Olfactory Theater: Tracking Scents in Aeschylus's Oresteia

Here's the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.

Lady Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1, line 53

Vivid imagery of dripping fluids proliferates in Aeschylus's Oresteia, and there is also a distinctive smell attributed to one of these liquids: human blood.¹ Cassandra and the Erinyes are capable of sniffing out this odor with their non-human senses of smell, which liken them to hounds on the scent in a metaphor that is repeatedly applied to both of them (e.g., Ag. 1093–94, 1184–85; Cho. 924; Eum. 244–47). A powerful sense of smell is portrayed as both bestial and divine, irrational and omniscient, enabling these characters to make accurate identifications without recourse to sight: Cassandra viscerally reacts to Agamemnon's imminent slaughter through her confrontation with the smell of blood (Ag. 1308–12), and the Erinyes are able to track Orestes by means of smell even after he has purified himself (Eum. 244–47). The miasma of the house of Atreus thus assumes an olfactory form that proves impossible to fumigate, in spite of the incense and burning sacrifices that feature prominently in the Agamemnon in particular.² The smell of bloodshed, then, tracks the course of the house's curse, giving a literal force to the characterization of Cassandra and the Erinyes as "hounds on the scent."

The Oresteia has been well analyzed for its dense networks of imagery, and its use of bestial and sacrificial language has received particular attention.³ This paper seeks to enrich our understanding of the significance of such language by attending to the trilogy's depiction of smell and its relation to humans, animals, and gods.⁴ For the particular smells that feature in the Oresteia—incense, roasting meat, and blood—are also those that would have permeated the air of the theater given the large number of sacrifices that were performed at the opening of the festival.⁵ By integrating the olfactory atmosphere of the performance setting into the language of the drama, Aeschylus implicates both characters and spectators in the same olfactory experience. Smell, in other words, provides a mode through which the audience can synaesthetically engage with the sights and sounds of the action onstage.⁶ In this way, the language of olfaction in this trilogy contributes to what Peter Meineck (2012.4) terms "an embodied cognitive relationship between performance and spectator," in which the live performance compels spectators not just to see, but also to feel. And it is precisely the shifting and incorporeal nature of smell that makes it apt for the role that it plays in this trilogy, which is to destabilize the traditional hierarchy of gods, humans, and animals through the well-known odors associated with each.⁷

I. THE AGAMEMNON

The Agamemnon is pervaded by scent from the outset. The first indication of an olfactory presence comes from the Chorus' inquiry about the city's blazing altars (91–96),

βωμοὶ δώροισι φλέγονται·ἄλλη δ' ἄλλοθεν οὐρανομήκηςλαμπὰς ἀνίσκειφαρμασσομένη χρίματος ἁγνοῦμαλακαῖς ἀδόλοισι παρηγορίαις,πελανῷ μυχόθεν βασιλείῳ.

The altars are all ablaze with gifts, in every place a flame rises heaven-high, coaxed by the gentle guileless comfort of pure anointing oil, a thickly-flowing offering from the inner stores of the palace.⁸

In referring to the "pure anointing oil," the Chorus evokes the fragrance associated with burning altars, a smell that is explicitly defined later as "sweet-smelling" by Clytemnestra ("While they lulled the altar-flames in the gods' abodes by feeding them with sweet-smelling incense," ἐν θεῶν ἕδραις / θυηφάγον κοιμῶντες εὐώδη φλόγα, 596–97). A similar portrayal of this intermingling of smoke and scent comes from a fragment of Sophocles that describes how "the altar in the street shines with fire, releasing a vapor from drops of myrrh, exotic scents" (λάμπει δ' ἀγυιεὺς βωμὸς ἀτμίζων πυρὶ / σμύρνης σταλαγμούς, βαρβάρους εὐοσμίας, frag. 370, trans. Lloyd-Jones 1994, slightly modified). The purpose of such offerings was to create a shared olfactory experience for humans and gods alike, as a fragrant smell was both pleasing to the gods and one of the defining features of immortal bodies.⁹ To give a few illustrative examples, Zeus in Book 15 of the Iliad is "wreathed in a fragrant cloud...