The clash of world view in Greek myth

An essay of mine from a few decades ago or thereabouts. I was starting to dissent which of course resulted in lower marks. As academia is so free.

Euripides’ plays shared many characters with Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles, such as Agamemnon and Helen. It is assumed therefore that these plays of Euripides were set in the Heroic Age, or more specifically 12th and 13th centuries BCE Greece a time of Kings and possibly Tyrants. But in many of his plays Euripides also brings through elements of his own 5th Century Greece that did not exist in such earlier Greek epochs, such as democracy and courts of justice. Consequently it has often been said that Euripides added elements to his plays that were essentially anachronistic. Others though seem quite happy to acknowledge that Euripides used these heroic myths as a way of discussing the Athens and Hellas that he lived in and through. Euripides play Orestes covers what would seem to us such disparate themes but would this have caused discordance amongst his 5th Century BCE Athenian audience?

Characters such as Agamemnon, Helen and Menelaus were all part of the Iliad that has traditionally been dated to a 7th or 8th Century writer called Homer and to a 12th or 13th Century Mycenaean era setting. It was by all accounts one of the most popular tales in Ancient Greece. This is a story about a thousand Greek ships sailing against Troy, a non-Greek (but seemingly non-Barbarian as well) walled city. They are led by Agamemnon although not without challenge from Achilles. There is very little democracy in the Iliad, in fact where it exists it’s likely on the Trojan side rather than the Greek. And the gods are everywhere especially as dispensers of justice, in fact the tale starts with Apollo’s anger with the Greeks and his levying of plague as penalty. Further Greek aristocrats such as Diomedes, Achilles, Agamemnon and Menelaus have taken leadership roles that, are by the natural order of things, their’s to have. Meanwhile non-aristocratic upstarts like Thersites are frowned upon and put into their places quickly. This then is a strictly hierarchical society, one where the Aristocrats right to rule is never questioned by the lower echelons. But it is a bloodthirsty one too, where justice is seen at the end of a sword blade more often than not.

This theme is continued in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, where the returning Agamemnon comes home to Argos with his Trojan captive (and lover by most accounts) Cassandra and after a stilted and ominous welcome from his wife Clytaemstra dripping in double-speak, both Agamemnon and Cassandra meet their deaths at Clytaemestra’s and her lover Aghiestus’ hands, Agamemnon supposedly murdered in his bath. The reason for this murder itself is said to be due to the fate of Iphigenia which is not completely clear in Agamemnon but who is generally assumed to have been sacrificed by her father Agamemnon so as to bring the winds necessary for the Greek ships to sail to Troy. But there is also an element of blood revenge present due to the participation of Aeghistus, whose siblings were murdered by Agamemnon’s father and served up as a meal to their father, Agamemnon’s uncle. But murder in pre-democratic Ancient Greece meant little more than the burden of revenge being handed to family to avenge, often to the next generation. In fact Agamemnon’s murder itself can be traced back not just through his niece and nephew murdering father but also to his god insulting grandfather. Now the task of revenge is handed down to Orestes and Electra, Agamemnon’s son and daughter. In The Libation Bearers Aeschylus expands on this and by guile and violence Orestes, with the help of both his sister Electra and his friend Pylades, murder both his mother, Clytaemestra, and her lover Aeghistus. But immediately after this matricide and murder Orestes starts to feel guilt and threat from his mother’s furies, as he realizes that his dreams of ending the bloodletting have only extended it, something that his mother forewarned him of. As a result Aeschylus The Libation Bearers is a critique of Homer’s ideology and not an extension of it.

Aeschylus then wrapped up this tale in The Euminides that is somewhat of a tribute to the new Athenian Courts of Justice but he did so with little detail and with Athena holding ultimate power over their still aristocratic decisions. Here she uses her deciding vote to set Orestes free but due to the democracy of the decision the Court has supposedly also ended the blood curse. But if we step back for a minute we can see that the start of The Libation Bearers there is a scene where Orestes has returned without his sister’s knowledge and they meet with her desiring his return but not knowing that he now stands in front of her. This scene is repeated, admittedly with changes, in both Sophocles’ and Euripides Electra who both then expand on a similar plot to Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers. Sophocles though is harking back more to The Iliad and its Aristocratic themes, there is no sign of Courts of Justice or democracy in his version. Nothing therefore to lead into Aeschylus’ The Euminides and its Courts of Justice, no matter how compromised they might be. In Euripides Electra on the other hand Orestes is mindful of the matricide he has committed and is commanded by the Dioscuri to run to Athens. This tale then segues seamlessly into Aeschylus’ The Euminides (but not before changing the story of Helen at Troy). It seems that there is a barely disguised fight here between ancient playwrights and intriguingly it seems to even involve Homer. But that is a distraction, as with Orestes a play from Euripides twelve years after he wrote Electra it seems that Euripides may have set out to expand on, or provide a version of Aeschylus’ The Euminides updated for a later part of the 5th Century. This in turn may have been prompted by Sophocles version of the Electra tale that seems to have come many years after Euripides’ own version.

Many commentators have critiqued Orestes. For example in the introduction to the Orestes play in Grene and Lattimore’s book on Euripides William Arrowsmith states that the Orestes ‘has long been an unpopular and neglected play, almost an unread one’. Although he then goes on to say he thinks it is undeserved the comment itself is a true one, of a certain kind of classicist anyway. But it is at odds with the popularity of the play from 408 BCE to the 2nd or 3rd Century CE. According to M. L. West it was not only the most popular of Euripides plays but the most popular of all tragedies. He then goes on to say that “snobs may dismiss this popularity as evidence of debased taste. Let them, Orestes is not an Agamemnon or an Oedipus, but it is first-rate theatre…”. I would be tempted to add that The Iliad, the most respected of all ancient plays is just a rather base attempt at propaganda by a 2nd rate aristocracy loving propagandist. Art as they say is in the eye of the beholder and there seems little doubt that Orestes was well liked after it was first performed.

The period from 479 BCE to 404 BCE was a stark one for Athenians, first there was a fight with Persia and then for 50 years Athens set out to build an empire. Finally at the end of it there is a long drawn out war with its Laconian neighbor ending in Athens defeat in 404 BCE. In addition there was plague, oligarch versus democrat in an often deadly competition for political control as well as a flowering of literature to address these themes. Euripides writing Orestes in 408 BCE was writing as Oligarch and Democrat witch-hunts alternately punctuated the city’s equilibrium and war threatened defeat. He allegedly left Athens for Macedon late in his life disappointed in what Athens had become. So although there is no doubt that features of Athens, it’s Law Courts, its often threatened democracy made it into Orestes maybe Euripides dejection with what Athens had become also made it in there as well. William Arrowsmith says in his introduction to Orestes in Greene and Lattimore that he was “tempted to see in the play Euripides’ prophetic image of final destruction of Athens and Hellas’. It is worth noting too that there is no obvious siding of Euripides to either the Aristocratic order or the Democratic order, he seems contemptuous of both.

The themes then would have had wide appeal not just for the first Athenians to see the play but to those who saw it later after Athens had fallen, as Athens would have sat astride the immediate history of the Mediterranean for quite some time. There is little doubt that features of contemporary Athens made it into Orestes but so too did they make it plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles although Sophocles was no democrat so his themes differed somewhat. In my view you can see a progression of democracy through the journey of Orestes from the aristocratic version of Aeschylus to the more cynical but more widely inclusive version of Euripides. At the same time Sophocles seems to have given the Oligarchic side dissemination of their ideas that resembled those of Homer in the Iliad. And it may be that Sophocles and Euripides parried blows in the theatre for their different ‘teams’. The fact that Orestes was wildly popular, and possibly the most popular play of all of antiquity, with its learned audiences, lays a substantial blow on the snobbish claim that the play was anarchic, anachronistic and inferior. Because it wasn’t any of these things, its sole wrong was to give democratic themes a hearing.

Bibliography

Conacher, D. J., Euripidean Drama, Toronto, 1967, p. 213-24 (readings)

Burnett, A. P., Catastrophe Survived, Oxford, 1971, p. 202-22 (readings)

Euben, J. P., Corruption in Euripides’ Orestes’, in Euben, J. P. (ed), Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, 1986, p. 222-7, 229-51 (readings)

Grene, David & Lattimore, Richard (eds.), The Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Volumes I, II & IV.

Homer, the Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Lloyd, M., The Agon in Euripides, Oxford, 1992, p. 113-29 (readings)

West, M. L., (ed) Euripides. Orestes, Warminster , 1987, p. 26-39 (readings)

Wolff, C., Orestes, in Segel, E. (ed), Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, Oxford, p. 340-356 (readings)