Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps

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СКАЧАТЬ Equally understood would have been Euripides’ argument against Orestes’ act of revenge as he presents it through the judgment passed by Tyndareus, Orestes’ grandfather and Clytemnestra’s father. Tyndareus claims that Orestes acted “stupidly” and outside the boundaries of the law or accepted custom:

      What should he have done? When his father died—killed, I admit, by my own daughter’s hand, an atrocious crime which I do not condone and never shall—he should have haled his mother into court, charged her formally with murder, and made her pay the penalty prescribed, expulsion from his house. Legal action not murder. That was the course to take. Under the circumstances, a hard choice, true, but the course of self-control and due respect for law, the better choice of two evils.³³

      Orestes, in Euripides’ version, has demonstrated a lamentable lack of self-control and respect for law, traits that the audience would quickly condemn. His passion for revenge is given no place; it is unequivocally the foolhardy alternative to a court of law.

      Aeschylus’ more nuanced treatment of the Orestes story is situated, on the other hand, between the outright praise from Zeus found in the Odyssey and the condemnation found in Euripides. Aeschylus and Euripides differ critically in the role they accord to vengeance in relation to any system of state punishment. For Aeschylus the desire for revenge is an understandable, although problematic emotion. Instead of condemning it, he creates a complex compromise that includes a system of state punishment within the polis of Athens, but this system incorporates a responsibility to the human desire for revenge.

      Aeschylus presents Orestes as trapped between Apollo’s mandate that he avenge his father’s murder and the inevitability that the Furies will relentlessly pursue him if he does kill; Orestes cannot do the right thing. In the second part of Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Libation Bearers, Orestes is pressured by his sister, Electra, and by society (represented by the Chorus), to kill his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, because they have killed his father, Agamemnon. Electra and the Chorus both represent the values of heroic societies. Electra sees the problem as a simple one: a death for a death. As she prays at her father’s tomb, the Chorus approaches her and instructs: “Say simply: ‘one to kill them for the life they took.’ May you not hurt your enemy when he struck first?”³⁴ Electra prays that Agamemnon’s “avenger come, that they / who killed you shall be killed in turn, as they deserve.”³⁵ When Orestes appears, she and the Chorus argue powerfully in an attempt to convince him to be that avenger, aligning revenge with justice and insisting that vengeance, in the form of a murder for a murder, is necessary to heal the “Swarming infection that boils within”³⁶ the land. For the gods, too, the situation is clear. Apollo’s oracle orders Orestes to take revenge or he will experience “winters of disaster”;³⁷ if Orestes fails to avenge his father he will “pay penalty / with [his] own life, and suffer much sad punishment.”³⁸

      Once Orestes has killed his mother and her lover Aegisthus, however, he discovers that he has enmeshed himself in a cycle of revenge that is unending: one murder begets another. Unlike the unscathed Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey whose serial revenge has enabled him to regain his wife and his throne, Orestes suffers mightily for what appeared to be a god-sanctioned act of murder. The Furies (or Erinyes)³⁹ haunt him: “Women who serve this house, they come like gorgons, they / wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in a tangle / of snakes. I can no longer stay.”⁴⁰ He becomes an outcast, and the Furies, “utterly repulsive,”⁴¹ stalk him, demanding their own retribution.⁴² Orestes cannot rule in his rightful place, and he flees his land unable to rest anywhere without the omnipresent Furies. The Furies are a unique composite image created by Aeschylus, who drew them partly from the Keres, the ghosts of those murdered who cry out for vengeance, and partly from an image depicting a source of physical infection capable of poisoning the land (in keeping with the pollution doctrine). The revenge sought by the Furies, then, is both individual representing a vengeful spirit of the slain Clytemenestra, and more widespread, in that Orestes’ murders pollute the very land.

      In the final play of the Oresteia, The Eumenides, Aeschylus depicts the difficulties and intricacies of a transition from private revenge to state judgment. Orestes, still fleeing the Furies, becomes a suppliant to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, a very different Athena than the vengeful goddess present in the final books of the Odyssey. Athena asks to hear both sides. The Furies’ indictment is brief, to the point, and reflects the basic principle of blood feuds that the intent of the wrongdoer is irrelevant:⁴³ “He murdered his mother by deliberate choice.”⁴⁴ Orestes then makes his argument:

      He [Agamemnon] died without honor when he came home. It was my mother of the dark heart, who entangled him in subtle gyves and cut him down, the bath is witness to his death. I was an exile in the time before this. I came back and killed the woman who gave me birth. I plead guilty. My father was dear, and this was vengeance for his blood. Apollo shares responsibility for this. He counter-spurred my heart and told me of pains to come if I should fail to act against the guilty ones. This is my case.⁴⁵

      Athena, in a dramatic shift away from earlier practices that left decisions about vengeance to individuals and families, characterizes the “matter as too big for any mortal man”⁴⁶ and that even she, a goddess, does not have the right “to analyze cases of murder where wrath’s edge is sharp.”⁴⁷ At the same time, Aeschylus presents her as wise enough to see the consequences of ignoring the Furies: “yet these, too, have their work. We cannot brush them aside, / and if this action so runs that they fail to win, / the venom of their resolution will return / to infect the soil, and sicken all my land to death.”⁴⁸ Orestes’ dilemma becomes Athena’s dilemma when the Furies agree to turn their authority to avenge murder over to Athena. She, the goddess of wisdom, recognizes her problem and sets up a court: “Here is dilemma. / Whether I let them stay or drive / them off, it is a hard course and will hurt. Then, since / the burden to the case is here, and rests on me, / I shall select judges of manslaughter, and swear / them in, establish a court into all time to come.”⁴⁹ Athena refers to the conception of the pollution doctrine that held that the harm would spread from the individual to the culture at large—“infect the soil.” Yet she takes the expiation of the pollution away from the individuals seeking vengeance, the Furies, and places it in the hands of a jury of strangers to the matter.

      The Oresteia provides insights into the problems that accompanied the transfer of the right to revenge to a central authority, even to the goddess of wisdom herself. The outcome may not deal well with the emotional needs of those seeking revenge.⁵⁰ The ballots of the jury that Athena has selected result in a tie, and Athena casts the deciding ballot for Orestes.⁵¹ The Furies, having lost, threaten: “I, disinherited, suffering, heavy with anger / shall let loose upon the land / vindictive poison / dripping deadly out of my heart upon the ground.”⁵² Athena has foreseen their disappointed and angry reaction, and she placates them by offering “a place of [their] own, deep hidden under ground that is yours by right / where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth / to accept devotions offered by your citizens.”⁵³ Unconvinced at first, the Furies repeat their lament, claiming to be disinherited, mocked, dishonored. Athena pleads with them: “No, not dishonored. You are goddesses. Do not / in too much anger make this place of mortal men / uninhabitable.”⁵⁴ Athena is patient with the Furies, promising that no household will prosper without their will, that she will let them have much influence and be honored. (It takes over 150 lines of dialogue between Athena and the Furies before they are convinced.) The Furies finally concede to Athena and utter these crucial lines: “I accept this home at Athena’s side,” thereby creating a complex image of vengeance at wisdom’s side, of raw unrestrained emotion incorporated into justice.⁵⁵ In so doing, the Furies became transformed into the Eumenides, the “kindly ones,” a critical aspect of institutionalized law.⁵⁶ They cease to be the Furies and become instead the local goddesses, contained by but also part of the legal system of Athens. As such, they are no longer frightful Gorgons but, as they came to be portrayed in artifacts, СКАЧАТЬ