The Oresteia of Aeschylus

THE ORESTEIA OF AESCHYLUS E. T. OWEN INa former paper in the QUARTERLY (July, 1934) I attempted an explanation of the nature and methods of Aeschylean tragedy. A few typical comments on various plays will show that there is need for some explanation: of the Seam /lgaimt Thebe! it has been said, "The first half of the play is in strictness not dramatic at all-a merely static presentment of the situation;" of the Agamemnon, "The drama makes but little progress until it is half over;" of the Choephoroe, "The real action does not begin until the play is half over." I submit that no artist habitually begins his artistry in the middle of his piece. These plays, whatever else they were written for, were written to entertain, or at least to hold the attention of, an audience, and therefore it is obvious that they must have had a different sort of interest from that which the critics quoted look for in them, an interest that was engaged and satisfied by whatever it is that is going on before the "real action" begins; in other words, the "real action" is not the artistic action of the play, but only part of it. My explanation was that the Aeschylean plot is to be looked for not in the story as such, but in what the (orm into which it is cast makes of the story through the implications of its technique and its reJjgious function. Certainly what the Atheniary spectators were watching was a drama, but not in the shape in which we see it or try to see it; for although it had now become for them in the main an entertainment, they still watched a choral rite being performed, and the action they saw taking place was of the sort appropriate to such a rite; it was not, for them, a representation of events as they had happened or might have happened. We cannot help thinking of Aeschylus as valiantly trying to write dramas as good as ours, and being hopelessly cramped by the queer form he had to use, and we keep assuring him that he did very well under the circumstances. But he was engaged on something quite different; he aimed at presenting no more than an interpretation of the story, and, while he doubtless believed that th~s interpretation represented a reality, it was such a reality as could be seen nowhere else and in no other way. For the story was presented under the similitude of a choral rite; entering the orchestra, it took its shape from its environment, which gave it a movement and a meaning over and above its own. 440 THE ORESTEIA OF AESCHYLUS 441 In the Oresteja the story of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra and Orestes is so treated. Agamemnon, in order to win his way to Troy, h·ad been forced to offer his daughter as a sacrifice to the hostile Artemis; in revenge for this act his wife murdered him on his return to Argos; their son, Orestes, when grown to manhood, slew his mother as a necessary act of retributive justice, by the explicit command of Apollo; pursued none the less by the Erinyes, .the embodied spirits of retributive justice, he sought refuge in Athens, where hi·s case was heard before a specially constituted tribunal of Athenian citizens, presided over by Athena, and the verdict barely awarded in his favour by the casting vote of the goddess. This story is set forth in three parts, called respectively Agamemnon, Choephoroe , Eumenides. These three parts, it must be understood, are not three plays, but one play, and neither the artistic nor the religious purpose of Aeschylus should be judged which at this time was disturbing Athens, on the proposals to curtail the functions of the Court of the Areopagus, had an influence in giving the Eumenides the shape it has, IMaurice Croiser, Euhyh, p. 258. :"Every Greek community is like ::t garrison of civilization amid wild hordes of barbarians. . .. It is one of the facts that most needs remembering in order to understand the greatness and the flaws of Hellenism, that it was represented everywhere by a handful of men...