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7 Mother Nero, Uncle Orpheus, and the Unborn The Atreidai family, the very best, must endure an awful fate revealed to them by fire-carrying Prometheus. During this mythic phase and once his mother has poisoned his father [sic] and as he faces the task of destroying mother-rule [la matria] the son desires a substitution, a first lie, a revealed fate. “Las imágenes posibles” The poisoned-father-by-his-wife’s-mother-rule (“matria”) passage in the epigraph is taken from Lezama’s thoughts on Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Euripides’ Ephigenia in Tauris, in which the murder of Orestes’ father, Agamemnon, by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus is not, however, caused by her poisoning him as head of the Atreidai family dynasty. Likewise, the Electra-dragon-birth-breast-feeding in the following passage comes from Foción’s mouth as he names Orestes’ sister, instead of his mother Clytemnestra, as the one who gives birth and nurses the matricidal son: When Electra [sic] thought she’d given birth to a dragon, she saw that the monster was crying to be nursed; she gives it her breast without hesitation and the milk comes out mixed with blood. Even though she had given birth to a monster, something which must have disconcerted her, she knew that her response had to be to keep him from dying of hunger, because the greatness of man consists in his ability to assimilate what’s unknown to him. To assimilate in depth is to give an answer. (P 247/249) The error in the sister-for-mother-birth-and-breast-feeding phrase lies in Foción’s agreeing with Electra’s claim that she “nursed” her brother Orestes, rather than with the Chorus’s report in Aeschylus’s Choephoroi about Clytemnestra’s nightmare and her giving birth to and breast-feeding a viper. In Sophocles’ Electra (lines 1141–50), the sister addresses the urn believed to contain her brother’s ashes and speaks of “her nursing of old days” and how no one else within the household would “nurse” him. True to the meaning of her name (“the unwedded one”), Electra 166 Mother Nero, Uncle Orpheus, and the Unborn is a virgin and nubile woman during Orestes’ infancy; thus her nursing claim is commonly interpreted as sibling-care or nurturing (nowhere in the tragedies is a dragon birth ever attributed to her).1 Lost Sister and Mother At the beginning of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, Orestes comes back to Argos from exile and offers a lock of his hair to Inachus, the river-god king and father of princess Io. In related fashion, in Sophocles’ Electra, the old slave welcomes Orestes to the “old Argos of [his] yearning, the grove of Inachus’ gadfly-haunted daughter” (Inachus and the feminine variants Inaca and Ynaca are names of great genealogical importance in Lezama’s fiction). Electra comes to the same ritual site to pour libations, finds the lock of hair, and realizes that it belongs to her lost brother. She sees “splendor” and “honor” in the hair brought to her father’s grave (as when “one small seed” grows into a “mighty tree”). Addressing Orestes’ funereal tokens, she says: You light to my eyes, four loves in one! I have to call you father, it is fate; and I turn to you the love I gave my mother—I despise her, she deserves it, yes, and the love I gave my sister, sacrificed on the cruel sword, I turn to you. You were my faith, my brother—you alone restore my self-respect. (Choephoroi 240–47) Electra is alluding to Iphigenia’s death by immolation at Aulis, but not to her father Agamemnon’s role in it. In the same scene, the hated mother is kept outside the inner circle of kinship (Choephoroi 242). For her part, Clytemnestra does not plead Agamemnon’s guilty role in Iphigenia’s sacrifice as her avenging motive for having him murdered. But as Orestes’ matricide begins to take shape, the avenging son reminds Zeus of his split double ancestry and the revenge cycle attached to it. In his words, the three orphaned siblings are: Fledglings reft of the noble eagle father. He [Agamemnon] died in the coils, the viper’s dark embrace. We are his orphans worn down with hunger. (Choephoroi 251–53) In ancient lore the female viper “was thought, while mating, to bite through the neck of the male, and to be, in vengeance, killed by her...

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