‘Blest is he who goes beneath the earth having seen these things,’ said Pindar. ‘He knows the end of life, he knows its god-given beginning too.’ Those who decline the rites remain among the uninitiate, ‘the unpurified mob’, as Plutarch saw them ‘who trample each other underfoot herded together in thick mire and gloom’. Not the initiate - ‘met by a marvellous light, or welcomed into open country and meadows, with singing and dancing and solemn raptures of holy music and sacred revelations; there, made perfect at last, walking at large, free and absolved, the initiate worships with crowned head, arm-in-arm with the pure and undefiled’. He is the pure beholder, purged, transfixed. The Mysteries would become the apocalypse of antiquity, an intimation of immortality, but at the time of Aeschylus they celebrated the things of this world. And the experience was a trauma of terror and reverence, of darkness broken by a blaze of torches, of ritual mounting to drama, drama resolving into vision, gods and mortals wedded here and now. As the Mysteries were absorbed by Athens, they became the force, as an ancient decree described them, that led mankind from savagery to civilization. More than agriculture, human culture was the harvest gift of Athens. Through the Mysteries she bestowed it on the world.
The Oresteia and the Mysteries might rival each other, not only as spectacles but as ordeals, initiations into our culture. Yet the rites of aggregation in the Oresteia finally admit us to society, not a visionary company. Aeschylus is civic, active, dramatic. He transforms the passion of Dionysus into the tragedy and restoration of our lives, the medium through which a culture ridden by its guilt achieves its greatness. The tragic hero, Orestes, becomes a revolutionary hero of his time. Aeschylus departs from Homer’s prince, who simply kills his father’s assassins and reclaims his native city, to enlarge the later Orestes of lyric poetry, the guilty matricide who must overcome the Furies with the arrows of Apollo. And Aeschylus departs from that physical combat to create an ethical, religious combat that surrounds Orestes and his crime with even broader meaning. The fruits of this struggle may be what no poet, perhaps no legend either, had ever brought to light - a remarkable vision of wedding and rebirth. But first, as at the outset of the Mysteries, the young initiate must suffer ‘wanderings, exhausting rushing to and fro, and anxious, interminable journeys through the darkness; then, just before the consummation itself, all the terrors, shuddering, trembling, sweat and wonder’.
Driven on by the Furies, Orestes has fled to Delphi for the purges of Apollo. Everything seems purged at Delphi, especially this strife between the forces of the Earth and the Olympians. In the priestess’ morning prayer she celebrates a peaceful evolution of the oracle and its possessors, from Mother Earth to the Titans to Apollo, who can speak for Father Zeus. Her subject is ‘cultural evolution’, we might say, as it is reflected in this happy union of the gods, their march that civilized our wildness and allows us to foresee our fate. And evolution is the subject of the drama to come, but its spirit will be harsh not peaceful, and so was the history of the Delphic shrine itself. Apollo took the Mother’s oracle by force; he butchered her sacred serpent, the Python, and this atrocity brought the Olympian to power. His priestess would rather suppress that violent history, though it seems to surface when she summons the attendant spirits of the shrine: Pallas, the warrior goddess; and Dionysus, whose maenads dismembered Pentheus; and Poseidon in his turbulence; and Zeus Teleios, who saw to Agamemnon’s execution. Behind the serene façade of Apollo’s temple, in other words, a pantheon of violent gods may wait to shape the coming action.
The priestess no sooner enters the sanctuary to receive her prophecy than she rushes back at once, terrified, like a child by a nightmare. And all that unfolds before us now is like a strenuous dream where ghosts may walk, our guilt and our gods may loom and struggle as if at our creation. For this is a vision of the childhood of the race and of our future - ‘greater than all [the Pythia’s] embarkations past’, and far beyond her powers of expression. At the Navel of the Earth she finds Orestes and the Furies, motionless as a still life, mysterious. Orestes holds a suppliant’s branch in one hand, wreathed with a shining, pious tuft of wool, but in the other hand a bloody sword - bloody from his mother’s wounds or from Apollo’s purges, or both, since purging contaminates the purger and Apollo’s shrine is polluted either way. The Furies arc still more ambiguous. Neither Gorgons nor Harpies, they arc terrifying precisely because they arc not supernatural; they arc women of a sort, and so their transformation into Eumenides will be both more miraculous and more natural at the last. Even now they surround Orestes like a lochos, an ambush pressing for revenge, but a lochos is a bed of childbirth, too, and there may be other tics between them. Some legends say that the Navelstone is the tomb of the Python, and if so the blood on Orestes’ sword may serve to revive the blood-guilt of Apollo. The first possessors of Delphi may have risen from the dead to seek revenge. Another watch has seen another sign, another interchange of men and women, but now the gods of the Sky and forces of the Earth have joined the action. There is a light in the darkness of Apollo’s temple. Is it the dawn of civilization or the advent of a new barbarism? Gods and men together will determine its significance.
The doors open. Over Orestes and the Furies stands Apollo, the god of prophecy, purgation and the law. According to popular belief his powers are ‘external’ in a strong sense: his prophecies are fiats, his purges are ritualistic, and his laws enforce our peaceful coexistence with the gods, essentially through our skills of self-effacement and restraint. ‘Nothing in excess’ is Apollo’s creed, and he had become its hero, lucid, formal, intellectual, civilized, through his victory over all that was dark, amorphous, irrational, primitive, the Earth. But Aeschylus has spared Apollo that struggle, and Apollo’s powers, never tempered from within, may be eroded. Clearly his purges have begun to dissolve Orestes’ blood-guilt and insanity, but his purges may be superficial. He knows, or thinks he knows, these Furies for what they are - emissaries of ‘the world of death’ - so he stupifies them for a moment, only to make them livelier as Orestes’ pangs of conscience. Clearly the purges of Delphi formed a bridge from the blood vendetta to social justice (they ‘detoxified’ the murderer, preparing him for common courts of law), but because they were simply ritualistic, some believe they impeded the advance of ethics, and Aeschylus increases this impression. Apollo orders Orestes on to Athens less for a probing, moral restoration than for a kind of magic absolution of his crime. Apollo the Healer has a power of referral, the Justicer knows ‘the rules of justice’, but as Orestes may imply - in a surprising imperative - the god must learn compassion.
Apollo is prophetic, it is true. Orestes will be absolved and the Olympians will prevail, but in a way Apollo could not foresee, and dependent on the Furies for success. That is another vision, and as Orestes leaves, his mother’s ghost appears, a spume that rises from the Navelstone and speaks the Mother’s true prophetic voice. Clytaemnestra, unlike Apollo, is the voice of conscience. She is guilty of murder, yet she was murdered in return, and still her Furies sleep. She awakes them from their origins, the silent dead, to rouse their powers of revenge. They begin defeated. Apollo has inspired the matricide and snatched him from their grasp. Now it is their turn to suffer incriminations - all the nightmares, spurs and chills they dealt their guilty victims - but they quickly turn their suffering against the guilty god. The Navelstone is haemorrhaging again, and they know what that means: another Olympian violation of the Mother and the Fates. Now by taking revenge on the matricide, Orestes, the Furies will repay the matricidal gods. They would wage the Theogony again, not on the Olympians’ grounds of Might Makes Right but on their own grounds, the Furies’ older, more moral law of retaliation.
A subtle distinction perhaps, yet it may govern their encounter with Apollo, striding forth in arms to drive them out. Here is the opening skirmish between the Titans and the gods, in effect, and in this battle of opposites each side has its claims, though each is so extreme a reconciliation seems impossible, and Apollo may be
even less cooperative than the Furies. His values - Law and Order - are undermined by his methods of enforcement: he would slaughter the Furies to preserve his sense of justice, he is murderously self-righteous. And the Furies calmly, rationally expose him in debate. First he justifies matricide in terms of vengeance, then he pardons it with absolution. But if murder calls for murder in return, should it be forgiven with a prayer? Perhaps on behalf of the marriage bond, which Apollo defends as sanctified by Zeus and Hera, more binding than the bonds of blood and Fate defended by the Furies. But Apollo, the champion of marriage, has murdered one of its partners and mortified its children. Faced with his contradictions, the Furies are consistent but clearly limited: they punish matricides, other murderers go free. Yet at least they are reactive, defensive of their order, while the Olympians promote their order with a brutal will. By facing Apollo with his wilfulness, moreover, the Furies force the action on to Athens, not for a blanket pardon but a trial, a weighing of the rights and wrongs. While Apollo would absolve Orestes in the name of force majeure, they pursue him in behalf of rudimentary justice.
As we move from Delphi to Athens, from an oracle to an altar of communion, we move in effect from the purges of the Mysteries to the passion play itself. The purges of Apollo have their limits. Orestes has had to suffer a further purgatorial journey, and even now, as he grasps Athena’s idol, he is ‘curst and an outcast’. He was a sceptic at Delphi; here he strains for belief, for the Furies press him towards a more intense ordeal. In full cry, they would hale Orestes down to the underworld for judgement, for there the three commandments of Greek religion - honour your gods, your parents and your guests - are enforced by Hades, the recording angel of antiquity. Orestes invokes Athena in despair, in a voice like Everyman’s appealing for salvation. Greek Hell and Heaven are contending for his soul, and the Furies’ binding-song that follows binds him to the implications of his crime, expanding it from matricide to the ruin of his house, the curse that every act of hubris breeds. The Furies also bind Orestes to themselves, expanding from primitive magic forces to the forces of revenge, the lex talionis, the binding law that regulates mankind. For the bond between them is as complex as that between Orestes and his mother. They are bound not only as victim and avenger but as equal victims of the gods, equally frenzied, reviled, destined to the darkness. Yet the Furies turn their deprivations into achievements; that is the weave of their binding-song - they shuttle, they suffer into higher states of awareness. Advancing from pathology to principle, in fact, in their closing lines they become majestic moral powers. Not until the Furies enter Athens can they realize their potential. Here their bond with Orestes may even be symbiotic - the making of them both - though first they make his life a living hell.
The new Theogony begins. Athena takes the stage, the warrioress and a force. of peace as well. She is the Parthenos, the virgin, the Olympian par excellence, who sprang from the brow of Zeus in battle gear - ‘terrible, rouser of war-cries, marshal of armies’, in Hesiod’s description, but she often lays aside her helmet to rejoice the heart of Zeus. Here she enters like Agamemnon, flushed with victory over Troy, but she bequeaths that victory to Theseus and his peaceful federation of Athens. Athena Parthenos inclines towards Athena Polias, the goddess of the city. Together they guard and guide all forms of human victory, as Vincent Scully observes, for Athena is both Olympian and of the Earth, the Father’s daughter and the Mother’s too. Behind the goddess stands a matriarchal spirit of the hearth whose symbol was the serpent, the symbol of the Furies, and her provinces were fertility and the loom. Athena becomes the force of public discipline, the instigator of our actions and their judge, for in a case of homicide she can detect the involuntary murderer and release him.
Where Apollo simply purges, Athena probes to matters of the heart. Like him she sees the Furies and Orestes at her shrine, but she will not prejudge her guests, she asks them to introduce themselves. In response the Furies expand their targets from matricides to murderers in general, though their punishments, as Athena sees them, are extreme. So was the crime, they answer, despite her sense that a higher power forced Orestes on. ‘What spur could force a man to kill his mother?’ they ask, pressing for a verdict, since Orestes will not take the traditional oath of innocence. Incriminating evidence, yet Athena uses it to demonstrate the Furies’ dogmatism - more moral but no less ritualistic than Apollo’s - and their binding-song has just committed them to acts of retribution rather than pompous declarations. Athena makes the Furies’ terms recoil, in other words, in a way that does them honour. And so they volunteer for what they had refused: adjudication of this issue by a god. ‘We respect you. You show us respect.’ A startling conversion, but understandable and prophetic. The warrioress is turning conflict into peace, her battleground into the depths of conscience.
These are depths which she must learn herself. When she probes Orestes, he reveals a guilt that purges cannot touch. Once more he is torn between his father and his mother, his mission and his guilt. Was his action just or not? he asks, and probes Athena’s conscience, for his father was her partisan at Troy, her brother Apollo drove Orestes on. Conscience alone might lead Athena to acquit him, but she perceives that the Furies ‘have their destiny too, hard to dismiss’, and once defeated, they will destroy her land. The choice is too grave for men to make, too emotional for a god. It is the tragic choice, and now it is Athena’s turn to feel it. ‘A crisis either way./Embrace the one? expel the other? It defeats me.’ Like the tragic heroes before her, she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. If she plays an Olympian role and frees Orestes, she incites the Furies. If she consigns Orestes to them, she incites the Olympians instead. Athena’s choice intensifies Orestes’ - now the gods and the Furies are on both sides of the conflict; if she embraces one, she must expel the other. Yet her approach to the choice intensifies Orestes’ too. Like him she hesitates, but Athena’s hesitation is even more constructive, for she is turning her ordeal into a trial, a legal judgement, and creating the procedures to control it. Her examination of the Furies and Orestes is like an anakrisis, the magistrate’s initial hearing of the contenders, preliminary to selecting proper judges. These will be men and gods together - the best Athenians, with Athena as their leader. As she brings on this great debate between conscience and command - dual sides of her own inner nature - she reveals a deep desire for balance.
The Furies want to help her. At the core of The Eumenides, as in the first two plays, stands a chorus that relates the Furies to the justice of the gods. Here that relationship involves the tragic choice itself, and the Furies are embroiled with Athena. If she lets the matricide go free, an age of lawlessness will follow, leaving the Furies with no choice but to hasten on a ‘blood-dimmed tide’ that sweeps society. That is a course which they deplore. Think what men might gain, they argue, if Athena lets the Furies choose for good instead of evil. Why together they might turn the tragic choice into a victory, nothing less than the birth of law itself, the Furies’ evolution from their origins to the ministers of justice. That, in fact, is the subject of their chorus. Rising up in the face of lawlessness - the tides, the rampant plagues, collapsing houses - the Furies return to their firm, original foundation: the terror that can reinforce our reverence for the rights; for now the Furies suffer into justice rather than revenge. That has been their promise all along, and that is why they (of all creatures in the world) can erect the ruling law of Greece. At the centre of this chorus the Furies erect a shrine to the doctrine of the Mean - Apollo’s doctrine, ironically enough. It is the Mean as they conceive it however; not the golden mediocrity of Delphi which avoids extremes, but the interplay of one against another, a dialectic, a moral tension. The very weave of their stanzas binds our powers of restraint to our potential, for this is a binding-song far larger than the first. Here the Furies bind us to the three Greek commandments not for punishment but for health; and here they strengthen earlier strands-from the Oresteia. The altar of the rights that Paris tramp
led is resurrected as a standard of behaviour. The law of Zeus may at last become the way to justice.
But before the Furies can bind themselves to the gods, they must discover what their bond with Orestes represents. At the end of their chorus they can prophesy the coming age of conscience, but they cannot see that Orestes is its herald. They see him as a perversion of the Mean more drastic than his storm-tossed father; he must ‘ram on the reef of law and drown unwept, unseen’. And so the Furies have raised the tragic choice to a higher power. Now civilization hangs on Orestes’ execution, unless Athena can release him and empower the Furies, too, fulfulling their hopes for justice while conserving human life. She herself must seize upon the Mean.
That is the purpose of her trial, and it has a hopeful start. As the Furies carry morality towards a higher goal, so the scene has moved to the Areopagus where Athena will establish her tribunal. She and her judges enter, her battle-trumpet sounds for peace, she begins to state her law. But a towering figure breaks the peace - Apollo, her enemy at Troy, the crucial witness who has purged Orestes. Athena improvises, turns to the Furies; the prosecution must begin, and we shift to a new, more urgent version of Athenian legal procedure. The Furies waive the prosecutor’s customary speech; they cross-examine Orestes, leading him from heroic claims to his most contradictory disclaimer: ‘Does mother’s blood run in my veins?’ Yes, he said so himself at the end of The Libation Bearers. In despair he turns to Apollo, almost challenging him to justify their crime. And now one wonders if Apollo even knows ‘the rules of justice’. He can only swell Orestes’ defences with his own windy threats; he relies on Father Zeus, not only because Zeus’s might makes right an act of matricide but because it relieves Apollo of responsibility. The Furies cross-examine him tersely. Could the Father avenge a father by abusing a mother so? On the defensive, Apollo expands Clytaemnestra’s guilt, but the more he exonerates her victim Agamemnon, the more he is exposed for lashing the jury with his rhetoric. Moreover, as the Furies insist, Clytaemnestra’s treatment of Agamemnon was no worse than Zeus’s treatment of his father. Apollo sputters with contempt: Zeus merely shackled Kronos, he did not murder him, and not even Zeus can bring the dead to life. Precisely the point, the Furies object. Orestes killed his mother; what can pardon that? Only Apollo’s disclaimer of motherhood itself: