PATIENT
The Oresteia
COMPOSED
458 BCE
FORM
A tragic trilogy
SETTING
Argos, then Athens
CHIEF COMPLAINT
How does a community stop answering blood with blood, and what does it have to give up to do it?
HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
A king comes home from ten years of war and is killed in his bath by his wife. His son returns to kill her, and is hunted by the goddesses of vengeance. Then the story leaves the family altogether and goes to court. Over three plays, Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers and the Eumenides, the oldest tragic trilogy we have asks how a community stops answering blood with blood. In the first two plays justice is revenge, each killing carried out as a duty and each producing a new duty. In the third, there is a jury, a vote and a verdict.
REVIEW OF SYSTEMS
DIKE
Justice. The word the trilogy keeps bending, from private vengeance to public law.
PATHEI MATHOS
Learning through suffering. The Agamemnon's creed, taken up by the Furies and finally by Athena.
MIASMA
The stain of bloodshed. It lies on the house, on Orestes' hands and on the land until the court answers it.
PEITHO
Persuasion. The power with which Athena ends the cycle where force could not.
THE COURT
Athena founds a body that keeps citizens from wrongdoing by a shared sense of awe, with neither anarchy nor tyranny.
PHYSICAL EXAM — STYLE & STRUCTURE
- —Three plays that work as one arc: the murder, the revenge, and the trial.
- —The Chorus carries the moral argument, and returns again and again to wisdom through suffering.
- —Moves from a palace to a courtroom. The third play stages a trial, with a jury, witnesses and a vote.
- —Strong set pieces: the watchman and the beacon, the purple carpet, Cassandra, the recognition at the tomb.
- —The ending asks whether the court is a real answer or only a way of stopping the pain, and does not wholly say.
ASSESSMENT & PLAN
The earliest of the Greek tragedies in this room, and the one that sets the question the others ask in different ways: Sophocles' Oedipus is about what a man cannot know about himself, Euripides' Bacchae is about what a city will not admit, and the Oresteia is about how a city learns to judge. Plato's Republic can be read as a long reply to the problem the Eumenides stages. For a first read, try Richmond Lattimore (Chicago), Robert Fagles (Penguin) or Ted Hughes's stage version (Faber); the full guide quotes E. D. A. Morshead's public-domain 1881 translation, in which the third play is called The Furies.