heard of Agamemnon and Cassandra too. Aeschylus wasn't the only playwright to create plays based on this myth of Agamemnon's murder - Euripides, for example, who came just after Aeschylus died, wrote one too. I've studied some ancient Greek plays, years ago, but I don't really have a background in it. To me, as a modern-day reader and an emancipated woman, I can't help but find them almost misogynistic in tone, even though scholars have apparently seen Clytemnestra as an early feminist figure for taking over the male role of ruler - the translator, Christopher Collard, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Wales, says in his introduction that "it seems unnecessary to think of her as more than a playwright's imaginative construction for the sake of his drama." (p.xxvii) But there are far stronger anti-women sentiments voiced in these plays, especially the third one. (I want to bring it up not because I'm offended or anything, but because it's an interesting theme, to me at least, and because I vaguely remember when I studied Greek plays in university that strong, powerful, mad women are a common theme - but more than that, I can't remember!)
In "Agamemnon", the king himself speaks of the gods' undivided and just support for the destruction of Tory, saying "it was for a woman that Troy was ground into dust..." (p.23)
Apollo has the worst denouncement, though, when he says during the trial in "Eumenides":
And Athena makes her judgement thus:
(Athena, a rational goddess, is the daughter of Zeus, born of his head.)
So combined with Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, his other daughter Electra's idolatry of her father, Clytemnestra's usurping of a man's role and adultery, the gods' promotion of the masculine over the feminine is rather like having the last word. Bit hard to gainsay a god.
I bring up the theme of women in these plays because I feel it is relevant in questioning, what is Clytemnestra's greatest crime here? Why does Orestes feel the need to kill her rather than bring her to justice? Certain lines jump out at me that make it apparent that her greatest crime was taking on a man's role, and therefore depriving Orestes of his inheritance. In "Libation Bearers", Orestes says of his decision to kill his mother,
(By "pair of women" he refers here to his mother's lover Aegisthus, who he calls "effeminate at heart".)
I wonder whether she would have been so abominable in mens' eyes if she had not sought to rule, which she was doing in her husband's absence anyway. It is so easy in mythology to lay all blame and evil and everything that goes wrong, at the feet of women. What scapegoats we make! Though to be fair, if Athena had not cast her own vote, Orestes would have been found guilty, for her vote made it a tie in which case she decreed he would be pardoned. The majority of jurors voted against him.
Which brings me to the big idea of the trilogy of plays, though: justice itself. Here we have the myth of how the first court of law, the first trial, began and was institutionalised in Athens, making it the most sophisticated and modern city-state in Greece. With the Furies trying to avenge Clytemnestra's murder and losing, they bemoan the change: "You younger gods! The ancient laws - you have ridden them down! You have taken them out of my hands for yourselves!" [p.106] The tied verdict, though, helps Athena, the patron of Athens, placate the Furies by saying they have not been dishonoured, and the goddess moves quickly to give the Furies a new role, that of protecting Athens rather than bringing destruction upon it for losing the trial. In doing so, she posits the city as the pinnacle of all things, blessed by the gods and made fortunate by the Furies who she gives the role of "keeping both land and cit on the straight way of justice." (p.111) In telling the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's downfall, this trilogy of plays gives us the mythologised story of how Athens became great - to an Athenian audience, so it's very much a self-aggrandising story.
There's lots more going on here; I've barely scratched the surface. I don't feel I can give it a rating, so I've given it a 3 because it's so middle-of-the-road. In terms of the general plot, it brought to mind "Hamlet" and also "Macbeth" - it's true that everything borrows from everything else, and stripped down, I'm sure there are probably only about three real plots or something (or was it seven? I think there's a book on this already!). It's tricky to read because all the action happens off the page; or rather, it happens in speech, making it fairly bogged-down with details, but this was also an interesting aspect of the plays. It was hard to read Cassandra and Clytemnestra's dialogue when they are both aware they are walking to their deaths - there's real emotion in those lines. The chants of the chorus are the hardest to read, being like poetry rather than prose and requiring significant background knowledge to understand.
A note on this edition: This is a new 2002 translation by Christopher Collard for Oxford World's Classics, and it's more of an academic translation than a popular, readable one. There is a long introduction and essay by Collard on the characters, the theatre production of the plays, dramatic form and so on, as well as extensive notes in the back. It comes with a summary of the three plays - which it's a great idea to read first or it's hard to follow what's going on - as well as a chronology of Agamemnon's family and a map that shows Greece and Turkey, which I really appreciated. All in all, it's a very thorough translation, noting when lines and words are missing from the original manuscripts, and probably your best choice if you're studying the plays.
The first play, "Agamemnon", is about betrayal: King Agamemnon returns home to Argos after the successful sacking of Troy (in modern-day Turkey), only to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover, Agamemnon's cousin, Aegisthus, who had taken over Agamemnon's rule in his absence. Clytemnestra is wrathful because her husband sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to placate the god Artemis and secure calm winds for the voyage to Troy, and kills Agamemnon in his bath. They also murder Cassandra, his spoils of war, the prophetess cursed to never be believed who sees her own death but is, of course, disbelieved. Such is the curse of Agamemnon's family continued.
The second play, "Libation Bearers", is about just revenge, or deliverance. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon's son Orestes returns from another kingdom where he was sent to live, having learned from the oracle Loxias of his mother's murderous betrayal. Through Loxias he is given leave by the god Apollo to exact revenge by killing his mother and her lover. When he arrives at the palace he goes first to the tomb of his father to pay his respects; there he encounters his sister Electra, also in mourning. With the help of the palace servants, he disguises himself as a traveller bearing news of his own death so as to trick his way inside and see Aegisthus privately. He slews him and then his mother, who knows she is going to her death but does not fight it.
The third play, "Eumenides", is about justice and change - it displays a new way of seeking justice, that in a new court-of-law, with the verdict decided by a group of citizen jurors in Athens. The Furies are hounding Orestes, demanding payment for the matricide. Orestes seeks out Apollo's temple and Apollo's protection, and then Athena (Pallas Athena), goddess of war, wisdom and justice (among many other things). Athena decides to hold a trial to hear the case, with the Furies the prosecution and Apollo defending Orestes. Athena casts her own vote in Orestes' favour, and the result is a tie: Orestes goes free. The Furies threaten to destroy the land but Athena placates them instead into protecting it, and decrees that henceforth a trial by jury shall always be used to decide such cases.
That's the general overview of this trilogy of Greek tragedies, though there is a lot more going on in the details. I did struggle a bit, reading these short plays, because it's so hard for me to concentrate these days. I found my mind wandering continuously, thoughts intruding, and even when I made the effort to focus I often had to re-read passages several times and then admit defeat. The notes do help, but the fact remains that I had trouble with the structure of many lines, that like obscure poetry they alluded me. Full of metaphor and requiring a great deal of knowledge to get the mythic and historical references, a lot of "Agamemnon" in particular was hard to follow, in particular the Chorus' chants, like when they tell the story of the family curse (I only know that's what it's about from reading the intro and some notes. Other names are often used - like Ilion, for Troy, or Pallas, for Athena - and like an optical illusion the lines seem to double in on themselves so you don't know what the hell is really being said, or so it seems to me, like it's a language I don't know. It gives me a headache.
Yet, on that note, it also made me wonder (an intruding thought among many), how these plays would have been heard by ordinary people, just as Shakespeare's plays were heard by the poor and uneducated as much as the rich - regardless, they all understood them, didn't they? I mean, the style of speech was understandable in all its convolutions and beseechings. We struggle to follow all the lines in Shakespeare today - it just makes me really recognise how much verbal language has changed, verbal English (I know Greek isn't English, but the translation honours the original). But I digress.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this story. We've all heard the story of Troy even if you haven't read The Illiad, and you've probably heard of Agamemnon and Cassandra too. Aeschylus wasn't the only playwright to create plays based on this myth of Agamemnon's murder - Euripides, for example, who came just after Aeschylus died, wrote one too. I've studied some ancient Greek plays, years ago, but I don't really have a background in it. To me, as a modern-day reader and an emancipated woman, I can't help but find them almost misogynistic in tone, even though scholars have apparently seen Clytemnestra as an early feminist figure for taking over the male role of ruler - the translator, Christopher Collard, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Wales, says in his introduction that "it seems unnecessary to think of her as more than a playwright's imaginative construction for the sake of his drama." (p.xxvii) But there are far stronger anti-women sentiments voiced in these plays, especially the third one. (I want to bring it up not because I'm offended or anything, but because it's an interesting theme, to me at least, and because I vaguely remember when I studied Greek plays in university that strong, powerful, mad women are a common theme - but more than that, I can't remember!)
In "Agamemnon", the king himself speaks of the gods' undivided and just support for the destruction of Tory, saying "it was for a woman that Troy was ground into dust..." (p.23)
Apollo has the worst denouncement, though, when he says during the trial in "Eumenides":
The so-called mother is no parent of a child, but nurturer of a newly seeded embryo; the parent is the one who mounts her, while she conserves the child like a stranger for a stranger, for those fathers not thwarted by god. [p.103]
And Athena makes her judgement thus:
It is my business in this case to give my judgement last; and I shall cast this vote of mine for Orestes. [...] I do so because there is no mother who gave me birth, and I approve the masculine in everything - except for union with it - with all my heart; and I am very much my father's: so I will set a higher value on the death of a woman who killed her husband, a house's guardian. [p.105]
(Athena, a rational goddess, is the daughter of Zeus, born of his head.)
So combined with Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter, his other daughter Electra's idolatry of her father, Clytemnestra's usurping of a man's role and adultery, the gods' promotion of the masculine over the feminine is rather like having the last word. Bit hard to gainsay a god.
I bring up the theme of women in these plays because I feel it is relevant in questioning, what is Clytemnestra's greatest crime here? Why does Orestes feel the need to kill her rather than bring her to justice? Certain lines jump out at me that make it apparent that her greatest crime was taking on a man's role, and therefore depriving Orestes of his inheritance. In "Libation Bearers", Orestes says of his decision to kill his mother,
"Many desires are falling together into one; there are the gods' commands, and my great grief for my father; besides, it oppresses me to be deprived of my property, so that our citizens, who have the finest glory among men, and honour for their heart in sacking Troy, should not be subjects like this of a pair of women. [p.59]
(By "pair of women" he refers here to his mother's lover Aegisthus, who he calls "effeminate at heart".)
I wonder whether she would have been so abominable in mens' eyes if she had not sought to rule, which she was doing in her husband's absence anyway. It is so easy in mythology to lay all blame and evil and everything that goes wrong, at the feet of women. What scapegoats we make! Though to be fair, if Athena had not cast her own vote, Orestes would have been found guilty, for her vote made it a tie in which case she decreed he would be pardoned. The majority of jurors voted against him.
Which brings me to the big idea of the trilogy of plays, though: justice itself. Here we have the myth of how the first court of law, the first trial, began and was institutionalised in Athens, making it the most sophisticated and modern city-state in Greece. With the Furies trying to avenge Clytemnestra's murder and losing, they bemoan the change: "You younger gods! The ancient laws - you have ridden them down! You have taken them out of my hands for yourselves!" [p.106] The tied verdict, though, helps Athena, the patron of Athens, placate the Furies by saying they have not been dishonoured, and the goddess moves quickly to give the Furies a new role, that of protecting Athens rather than bringing destruction upon it for losing the trial. In doing so, she posits the city as the pinnacle of all things, blessed by the gods and made fortunate by the Furies who she gives the role of "keeping both land and cit on the straight way of justice." (p.111) In telling the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's downfall, this trilogy of plays gives us the mythologised story of how Athens became great - to an Athenian audience, so it's very much a self-aggrandising story.
There's lots more going on here; I've barely scratched the surface. I don't feel I can give it a rating, so I've given it a 3 because it's so middle-of-the-road. In terms of the general plot, it brought to mind "Hamlet" and also "Macbeth" - it's true that everything borrows from everything else, and stripped down, I'm sure there are probably only about three real plots or something (or was it seven? I think there's a book on this already!). It's tricky to read because all the action happens off the page; or rather, it happens in speech, making it fairly bogged-down with details, but this was also an interesting aspect of the plays. It was hard to read Cassandra and Clytemnestra's dialogue when they are both aware they are walking to their deaths - there's real emotion in those lines. The chants of the chorus are the hardest to read, being like poetry rather than prose and requiring significant background knowledge to understand.
A note on this edition: This is a new 2002 translation by Christopher Collard for Oxford World's Classics, and it's more of an academic translation than a popular, readable one. There is a long introduction and essay by Collard on the characters, the theatre production of the plays, dramatic form and so on, as well as extensive notes in the back. It comes with a summary of the three plays - which it's a great idea to read first or it's hard to follow what's going on - as well as a chronology of Agamemnon's family and a map that shows Greece and Turkey, which I really appreciated. All in all, it's a very thorough translation, noting when lines and words are missing from the original manuscripts, and probably your best choice if you're studying the plays.
September 6, 2021
Or is revenge not the way to go after all? Many an Athenian must have asked just this sort of question after watching a performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, from the time when this trilogy of plays was first performed at the Theatre of Dionysus, on the Acropolis in Athens, in 458 B.C. The Oresteian trilogy of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides may be 2500 years old, but these plays are downright modern in the way they encourage the modern reader or viewer to meditate on revenge, its causes, and its consequences.
In our modern world, we are used to being told that it is wrong to seek revenge. At the same time, however, every human being knows the feeling of being wronged, and the strength of that immediate, atavistic wish to repay wrong for wrong. The ancient Greek attitude toward revenge was just as contradictory. On the one hand, Greek civilization had its beginnings in the warrior culture that had won the Trojan War – an honor culture in which one always had to be ready to defend with violence one’s own good name and that of one’s family. On the other hand, Athens in 458 B.C. was just a few years into its experiment in democracy. No doubt the Athenians knew that vengeance and democracy are incompatible – that “an eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind.
That seemingly contradictory attitude toward revenge makes its way into The Oresteia -- a trilogy of plays that wastes no time moving from spousal murder and coup d’état to matricide. The first play in the trilogy, Agamemnon, chronicles the Mycenaean king’s return from Troy after the Greek victory in the Trojan War. Little does Agamemnon know that he is a marked man; his wife Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and the two plan to murder Agamemnon. Clytemnestra seeks revenge against her husband because, to secure a favorable wind when the ships were first sailing for Troy, Agamemnon ordered the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia (a story told in Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis). For this reason, there is a decided double edge to lines like the one in which Clytemnestra tells a herald bringing the news of the Greek victory, “Now for the best way to welcome home/my lord, my good lord….” (p. 125).
The Agamemnon of this play seems somewhat more sympathetic than the antagonistic king of Homer’s Iliad; when Clytemnestra invites him to walk upon crimson tapestries like a barbarian potentate, Agamemnon demurs, saying, with a humility that an Athenian audience would have found appropriate, that “only the gods deserve the pomps of honour/and the stiff brocades of fame. To walk on them…/I am human, and it makes my pulses stir/with dread” (p. 137). Nonetheless, his pious humility notwithstanding, Agamemnon is doomed to die at the hands of his wife and her lover.
Likewise doomed is Cassandra, the Trojan princess brought home as a slave by Agamemnon (another act of Agamemnon’s that is unlikely to improve Clytemnestra’s mood). Cassandra is blessed with the gift of prophecy, but cursed with the knowledge that no one will believe her prophecies. Knowing that she and Agamemnon are about to die at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Cassandra looks ahead – accurately, as always – to future events when she remarks that “We will die,/but not without some honour from the gods./There will come another to avenge us,/born to kill his mother, born/His father’s champion” (p. 155). That promise of retribution aside, the play Agamemnon ends on a grim note, with the chorus of old Argive men indignant at the murder of their king, but helpless to do anything against the new tyranny of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
The man alluded to in Cassandra’s anguished speech – the man fated to avenge his father by killing his own mother – is, of course, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; and as The Libation Bearers begins, Orestes has come home to Argos, accompanied by his friend Pylades. Once Orestes and his sister Electra have found each other, they plan their revenge. Orestes learns that Clytemnestra, plagued by evil dreams and fearful that she will face divine vengeance for her crime of husband-murder, has ordered that a group of enslaved women serve as libation bearers, offering sacrifices to the gods in an attempt to expiate Clytemnestra’s crime. Scornfully, Orestes asks of his mother’s after-the-fact repentance, “Why did she send libations? What possessed her,/so late, to salve a wound past healing?/To the unforgiving dead she sends this sop,/this…who am I to appreciate her gifts?/They fall so short of all her failings” (p. 200). No show of remorse on Clytemnestra’s part – no set of pious prayers mouthed by enslaved libation bearers forced to pray for a murderess whom they despise – is going to sway Orestes from his path of vengeance.
What does, momentarily, shake Orestes from his vengeful path is simple, human emotion - his natural feelings of filial affection toward his mother. The killing of Aegisthus, the original evil stepfather, is an easy enough thing; but then Clytemnestra opens her robe to reveal the breasts with which, many years before, as a young mother, she suckled the baby Orestes. “Wait, my son – no respect for this, my child?/The breast you held, drowsing away the hours,/soft gums tugging the milk that made you grow?” (p. 216) Orestes is momentarily paralyzed by coming face-to-face with the paradoxical reality that he can only avenge his father by killing his mother: “What will I do, Pylades? – I dread to kill my mother!” (p. 217) It is left to Pylades to speak as the voice of god-ordained revenge: “What of the future? What of the Prophet God Apollo,/the Delphic voice, the faith and oaths we swear?/Make all mankind your enemy, not the gods” (p. 217). Thus steeled by Pylades’ invocation of divine will, Orestes proceeds with his own fateful act of matricide.
I call it “fateful” because, divine will or no, Orestes still faces consequences for killing his mother. The mere fact that he acted in response to divine command does not exempt Orestes from a terrible, elemental punishment – to be forever pursued and driven mad by the Furies, hideous snake-haired monsters whose entire purpose, in the Olympian worldview, is to punish certain particularly heinous crimes such as matricide.
It matters not that, as the leader of the chorus of formerly enslaved women states, Orestes has “set us free, the whole city of Argos,/lopped the heads of these two serpents once for all” (p. 224). For Orestes, there is only the ultimate, fundamental horror of seeing, everywhere he turns, “Women – look – like Gorgons,/shrouded in black, their heads wreathed,/swarming serpents!” (p. 225). Orestes’ fate, barring some sort of divine intervention, is to be forever driven mad by the Furies, constantly running from them – “they drive me on! I must move” (p. 225) – in a vain search for shelter or relief. The Libation Bearers ends on this grim note, with only the vague hope expressed by the choral leader that “One thing will purge you. Apollo’s touch will set you free from all your…torments” (p. 225).
“Eumenides” means “kindly ones,” and therefore it seems counterintuitive that the concluding play in this trilogy, a play about the snake-haired, avenging Furies, should be titled The Eumenides (The Kindly Ones). Yet the manner in which Aeschylus resolves this seemingly unresolvable dilemma reveals much regarding the playwright’s beliefs regarding both justice and the relationship between divinity and humankind.
At Apollo’s behest, Orestes, pursued by the Furies, has made his way to the Acropolis of Athens, where he throws himself upon the mercy of Athena, the city’s patron goddess. The Furies meanwhile vow to pursue Orestes unto death, prompted in part by the urgings of the ghost of Clytemnestra, who calls upon the Furies to avenge her murder: “Never forget my anguish./Let my charges hurt you, they are just” (p. 236).
Reluctantly, the Furies agree to let Athena serve as judge between them and Orestes, and the goddess of wisdom lectures the Furies on their narrow and harsh conception of justice, telling them that “you are set on the name of justice rather than the act”, and adding that “Injustice…should never triumph thanks to oaths” (p. 250). The Furies’ defense of their code of vengeance comes to seem legalistic, pettifogging – when Orestes asks why the Furies did not hound Clytemnestra for killing her husband Agamemnon, the leader of the Furies responds, “The blood of the man she killed was not her own” (p. 258). Apollo himself witnesses on behalf of Orestes, and in a traditional Athenian-style trial, Orestes is acquitted by a tie vote.
Yet in response to the Furies’ rage at being denied the victim of their vengeance, Athena offers them a new mission – to become protectors, with her, of the city of Athens: “Look,/it is all yours, a royal share of our land –/justly entitled, glorified forever” (p. 270). The Furies, albeit somewhat reluctantly, accept Athena’s offer; and in the process of forswearing revenge, they cease to be hideous monsters, and become benevolent deities – Eumenides, “kindly ones.” The anti-vengeance message in this resolution of the trilogy seems clear. Additionally, an Athenian spectator of Aeschylus’ time might have thought of the way Athens’ legal system moved from the cruelty of Draco – a man whose laws were so harsh that he gave the world the word “draconian” – to the more enlightened code of the lawgiver Solon.
In the resolution of The Oresteia, we also learn a great deal regarding Aeschylus’ religious sensibilities. I had always heard Aeschylus described as being, of Athens’ three great playwrights, the most conventionally reverent, with his later successors Sophocles and Euripides being more willing to challenge convention – as if Aeschylus was driving around Athens in a chariot with a bumper sticker on the back saying ZEUS SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT. The truth, unsurprisingly, is more complex. Both in The Oresteia and in Aeschylus’ other surviving plays, there is indeed a suggestion that human beings must learn how to serve the gods more reverently – but there is also a corollary suggestion that the gods must likewise learn how to rule over humankind more justly. The divine and the human must find a way to reach out toward each other.
And, as mentioned above, this trilogy’s reflections upon the subject of vengeance are quite modern. Teaching The Oresteia for a “What Is Literature?” class at Penn State University, I found myself pairing the trilogy with Steven Spielberg’s film Munich (2005). The film, which details the Israeli government’s efforts to kill the Palestinian “Black September” terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics, provides, like The Oresteia, a thoughtful look at revenge and its ramifications.
At first, the film’s main character, Mossad agent Avner Kaufman (played by Eric Bana), accepts without too much question the decision by Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government that the blood of the murdered Israeli athletes must be repaid with the blood of their Palestinian killers. Yet as Avner sees the Palestinians with their families, hears from them tales of oppression and dislocation similar to the experience of many Israelis, faces the prospect that the taking of revenge may involve the unintended sacrifice of innocent lives, he begins to question the mission in which he is engaged. Few things could be more modern, or more enduringly relevant, than a story of whether or not to take revenge.
This Penguin Books edition of The Oresteia, rendered into English by the great translator Robert Fagles, includes a helpful introductory essay, informative notes, and a useful glossary. It is a great way to get to know the first complete, surviving trilogy of tragic plays from classical Greece.
In our modern world, we are used to being told that it is wrong to seek revenge. At the same time, however, every human being knows the feeling of being wronged, and the strength of that immediate, atavistic wish to repay wrong for wrong. The ancient Greek attitude toward revenge was just as contradictory. On the one hand, Greek civilization had its beginnings in the warrior culture that had won the Trojan War – an honor culture in which one always had to be ready to defend with violence one’s own good name and that of one’s family. On the other hand, Athens in 458 B.C. was just a few years into its experiment in democracy. No doubt the Athenians knew that vengeance and democracy are incompatible – that “an eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind.
That seemingly contradictory attitude toward revenge makes its way into The Oresteia -- a trilogy of plays that wastes no time moving from spousal murder and coup d’état to matricide. The first play in the trilogy, Agamemnon, chronicles the Mycenaean king’s return from Troy after the Greek victory in the Trojan War. Little does Agamemnon know that he is a marked man; his wife Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and the two plan to murder Agamemnon. Clytemnestra seeks revenge against her husband because, to secure a favorable wind when the ships were first sailing for Troy, Agamemnon ordered the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia (a story told in Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis). For this reason, there is a decided double edge to lines like the one in which Clytemnestra tells a herald bringing the news of the Greek victory, “Now for the best way to welcome home/my lord, my good lord….” (p. 125).
The Agamemnon of this play seems somewhat more sympathetic than the antagonistic king of Homer’s Iliad; when Clytemnestra invites him to walk upon crimson tapestries like a barbarian potentate, Agamemnon demurs, saying, with a humility that an Athenian audience would have found appropriate, that “only the gods deserve the pomps of honour/and the stiff brocades of fame. To walk on them…/I am human, and it makes my pulses stir/with dread” (p. 137). Nonetheless, his pious humility notwithstanding, Agamemnon is doomed to die at the hands of his wife and her lover.
Likewise doomed is Cassandra, the Trojan princess brought home as a slave by Agamemnon (another act of Agamemnon’s that is unlikely to improve Clytemnestra’s mood). Cassandra is blessed with the gift of prophecy, but cursed with the knowledge that no one will believe her prophecies. Knowing that she and Agamemnon are about to die at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Cassandra looks ahead – accurately, as always – to future events when she remarks that “We will die,/but not without some honour from the gods./There will come another to avenge us,/born to kill his mother, born/His father’s champion” (p. 155). That promise of retribution aside, the play Agamemnon ends on a grim note, with the chorus of old Argive men indignant at the murder of their king, but helpless to do anything against the new tyranny of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.
The man alluded to in Cassandra’s anguished speech – the man fated to avenge his father by killing his own mother – is, of course, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; and as The Libation Bearers begins, Orestes has come home to Argos, accompanied by his friend Pylades. Once Orestes and his sister Electra have found each other, they plan their revenge. Orestes learns that Clytemnestra, plagued by evil dreams and fearful that she will face divine vengeance for her crime of husband-murder, has ordered that a group of enslaved women serve as libation bearers, offering sacrifices to the gods in an attempt to expiate Clytemnestra’s crime. Scornfully, Orestes asks of his mother’s after-the-fact repentance, “Why did she send libations? What possessed her,/so late, to salve a wound past healing?/To the unforgiving dead she sends this sop,/this…who am I to appreciate her gifts?/They fall so short of all her failings” (p. 200). No show of remorse on Clytemnestra’s part – no set of pious prayers mouthed by enslaved libation bearers forced to pray for a murderess whom they despise – is going to sway Orestes from his path of vengeance.
What does, momentarily, shake Orestes from his vengeful path is simple, human emotion - his natural feelings of filial affection toward his mother. The killing of Aegisthus, the original evil stepfather, is an easy enough thing; but then Clytemnestra opens her robe to reveal the breasts with which, many years before, as a young mother, she suckled the baby Orestes. “Wait, my son – no respect for this, my child?/The breast you held, drowsing away the hours,/soft gums tugging the milk that made you grow?” (p. 216) Orestes is momentarily paralyzed by coming face-to-face with the paradoxical reality that he can only avenge his father by killing his mother: “What will I do, Pylades? – I dread to kill my mother!” (p. 217) It is left to Pylades to speak as the voice of god-ordained revenge: “What of the future? What of the Prophet God Apollo,/the Delphic voice, the faith and oaths we swear?/Make all mankind your enemy, not the gods” (p. 217). Thus steeled by Pylades’ invocation of divine will, Orestes proceeds with his own fateful act of matricide.
I call it “fateful” because, divine will or no, Orestes still faces consequences for killing his mother. The mere fact that he acted in response to divine command does not exempt Orestes from a terrible, elemental punishment – to be forever pursued and driven mad by the Furies, hideous snake-haired monsters whose entire purpose, in the Olympian worldview, is to punish certain particularly heinous crimes such as matricide.
It matters not that, as the leader of the chorus of formerly enslaved women states, Orestes has “set us free, the whole city of Argos,/lopped the heads of these two serpents once for all” (p. 224). For Orestes, there is only the ultimate, fundamental horror of seeing, everywhere he turns, “Women – look – like Gorgons,/shrouded in black, their heads wreathed,/swarming serpents!” (p. 225). Orestes’ fate, barring some sort of divine intervention, is to be forever driven mad by the Furies, constantly running from them – “they drive me on! I must move” (p. 225) – in a vain search for shelter or relief. The Libation Bearers ends on this grim note, with only the vague hope expressed by the choral leader that “One thing will purge you. Apollo’s touch will set you free from all your…torments” (p. 225).
“Eumenides” means “kindly ones,” and therefore it seems counterintuitive that the concluding play in this trilogy, a play about the snake-haired, avenging Furies, should be titled The Eumenides (The Kindly Ones). Yet the manner in which Aeschylus resolves this seemingly unresolvable dilemma reveals much regarding the playwright’s beliefs regarding both justice and the relationship between divinity and humankind.
At Apollo’s behest, Orestes, pursued by the Furies, has made his way to the Acropolis of Athens, where he throws himself upon the mercy of Athena, the city’s patron goddess. The Furies meanwhile vow to pursue Orestes unto death, prompted in part by the urgings of the ghost of Clytemnestra, who calls upon the Furies to avenge her murder: “Never forget my anguish./Let my charges hurt you, they are just” (p. 236).
Reluctantly, the Furies agree to let Athena serve as judge between them and Orestes, and the goddess of wisdom lectures the Furies on their narrow and harsh conception of justice, telling them that “you are set on the name of justice rather than the act”, and adding that “Injustice…should never triumph thanks to oaths” (p. 250). The Furies’ defense of their code of vengeance comes to seem legalistic, pettifogging – when Orestes asks why the Furies did not hound Clytemnestra for killing her husband Agamemnon, the leader of the Furies responds, “The blood of the man she killed was not her own” (p. 258). Apollo himself witnesses on behalf of Orestes, and in a traditional Athenian-style trial, Orestes is acquitted by a tie vote.
Yet in response to the Furies’ rage at being denied the victim of their vengeance, Athena offers them a new mission – to become protectors, with her, of the city of Athens: “Look,/it is all yours, a royal share of our land –/justly entitled, glorified forever” (p. 270). The Furies, albeit somewhat reluctantly, accept Athena’s offer; and in the process of forswearing revenge, they cease to be hideous monsters, and become benevolent deities – Eumenides, “kindly ones.” The anti-vengeance message in this resolution of the trilogy seems clear. Additionally, an Athenian spectator of Aeschylus’ time might have thought of the way Athens’ legal system moved from the cruelty of Draco – a man whose laws were so harsh that he gave the world the word “draconian” – to the more enlightened code of the lawgiver Solon.
In the resolution of The Oresteia, we also learn a great deal regarding Aeschylus’ religious sensibilities. I had always heard Aeschylus described as being, of Athens’ three great playwrights, the most conventionally reverent, with his later successors Sophocles and Euripides being more willing to challenge convention – as if Aeschylus was driving around Athens in a chariot with a bumper sticker on the back saying ZEUS SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT. The truth, unsurprisingly, is more complex. Both in The Oresteia and in Aeschylus’ other surviving plays, there is indeed a suggestion that human beings must learn how to serve the gods more reverently – but there is also a corollary suggestion that the gods must likewise learn how to rule over humankind more justly. The divine and the human must find a way to reach out toward each other.
And, as mentioned above, this trilogy’s reflections upon the subject of vengeance are quite modern. Teaching The Oresteia for a “What Is Literature?” class at Penn State University, I found myself pairing the trilogy with Steven Spielberg’s film Munich (2005). The film, which details the Israeli government’s efforts to kill the Palestinian “Black September” terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics, provides, like The Oresteia, a thoughtful look at revenge and its ramifications.
At first, the film’s main character, Mossad agent Avner Kaufman (played by Eric Bana), accepts without too much question the decision by Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government that the blood of the murdered Israeli athletes must be repaid with the blood of their Palestinian killers. Yet as Avner sees the Palestinians with their families, hears from them tales of oppression and dislocation similar to the experience of many Israelis, faces the prospect that the taking of revenge may involve the unintended sacrifice of innocent lives, he begins to question the mission in which he is engaged. Few things could be more modern, or more enduringly relevant, than a story of whether or not to take revenge.
This Penguin Books edition of The Oresteia, rendered into English by the great translator Robert Fagles, includes a helpful introductory essay, informative notes, and a useful glossary. It is a great way to get to know the first complete, surviving trilogy of tragic plays from classical Greece.
October 1, 2023
The Oresteian Trilogy contains three works by Aeschylus: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. My audio version, which is read by a full cast, also includes an excerpt from Proteus in The Odyssey that refers to Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. It was performed in 458 BCE and is the only Greek drama that survives in its entirety. It is a story of vengeance and justice. In the first part, when Agamemnon returns from Troy, his wife Clytemnestra takes revenge on him for his role in the sacrifice of their daughter Iphegenia. In The Libation Bearers, Orestes and Electra take revenge on their mother Clytemnestra. In Eumenides, Orestes goes on trial for killing Clytemnestra, with Athena as judge, the Furies as prosecutors, and Apollo speaking for the defense. It reflects the changes in Greek society at the time, told as a clash between the old gods and the new order. This Greek tragedy is written in an eloquent manner. It is surprisingly modern in its translation by Ian Johnston and adaptation by Yuri Rasovsky. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the classics. I think audio is a wonderful way to gain an appreciation for how it may have been performed.
November 20, 2023
For such an old play the characters speak remarkably clear.
The drama, violence and deceit are rendered in long winding verses which take you through the play in high speed. The third act with a rather sudden verdict made less impact on me but overall highly enjoyable to read this classic.
The drama, violence and deceit are rendered in long winding verses which take you through the play in high speed. The third act with a rather sudden verdict made less impact on me but overall highly enjoyable to read this classic.
March 19, 2021
Probably more 3.75 rounded up!
”he’s here, somewhere, cowering like a hare....
the reek of human blood-it’s laughter to my heart!”
So I’ll do this in three parts as it is 3 plays. These plays combined are called “The Orestia” and tells the homecoming of Agamemnon, his murder, and the revenge his son and daughter take in return... and then the consequences of that.
I have read “Agamemnon“ by Aeschylus once before, in a book called “Greek Tragedy” by Penguin Books. While I can’t remember who the translator for that book was, this full recounting of The Orestia was done by Robert Fagles.
The first play, “Agamemnon” follows said character in his ‘welcome back home’ after fighting in Troy (in Aeschylus’ play this is in Argos and not Mycenae as told by Homer). Here he is greeted by his wife Clytemnestra... who is obviously still hateful and bearing a resentful grudge towards Agamemnon due to his involvement and planning in the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia. No surprises there. So being the vengeful queen she is- she gets her just revenge (in my opinion).
This play also shows Cassandra, the prophetess, and Agamemnon’s ‘spoil of war’. She prophesies all of these deaths but has the unfortunate ability that everything she prophesies will not be believed (thanks Apollo- note the sarcasm).
Anyway, next we move onto “The Libation Bearers” (play 2). Here we follow the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon (well... the surviving children I mean). Electra has not seen her brother, Orestes, in years and wishes to take revenge on Clytemnestra for her part in killing their father.
The first half of this play focuses on Orestes and Electra meeting again (after a long time apart) and the awful ‘clues’ Electra follows to convince herself that Orestes is at Agamemnon’s tomb. These clues consist of a lock of hair and a footprint...It is no wonder Euripides made fun of these absurd ‘clues’ in his play “Electra”.
As always, my interest picked up when there’s blood shed and when Orestes grapples with his moral thoughts. Again, Electra is also a vengeful female character (there’s a pattern to this in this trilogy).
The final play “The Eumenides” follows my all-time-favourite Furies who hunt down those who have committed crimes, such as matricide, and torment them. They are after Orestes in this one.
I enjoyed this play probably the most out of the three. This play involved the Gods too (well Athena and Apollo) and the Furies. I just loved the Furies in this, and their vengeance and torment and love for destruction.
This play also features a great court scene where you get to see Athena in her military prowess and strategy hold a trial about Orestes’ crimes.
While it was great to finally read The Orestia- I loved the powerful vengefulness in these plays, and how a family curse has effected each generation- my translation of this just wasn’t the best. I really liked the power of words of some of the passages and the emotions portrayed- it was great to imagine how an actor in a play might show this. However, I found the book layout to not be as clear as I would’ve liked it, and flicking backwards and forwards would take me out of the passages of what was being said.
In addition to this, this translation uses the word “bitch” which wasn’t really needed... and was also not a word used in Ancient Greek (I think?).
Some parts of these plays, for me, moved at a slower pace that I did lose my focus. However, most of the time it would pick up again and I’d be interested to find out what happened in the end.
I would say that The Libation Bearers was probably my least liked play of the three- I think the beginning was a little too slow for my liking, and I was eye rolling hard at the clues, however this play did eventually pick up once the killing deeds are about to begin.
”he’s here, somewhere, cowering like a hare....
the reek of human blood-it’s laughter to my heart!”
So I’ll do this in three parts as it is 3 plays. These plays combined are called “The Orestia” and tells the homecoming of Agamemnon, his murder, and the revenge his son and daughter take in return... and then the consequences of that.
I have read “Agamemnon“ by Aeschylus once before, in a book called “Greek Tragedy” by Penguin Books. While I can’t remember who the translator for that book was, this full recounting of The Orestia was done by Robert Fagles.
The first play, “Agamemnon” follows said character in his ‘welcome back home’ after fighting in Troy (in Aeschylus’ play this is in Argos and not Mycenae as told by Homer). Here he is greeted by his wife Clytemnestra... who is obviously still hateful and bearing a resentful grudge towards Agamemnon due to his involvement and planning in the sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia. No surprises there. So being the vengeful queen she is- she gets her just revenge (in my opinion).
This play also shows Cassandra, the prophetess, and Agamemnon’s ‘spoil of war’. She prophesies all of these deaths but has the unfortunate ability that everything she prophesies will not be believed (thanks Apollo- note the sarcasm).
Anyway, next we move onto “The Libation Bearers” (play 2). Here we follow the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon (well... the surviving children I mean). Electra has not seen her brother, Orestes, in years and wishes to take revenge on Clytemnestra for her part in killing their father.
The first half of this play focuses on Orestes and Electra meeting again (after a long time apart) and the awful ‘clues’ Electra follows to convince herself that Orestes is at Agamemnon’s tomb. These clues consist of a lock of hair and a footprint...It is no wonder Euripides made fun of these absurd ‘clues’ in his play “Electra”.
As always, my interest picked up when there’s blood shed and when Orestes grapples with his moral thoughts. Again, Electra is also a vengeful female character (there’s a pattern to this in this trilogy).
The final play “The Eumenides” follows my all-time-favourite Furies who hunt down those who have committed crimes, such as matricide, and torment them. They are after Orestes in this one.
I enjoyed this play probably the most out of the three. This play involved the Gods too (well Athena and Apollo) and the Furies. I just loved the Furies in this, and their vengeance and torment and love for destruction.
This play also features a great court scene where you get to see Athena in her military prowess and strategy hold a trial about Orestes’ crimes.
While it was great to finally read The Orestia- I loved the powerful vengefulness in these plays, and how a family curse has effected each generation- my translation of this just wasn’t the best. I really liked the power of words of some of the passages and the emotions portrayed- it was great to imagine how an actor in a play might show this. However, I found the book layout to not be as clear as I would’ve liked it, and flicking backwards and forwards would take me out of the passages of what was being said.
In addition to this, this translation uses the word “bitch” which wasn’t really needed... and was also not a word used in Ancient Greek (I think?).
Some parts of these plays, for me, moved at a slower pace that I did lose my focus. However, most of the time it would pick up again and I’d be interested to find out what happened in the end.
I would say that The Libation Bearers was probably my least liked play of the three- I think the beginning was a little too slow for my liking, and I was eye rolling hard at the clues, however this play did eventually pick up once the killing deeds are about to begin.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 30, 2018
According to the Wikpedia entry for Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
"...The canvasses are based on the Eumenides—or Furies—of Aeschylus's Oresteia...Bacon did not seek to illustrate the narrative of the tale, however. He told the French art critic Michel Leiris, "I could not paint Agamemnon, Clytemnestra or Cassandra, as that would have been merely another kind of historical painting ... Therefore I tried to create an image of the effect it produced inside me."
Aeschylus' phrase "the reek of human blood smiles out at me" in particular haunted Bacon, and his treatments of the mouth in the triptych and many subsequent paintings were attempts to visualise the sentiment.
In 1985, he observed that Aeschylus' phrase brought up in him "the most exciting images, and I often read it ... the violence of it brings up the images in me, 'the reek of human blood smiles out at me', well what could be more amazing than that."
November 29, 2015
Agamemnon (Oresteia, #1):The First Strike
The Libation Bearers (Oresteia, #2): The Course of The Curse
Eumenides (Oresteia, #3): Pending
July 15, 2012
I tried to read 'Prometheus Bound' years ago, and couldn't finish it. Clearly I should have waited a while- The Oresteia, in the Fagles translation, is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. Darker and more violent than anything the 20th century could come up with, it's also brighter and more hopeful than anything from the 19th century. It's as if someone had written both Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' and Eliot's 'Waste Land', and it was one book, only there was far deeper social, political and religious thought involved (this is no slight to those two poems). A less edifying, but funnier joy was finding the original 'better to live on your feet than die on your knees' statement being made by an old codger running around like a headless chook while the 'tyrant' murders the 'innocents.'
Otherwise, the introductory essay is a little hand-wavy for my tastes, and the notes are often too detailed and insufficiently informative. Fagles' translation is modern in that it accepts and respects difficulty, while not being utterly obscure. It'll take you some time to read, but it's well worth it.
Otherwise, the introductory essay is a little hand-wavy for my tastes, and the notes are often too detailed and insufficiently informative. Fagles' translation is modern in that it accepts and respects difficulty, while not being utterly obscure. It'll take you some time to read, but it's well worth it.
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