Eumenides

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 458

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 1-234

Lines 235-565

Lines 566-1047

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Legal Basis of Justice

Whereas the justice explored in the previous plays of the Oresteia (Agamemnon and Libation Bearers) is largely retributive, Eumenides moves toward a legal notion of justice and social order. The retributive impulse that characterizes Agamemnon and Libation Bearers—returning wrong for wrong and violence for violence—is given a physical manifestation in the Furies, who pursue Orestes for the pollution he incurred through his crime of matricide. The Furies view themselves as “straight and just” (312), and indeed they do represent an eye-for-an-eye notion of fairness. But the ugliness of the Furies, so strongly emphasized in the play and possibly a detail invented by Aeschylus, suggests that the retributive vengeance embodied by the Furies is ugly and outdated. To Apollo, the Furies actually represent malevolence, rather than true justice:

It was because of evil they were born, because

They hold the evil darkness of the Pit below

Earth, loathed alike by men and by the heavenly gods (71-73).

The Furies derive their authority from “powers gray with age” (150), “privilege / Primeval” (393-94)—from “established laws” (491) of a pre-civilized age. The justice of the Furies is therefore very old. The alternative to this kind of redress is represented by the newer gods Apollo and Athena, the Olympians who support Orestes. Apollo and Athena stress the importance of legal due process, as when Athena reminds the Chorus that in Athens, “the place of the just” (413), one is forbidden “to speak evil of another who is without blame” (414). Demonstrating her emphasis on the value of civic institutions like the court system, Athena insists on hearing both sides of the case to understand its nuance—to the utter perplexity of the Furies, who cannot comprehend that there could be any justification for matricide. Ultimately, admitting that Orestes’s case is too complicated for any one god or mortal to decide it, she turns the matter over to a jury:

So, since

The burden of 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.

Litigants, call your witnesses, have ready your proofs

As evidence under bond to keep this case secure.

I will pick the finest of my citizens, and come

Back. They shall swear to make no judgment that is not

Just, and make clear where in this action the truth lies (481-88).

Athena thus ushers in a new justice system—one founded on codified laws and impartial courts that can resolve disputes through rational consideration rather than emotion-driven vengeance. Orestes’s subsequent acquittal represents the triumph of level-headed reason over the dark forces of vendetta and blood-guilt. This acquittal also marks the end of the multi-generational cycle of violence that characterizes the earlier parts of the Oresteia, violence symbolized by the “Curse of Atreus” that plagued the patriarchs Atreus and Thyestes and passed down to their children: Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes, helped his lover Clytemnestra murder Atreus’ son Agamemnon; and then Orestes murdered his mother and Aegisthus. Incidentally, the trial also establishes Athens as the original home of justice in general and murder trials in particular, a source of pride to the play’s original Athenian audience.

Old Versus New Gods

The Eumenides introduces a conflict between older and younger generations of gods—a clash that is not present to a meaningful degree in the previous plays of the Oresteia. This conflict is heralded in the very first lines of the play, when the Pythia describes the history of Delphi, which was passed down from god to god—from the elder goddesses Gaia, Themis, and Phoebe, to the young god Apollo, who received it “as a birthday gift” (7). The old chthonic gods, represented in the play chiefly by the Furies, are primordial powers associated by and large with femaleness, the earth, the Underworld, and matriarchal power. Theirs is a realm of darkness. The Furies revere Nyx, the goddess of night, as their mother—a pointed innovation on Aeschylus’s part, as the Furies were more typically called the daughters of Uranus, the embodiment of the bright sky.

The new gods, on the other hand, are represented in the play by Apollo and Athena. They are younger in a literal sense, as they were born after the chthonic goddesses, according to myths. Also, in opposition to the older gods who are associated with darkness and the earth, the younger gods are associated with light and heaven. Finally, unlike the matriarchal older gods, the Olympians are masculine and patriarchal—their leader is Zeus, the great father god thought by the Greeks to control the weather.

The interactions between the old and new gods are tense, and this tension is one of the central themes of the play. The first episode features a debate or agon (a common convention or scene-type in Attic tragedies) between the Furies and Apollo. The old gods—here as elsewhere in the play—accuse the new gods of subverting their ancient powers. Indeed, the new gods have taken over the cosmos, despite the fact that the Furies insist that their retributive role is the only thing keeping the world in order. The old and new gods have different ideas of justice: The justice of the old gods derives its authority from ancient custom, while the justice of the new gods rests on law and impartial procedure.

The trial of Orestes becomes another battleground for the old and new gods to vie with one another. The acquittal of Orestes, accordingly, confirms the triumph of a systematized approach to justice through a civically-overseen legal system over old traditions of blood feuds. In the end, though, Athena is able to reconcile the Furies and the old gods with the new regime by offering them a seat at the table, granting the Furies new cult honors at her own city of Athens. The play ends with the Furies shedding their old garb and becoming the Eumenides or Semnai Theai, ostensibly gentle goddesses of a new kind of justice, in a world ruled by a new kind of god.

Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy

Eumenides also juxtaposes patriarchy and matriarchy. The motif of gender (and its subversion) is central to the first two plays of the Oresteia, especially Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra assumes masculine traits as she puts into motion her plot to murder her husband. In Eumenides, the contest between male and female comes to a head as a conflict between the rights of fathers and mothers—a dispute that rages on both the mortal and divine plains.

Matriarchal power is represented in the play by the old gods, primarily the Furies, while patriarchal authority is represented by the new gods, Apollo and Athena. The old gods of the play embrace femaleness: The Furies refer reverentially to their mother, Nyx, or Night, and the audience or reader learns that the original deities who controlled Delphi—Gaia, Themis, and Phoebe—were all female too. It is no surprise, then, that the Furies view Orestes’s murder of his mother as unforgivable. Matricide is one crime they cannot forgive. In the Prologue, the Ghost of Clytemnestra even rises up from the Underworld to remind the Furies of their duty to pursue Orestes, even as they shrug off Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon: As they explain to Apollo, the Furies never pursued her because “the man she killed was not of blood congenital” (605).

The new gods, on the other hand, are ruled by Zeus: They are masculine and patriarchal. To Apollo, Orestes’s matricide is not a crime like Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband. In fact, Apollo—and, under his tutelage, Orestes too—views the killing of Clytemnestra as justified because it makes an example of women who kill their husbands. Apollo’s patriarchal worldview leads him to excuse Orestes’s actions, on the grounds that:

It is not the same thing for a noble man to die,

One honored with the king’s staff given by the hand of god,

and that by means of a woman (625-27).

But it is Apollo’s final argument that is the most revealing. Apollo makes the remarkable (and, from a modern perspective, utterly nonsensical) argument that a son who murders a mother is not actually spilling kindred blood:

I will tell you, and I will answer correctly. Watch.

The mother is no parent of that which is called

Her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed

That grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she

Preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere (657-61).

Apollo supports this rhetorical rigmarole by citing the example of Athena, who—according to myth—was born without a mother, emerging from the head of her father Zeus.

Athena herself is a special case. For though she is female like the old gods, she has some traditionally masculine features: She is associated with war, and her prevailing domains are wisdom and strategy. Moreover, as Apollo emphasizes, Athena has no maternal antecedents—only a father, who is none other than Zeus himself. Yet unlike the primal masculinity of Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia, Athena’s masculinity is not driven by a dangerous sexuality. In fact, Athena is a virgin goddess, and none of the myths about her portray her as wanting or acquiring romantic or sexual partners. In the play, this asexuality helps allows her to reconcile the matriarchal old gods and the patriarchal new gods—though this reconciliation, significantly, does not challenge the supremacy of the new gods over the old.