From the Bookshelf of Reading Ancient Classics…

Oresteia

Aeschylus,

Christopher Collard (Translator)

Start date: May 16, 2020

Finish date: June 30, 2020

Why we're reading this: Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the only trilogy to survive from Ancient Greece. It tells the story of Clytemnestr…more
[close] Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the only trilogy to survive from Ancient Greece. It tells the story of Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon in vengeance for the killing of their daughter, Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrificed to the goddess Artemis in exchange for favourable winds to sail to Troy. It focuses on themes of gender, justice, and duty (to family, country, gods), and serves as a foundation myth for the Areopagus homicide court in Athens. It is an extremely important piece of literature, and influenced many later writers, including Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.

What do you think of the Oresteia, and in particular, how do you feel about the ‘justness’ of each of the killings? How do the killers (Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes) justify their actions, and how plausible are those justifications? In particular, why is Clytemnestra villainized to a greater extent than either Agamemnon or Orestes? Is this villainization fair? How did you feel about the outcome of the trial, and the votes of the jurors and Athena? Did you feel that justice had been done?

We read Aeschylus' Oresteia in May and June 2020, as part of a Greek tragedy read-along

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Jun 22, 2014 Suzanne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: greek-roman-literature, classics, favorites, ma-thesis, greek-tragedy, plays, reading-ancient-classics

Aeschylus is the eldest, and perhaps greatest, of the three Athenian tragedians. His Oresteia (which I did my MA thesis on!) is the only trilogy to survive from antiquity. It comprises the tragedies Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, & Eumenides. All three were performed in sequence on the same day in the spring of 458 BC, at the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and won first prize in the tragic competition.

The trilogy follows the fates of:
- Agamemnon, the king who sacrificed his own daughter in exchan Aeschylus is the eldest, and perhaps greatest, of the three Athenian tragedians. His Oresteia (which I did my MA thesis on!) is the only trilogy to survive from antiquity. It comprises the tragedies Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, & Eumenides. All three were performed in sequence on the same day in the spring of 458 BC, at the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and won first prize in the tragic competition.

The trilogy follows the fates of:
- Agamemnon, the king who sacrificed his own daughter in exchange for favourable winds to sail his army to Troy;
- his strong-willed and vengeful wife Clytemnestra, who has been ruling the kingdom in her own right during his absence and who demands justice for her murdered daughter;
- and their son Orestes, torn between his duty to his father and his duty to his mother.

Justice & gender are the two great themes of this trilogy, which serves as a foundation myth for the Areopagus, the Athenian homicide court. After murdering his mother in order to avenge his father, Orestes is sent to Athens to stand trial for matricide, where the goddess Athena inaugurates the first court, in order to break the cycle of revenge killings. It also serves as a foundation myth for patriarchy: Apollo & Athena acquit Orestes on the grounds that killing a woman is not as serious a crime as killing a man, because the man is the head of the family and the state. By killing her husband, Clytemnestra had subverted the traditional patriarchal social order, and thus her crime was considered far worse than Agamemnon’ and Orestes’ murder of their female relatives. However, Aeschylus does not mean for his audience to blindly accept the gods’ sexist logic: Apollo is characterized in a negative way - arrogant & disrespectful - and his arguments blatantly contradict broadly accepted truths of his audience; the human jury actually votes against Orestes - Athena’s vote makes the outcome a tie, and Orestes gets off on this technicality; and finally, Aeschylus gave Clytemnestra a powerful voice, with which she calls out the injustice & double standards of her society - she is, possibly, my favourite character in all Graeco-Roman literature. ...more

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