06 The Oresteia - Mythic Background PDF

06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND 06 The Oresteia - Mythic Background Lecture 6, The Oresteia, Mythic Background. Hello and welcome back to Lec- ture 6. In the previous lecture we began talking about Aeschylus and looked at his three earliest surviving works. In this lecture I want to set the bac...

06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND 06 The Oresteia - Mythic Background Lecture 6, The Oresteia, Mythic Background. Hello and welcome back to Lec- ture 6. In the previous lecture we began talking about Aeschylus and looked at his three earliest surviving works. In this lecture I want to set the background for turning to our discussion of Aeschylus’ great trilogy, The Oresteia, which I’ll then talk about for the next three lectures. Here I want to give you the mythic background for the trilogy by outlining the two important interlock- ing myths that Aeschylus assumes his audience is familiar with. The story of the Trojan War and the story of the House of Atreus, the family in which Agamemnon belongs. So, The Oresteia assumes that its audience is familiar with both of those two myths, which were so important not just in Greek the- ater but in Greek literature in general. The Trojan War is the most famous episode of classical myth, I think, without a doubt. This fame results from the fact that it was considered an especially important event by the classical Greeks themselves and thus it became especially productive in classical liter- ature, not just in tragedy but in other forms of literature as well. Of course, the most obvious example is that the two great Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both refer to and have to do with the Trojan War. In the fifth century B.C., furthermore, the Trojan War was seen as the episode that marked the end of what could be called the heroic age and the beginning of what could be called the purely human age or purely human history. The Trojan War was the last episode in which the great heroes of myth took part, the last time when these characters who were somehow closer to the gods than normal everyday human beings took part in events that were recorded and remembered by later poets. But the heroes of the Trojan War were not only the last generation of the great race of heroes, they were also viewed by Greeks of the classical age as ancestors of families alive in the fifth century. For a fifth century Athenian to be able to trace his ancestry back to one of the heroes of the Trojan War was 1 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND a very important part of that person’s self-esteem and view of who he was, sort of like being able to trace our ancestry back to someone who came over on the Mayflower, I suppose, except going back several more centuries. The Trojan War thus was what could be called a liminal event, a threshold event. It looked back to myth in our terms, back to the race of heroes, but it also looked for- ward into the human present because these heroes were seen as ancestors of us, assuming that we are fifth century Athenians, as well as the last members of that great heroic age. And probably because of this liminal nature of the Tro- jan War, because it’s an episode that looks both directions to the remote past and to the present, it became the most fruitful episode of all Greek mythology for literature. It comes up over and over and over again. And many tragedies, both extant and lost, deal either with the Trojan War or with its aftermath, with events leading up to it, with events that are in one way or another connected to the Trojan War. So that’s the first great episode of myth that Aeschylus could assume his audience already knew when he presented the Oresteia to them. The other interlocking episode is the whole history of the House of Atreus, the family of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The most important mem- bers of the House of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, of course, were also the leaders of the expedition against Troy and that’s why I say the myths are interlocked. They have a lot to do with one another. Furthermore, the Trojan War was motivated by the seduction of Menelaus’ wife, Helen, by the Trojan prince, Paris. Now, it’s worth reiterating something that I said earlier, that the tragedians and their audience would not have thought of these stories as myths in strict opposition to history. For them, the Trojan War had really happened. These were events that had actually occurred in which their real, genuine an- cestors had actually taken part. And again, the traditional date of the fall of Troy is 1184 B.C., so these events had happened a good many hundred years in the past, but they were believed to have really happened. However, alongside with that belief that these events had really happened, there was definitely a 2 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND sense that things had been different in these ancestors’ days. And that’s what I mean by calling the characters of the Trojan War the last of the great race of heroes. In particular, the belief was that, or the sense was that in that remote past, gods and humans had interacted much more freely. And as we’ll see in our discussion of tragedy, in many tragedies, gods and humans interact freely. Gods come on stage as characters. But of course, people living in 5th century Athens knew that the gods did not do that anymore. They believed in these gods, so they believed that the gods had once done those things, but only in the remote past. That was over. And the Trojan War was seen as the time when that kind of interaction ceased, or rather it was seen as the last great episode of the time when that interaction between gods and humans still took place. De- spite the importance of the Trojan War for Greek culture, Greek art, and Greek literature, unfortunately we don’t have any major surviving ancient work that tells the entire story of the war. We have had to piece the basic storyline of the Trojan War back together from bits and pieces scattered all over all sorts of works of literature, tragedy, epic, and others. But the basic story as the trage- dians knew it can be pieced together. We’re lucky in that we have so many references to the Trojan War that we can put the basic story together. And very, very briefly and basically, the story of the Trojan War was as follows. Helen, daughter of Zeus and a human mother, the most beautiful woman in the world, wife of the Greek King Menelaus, was abducted by Paris, Prince of Troy, and taken away to Troy with him. Now, Paris did this not entirely on his own volition. Paris was promised Helen by the goddess Aphrodite. Paris had to judge a beauty contest between three goddesses, Aphrodite, the god- dess of sexual passion, Hera, the wife of Zeus and goddess of marriage, and Athena, daughter of Zeus and goddess of just warfare and of wisdom. Each goddess promised Paris a bribe if he would choose her as the most beautiful. Athena promised him prowess in battle. Hera promised him power domin- ion over many countries, many cities. And Aphrodite promised him the most 3 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND beautiful woman in the world as his wife. Paris, acting in direct contradiction to what the values of Greek society would tell a young man he ought to do, chose the most beautiful woman in the world over prowess in battle or in pol- itics. Therefore, when he went to Sparta, where Helen and Menelaus lived, and absconded with Helen, he was acting, he thought at least, on authority of the goddess Aphrodite. Menelaus did not see it that way. And Menelaus and Agamemnon mustered an army to go to Troy and fight for Helen’s return. Agamemnon was Menelaus’ elder brother and so as head of the family, he was the main leader of the expedition. When the Greek fleet of 1,000 ships gathered to sail for Troy, the winds blew against them for a month so that they could not sail. And the seer Calchas, a prophet who interpreted omens, told Agamemnon that the winds were blowing against him because the god- dess Artemis was angry and that Artemis demanded a sacrifice in order for the winds to change so that the Greeks could sail to Troy. The sacrifice Artemis demanded was Agamemnon’s eldest daughter, Iphigenia. Agamemnon did indeed sacrifice Iphigenia, the winds changed and the Greeks sailed for Troy. The Trojan War lasted for ten years. The fighting during that time was fairly evenly balanced with each side having its foremost warrior, Achilles for the Greeks, Hector for the Trojans. Achilles was the son of a goddess mother, Thetis, and a human father, Peleus. That’s unusual. Normally, when you have one divine parent and one human parent, the divine parent is the male, the human parent is the female. In Achilles’ case, it’s reversed. The wedding of Peleus and Thetis had been arranged by Zeus and Thetis was not entirely willing to marry Peleus. Like other offspring of a god and a human, Achilles was mortal, was a human, but he was exceptional. In his case, his exceptional abilities had to do with his prowess as a warrior. He was the greatest warrior among the Greeks. Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior, was the eldest son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. And as the Trojan War progressed, as I said, the fighting was fairly evenly balanced until eventually the great- 4 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND est Trojan warrior, Hector, was slain by the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles. This is recounted, of course, in the Iliad. Then, in events that happened af- ter the Iliad, Achilles himself was killed by Paris, who shot him in the heel with a poisoned arrow. And Achilles’ heel, supposedly, according to later tradition, this is probably not known to the tragedians, Achilles’ heel was his one vulnerable spot. Sorry, he was otherwise invulnerable, but his heel was the only place where he could be wounded. His heel was where Paris shot him and Achilles was killed. So this meant that the Greeks and the Trojans were both left without their foremost warrior. And finally, to win the war, the Greeks resorted to trickery. They used the famous ruse of the Trojan horse, a great wooden horse, hollow, filled with warriors, which the Trojans took into the walls of Troy, thinking that the Greeks had sailed away and had left the Trojan horse as an offering for them or for the gods. The Trojans took the horse inside the walled city of Troy. And of course, that night, the Greeks came pouring out of the horse, opened the gates to let the other Greeks, who had not sailed back to Greece, but had only sailed out of sight of Troy, to let them into the city and Troy was sacked. And the whole idea of the Trojan horse was invented by Odysseus, the most clever among the Greek warriors and of course, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Now during the sack of Troy, the Greeks committed many outrages against the Trojans. They went beyond what they ought to have done in sacking the city. And these actions, these out- rages that the Greeks committed, affected their ability to return home because the gods were angered by some of the things the Greeks did during the sack of Troy. Specifically, these outrages included the murder of King Priam at his household altar. Priam had gone to the altar inside his palace and was seated at, holding on to the altar, which should have meant he was inviolable. He was under the protection of the gods. Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, seized Priam at the altar and killed him in front of Priam’s wife, Hecuba. This was a very great outrage to kill a man who was actually holding on to an altar. Worse than that 5 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND perhaps, Priam’s daughter, Cassandra, was raped in the temple of the virgin goddess Athena. And there are all sorts of levels of outrage and sacrilege in- volved in that particular action. First, Cassandra, as we’ll discuss more in the next lecture, had herself been the promised mistress of the god Apollo. She went back on her word and did not sleep with Apollo, but still she was in some sense consecrated to Apollo. And so no human man should have touched her, should have had sex with her. Second, raping someone in a temple was an outrage in and of itself because a temple is a sacred place to a god. Third, this wasn’t just any old temple. This was a temple of the goddess Athena who was herself a virgin. And so by committing this rape of Cassandra in a temple of the virgin goddess Athena, the Greek Ajax who raped Cassandra had violated all sorts of boundaries, had transgressed in various different ways. Finally, be- fore leaving Troy, the Greeks sacrificed Priam’s youngest daughter, Polixena, to the ghost of Achilles, which means, if you think about it, that the Greeks expedition both began and ended with the sacrifice, the human sacrifice of a young girl. Ifigenia at the beginning of the expedition, Polixena at the end of the expedition. Now, the surviving Greeks suffered many hardships on their way home and when they returned home, and many authors specifically say that these hardships were directly due to the outrages that they commit- ted during the sack of Troy. Agamemnon, of course, when he got home was killed by his wife and her lover. Odysseus famously spent 20 years wander- ing on his way home from Troy, which meant he was absent for a total of, I’m sorry, he spent 10 years wandering on his way home from Troy, which meant he was absent for a total of 20 years. Menelaus and Helen were blown off course and spent seven years in Egypt before they made it home again. All of these events, the events leading up to the Trojan War and the events after the Trojan War are closely connected with the story of Agamemnon and Menelaus’ family and it’s to that story, that myth, that I would like to turn at this point. Agamemnon and Menelaus are members of a family referred to as 6 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND the House of Atreus. Their father was named Atreus. Their most obvious con- nection with the Trojan War, of course, is that Helen was the wife of Menelaus. Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra or Clytimestra as Aeschylus calls her, was the half-sister of Helen and therefore Agamemnon and Menelaus, two broth- ers, married sisters. I say half-sister because Clytemnestra’s father was not Zeus. Her father was a normal human being. The abduction of Helen was an offense against the honor of Menelaus’ whole family and since Agamemnon was the elder brother, the task of leading the expedition to get Helen back fell to Agamemnon and not to Menelaus. Helen’s abduction was also a grievous offense against the Greek tradition of xenia, a word that means hospitality but much more than hospitality. It’s usually translated as guest host relationship. It’s a relationship of reciprocal obligations between guest and host. The guest must not harm his host. The host must not harm his guest. When Paris abducts or seduces his host’s wife, Helen, runs away with her, takes her back to Troy when Paris had been staying as a guest in the House of Menelaus, that is a very serious violation of xenia. So as well as being a violation of Agamem- non and Menelaus’ family honor, Paris has also violated this extremely im- portant tradition, this extremely important concept of xenia, the guest host relationship, which as we’ll talk about in the next lecture is a relationship pro- tected by, defended by Zeus himself. But the loss of Helen and the sacrifice of Iphigenia are not just episodes in the Trojan War myth. They also connect to the overall story of Agamemnon’s family, of the House of Atreus. This family suffers under a hereditary curse that repeats itself generation after gen- eration. And the concept of a hereditary curse perhaps needs a little bit of explaining because it’s something that we don’t really have. We don’t share this concept in our society. The idea very basically is that moral guilt is in- heritable just like monetary debts are inheritable. So that if a man commits some terrible transgression, that will affect his offspring, that will be carried out against his offspring. His offspring will in some sense have to pay for his 7 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND moral transgressions just as if he died in debt, they would have to pay off his monetary debts. And a hereditary curse can go down generation after gener- ation. The House of Atreus is one of the clearest examples of this in Greek myth. The curse of the House of Atreus manifests itself specifically through and is caused and reiterated by inappropriate and excessive intergenerational violence. By that I mean, as we’ll see, that in this family parents have a ten- dency to kill their children and children at times have a tendency to kill their parents. So this is a family that implodes on itself, that destroys itself from within through the killing, particularly the killing of children by their parents. Now this curse began not with Agamemnon, not with Agamemnon’s father Atreus, not with his father Pelops, but with Agamemnon’s great-grandfather a man named Tantalus, the founder of the family. Tantalus offended the gods and his offense against the gods in some way had to do with the main dividing line between gods and humans in Greek myth, the division between immortal- ity and mortality. Over and over again Greek myth reiterates that the primary distinction between gods and humans is not just that gods are more powerful, more beautiful, more everything than humans are, but that gods are immortal. Gods cannot die while humans must die. That is the primary distinguishing attribute of gods, that they are immortal. The primary distinguishing attribute of humans is that they are mortal. Tantalus offended the gods in one of two ways. The most common story is that he tried to trick the gods into eating the flesh of Tantalus’s son, Pelops. Tantalus killed his son, chopped him up, cooked him, and offered his flesh to the gods at a banquet. Now this means that the gods at this point were interacting freely enough with human beings to attend a banquet. It also means that Tantalus apparently, why would he do such a thing? Apparently he was trying to indicate that the gods were not so superior to human beings, that the gods did not know more than humans, that the gods could be tricked into committing a terrible act, eating the flesh of a human child. While the gods were not fooled, they realized perfectly well 8 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND who Pelops was and resurrected him. Unfortunately, one divinity, Demeter, was distracted at this point by grief for her missing daughter Persephone who was spending the six months of the year in the underworld that Persephone had to spend every year, and Demeter absentmindedly ate Pelops’s shoulder before she realized what she was doing. So when Pelops was resurrected, the gods made him a shoulder out of ivory to replace the one that Demeter had eaten while her mind was on other things. That’s the usual version of what Tantalus did to offend the gods. The less common version is that he tried to steal nectar and ambrosia. Nectar and ambrosia are the drink and the food of the gods. And apparently, the gods’ immortality is somehow symbolized by or invested in ambrosia in particular. There are several times in Greek myth when it seems obvious that if a human being can get hold of ambrosia, can eat ambrosia, the human being will become immortal, will in effect become a deathless god. And so Tantalus trying to steal nectar and ambrosia in effect means that Tantalus is trying to steal immortality. Thus, whichever version we accept, Tantalus’ transgression has to do with blurring the lines between mor- tal and immortal, blurring the lines between humans and gods, and blurring them in a way that has to do with inappropriate eating, either through forcing the gods to eat human flesh or through himself, a human, trying to eat the gods’ food. One way or the other, it’s a transgression that has to do with inappropri- ate eating and blurring the line between divine and human. And it’s therefore very, very fitting that Tantalus is punished in the underworld through eternal torment by hunger and thirst. Greek myth is exceptionally good at coming up with really bad psychological tortures for its primary wrongdoers in the underworld. Only a handful of wrongdoers are distinguished enough to get these terrible psychological tortures, but Tantalus is one of the most famous ones. He stands forever in a river of water that’s up to his chin with fruit trees growing on the bank of the river just almost in reach. He’s eternally hungry and eternally thirsty. But whenever he reaches for the fruit, the wind blows it 9 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND out of his reach. Whenever he stoops to drink from the water, it flows away and leaves a dry sand bed. And so he is eternally Tantalized, and his name is where we get that word, by what he desires but cannot have. So much for Tan- talus. The curse continues to play itself out in the next generation after Pelops is resurrected by the gods, he too incurs a curse upon himself and his descen- dants through violence. Now Pelops is an exception in a couple of ways. His violence is not inter-familial. He doesn’t kill his own children. He doesn’t kill a relative. He does kill his father-in-law to be, but that’s not quite the same thing. Also, Pelops does not himself seem to suffer directly from the curse, at least not more than he’s already suffered by being murdered, chopped up, and cooked by his own father. But in Pelops’ case, he reiterates the curse or causes a second generation curse against his descendants through his marriage. He wanted to marry a woman named Tipodemia. She was a princess whose father, Oinomaeus, had decreed that in order to marry her, a suitor must first defeat him in a chariot race. And this is so often the case in folk tale when a young man must undertake a great challenge and if he succeeds, he gets the hand of a princess in marriage. If he fails, he dies. Oinomaeus had decreed that anyone who lost the chariot race for Hippodemia’s hand would be killed. So it’s you win, you get Hippodemia. If you fail, you are killed yourself. Well, Pelops didn’t want to die, but he did want Hippodemia. So he resorted to treachery and trickery. He bribed Oinomaeus’ charioteer, Myrtilus, to sabotage Oino- maeus’ chariot. What Myrtilus did was remove the pin, the lynchpin, that holds the wheel onto the axle and replace it with wax. Therefore, when Oino- maeus started driving his chariot, the wax heated up, the wheel fell off, the chariot crashed, Oinomaeus was killed. And Pelops fled with Hippodemia, taking the charioteer Myrtilus with him. Apparently, that was part of the deal. Now, when these three, Pelops, Hippodemia, and Myrtilus, stop for the night, Myrtilus tries to rape Hippodemia. Apparently he thought that would be his just reward for helping Pelops. Pelops picks Myrtilus up and throws him to his 10 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND death over a cliff. As Myrtilus falls, he shrieks out a curse against Pelops and all his descendants forever. So, next generation. Pelops has several children. The most important for our purposes were Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus and Thyestes are doubly cursed. They’re cursed because of what their grandfather Tantalus did. They’re cursed because of the curse of the charioteer Myrtilus against their father, Pelops. And in their generation, the curse really starts to work itself out in the two main ways that it will take in the next generation as well. Again, through the killing of children, but also now through adultery. These two brothers quarrel over the kingship of a town named Mycenae. The people of Mycenae had been told that a son of Pelops should rule them, but had not been told which son. Atreus and Thyestes agree at Thyestes’ sugges- tion that the brother who owns a particular fleece of a particular golden lamb should be king. Now, Atreus had such a fleece, so he agreed to Thyestes’ sug- gestion. What Atreus did not know was that Thyestes had seduced Atreus’ wife Ierope, and Ierope gave her lover Thyestes the fleece in question. So Thyestes said, I’ve got the fleece, I should be king. Atreus, however, was able to point to an unmistakably clear omen sent by the gods that he, Atreus, should be king. The gods made the sun set in the east. As omens go, that’s a pretty good one. And therefore, everyone agreed that Atreus should be king, and he banished Thyestes. After the banishment of Thyestes, Atreus appar- ently started thinking, how did Thyestes get hold of that fleece, and figured out that Ierope and Thyestes had been lovers. Atreus wanted revenge for his wife’s seduction, and so he invited his brother Thyestes back home to Myce- nae and said, bring your children with you. When Thyestes got there, on the pretense of reconciliation, Atreus invited his brother to a banquet, and guess what the main dish was. Atreus killed Thyestes’ sons, either two or three of them, depending on who you ask, cooked them, served them to their fa- ther as a dish at the banquet. Thyestes, not being a god, had no idea what he was eating, ate the flesh of his own sons. Afterwards, Atreus showed him 11 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND the hands, feet, and heads of the children and said, do you see what kind of beast you have eaten, or words to that effect. Thyestes goes back into exile, and as he goes, curses Atreus, and Atreus’ descendants. On the advice of an oracle while he’s in exile, Thyestes fathered a son by his own daughter, so now we bring incest into the picture. I like to say to my classes that the house of Atreus is the prototypical dysfunctional family. We’ve got cannibalism, adultery, murder, incest, you name it, they’ve done it. Thyestes fathered a son on his own daughter so that he will have an avenger, and this son, Agistus, is going to be very important in our discussion of the Oresteia. He’ll be crucial in the further playing out of the family curse. Now this brings us to Agamem- non and Menelaus, and you can see by this time they are laboring under a triple generational curse. They are cursed because of what their father Atreus did to their uncle Thyestes. They are cursed because of what their grandfather Pelops did to the charioteer Myrtilus, and they are cursed because of what their great grandfather Tantalus did in the first place. When you look at it that way, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia is not just an element in his own story. That sacrifice repeats, reiterates, reenacts the pattern of his family curse. His actions, in fact, can be seen as inevitable in two ways. He has to obey the goddess Artemis if he wants to sail to Troy, and he has to sail to Troy because Zeus has ordered him to do so in order to avenge Paris’s violation of Xenia. We’ll talk more about that in the next lecture. So Agamemnon must go to Troy, which means he must sacrifice Iphigenia, but he’s also doomed. His actions are also inevitable because of the family he belongs to. He is a father who is going to kill one of his own children. That’s just almost written into his program, so to speak, before he’s ever even born. But at the same time, Agamemnon’s family history makes his actions seem even worse than it oth- erwise would because surely he of all people should know just how horrific a thing the slaughter of children by their fathers or their uncles is. So it’s a two-sided coin. He’s doomed to do this, but at the same time it’s even more 12 of 13  06 THE ORESTEIA - MYTHIC BACKGROUND horrifying when he does it than if someone else did. The secondary motif of adultery established by Thyestes and Ierope also occurs in this generation as well. During Agamemnon’s absence, Clytemnestra takes as a lover none other than Aegisthus, that child begotten by Thyestes upon his own daughter and brought up to be an avenger, becomes the lover of Agamemnon’s wife. So you have the adultery, intra-familial adultery played out in this generation as well. When Agamemnon returns home after the Trojan War, Clytemnes- tra and Aegisthus kill him. Several years later, Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns from exile and with the help of his sister Electra, kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. And so there the pattern is inverted. Instead of a father killing a son, you have a son killing a mother. The intergenerational violence turns around in the other direction and towards other gender. Now, all three tragedi- ans wrote plays on aspects of the myth of the House of Atreus, many lost and some extant. Sophocles and Euripides each wrote a play called Electra about the vengeance that Agamemnon’s children take on their mother. Euripides returned to the stories of Agamemnon’s children in plays such as Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia at Taurus and Orestes. But the most significant tragedies on the House of Atreus are of course Aeschylus’s three great plays, Agamem- non, Libation Bearers and Humanities, which together make up the trilogy The Oresteia. And I will spend the next three lectures, in fact, I’m going to slow down and take three entire lectures to talk about this great trilogy. 13 of 13