Eumenides

The staging of Aeschylus’s Eumenides is unusual among Attic tragedies in several ways. First, the setting changes three times (in most tragedies, the setting remained the same for the whole play): The first part of the play takes place at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the second part before the temple of Athena at Athens, and the third part at the outdoor Areopagus court in Athens. This means that the props indicating the settings, made up of a structure called the skene and a circular performance space called the orchestra, would have been altered as necessary by stagehands. A wheeled platform called an ekkyklema may have also been used in some scenes. Second, the entrances and exits of the actors also pose some difficulties. In the Prologue alone, the stage empties twice, unusually for an Attic tragedy: first when the Pythia enters the temple of Apollo and sees Orestes and the Furies, and then again when the Pythia exits before Apollo and Orestes enter. In later scenes, the movements of the Chorus of Furies become increasingly important, with scholars speculating that they danced in a circle around the orchestra, or an altar or statue at the center of the orchestra. In short, the complex staging of Eumenides would have made this play—the final part of the Oresteia trilogy—quite an impressive and lively spectacle.

Eumenides picks up after the events of Agamemnon and Libation Bearers, the first two plays of the Oresteia. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra—with the help of her lover Aegisthus—murders her husband Agamemnon after he returns home to Argos from fighting at Troy with a new lover in tow. In the Libation Bearers, set some time after Agamemnon, Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, returns to Argos to avenge his father, ultimately killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Eumenides begins an unspecified amount of time after this murderous revenge, with Orestes tormented by the Furies, Underworld goddesses who persecute those who have incurred blood-guilt, especially by killing a family member. This sets the stage for the conclusion of the bloody saga of the Oresteia, in which an endless cycle of bloodshed and violence occasioned by private feud will finally be broken by the acquittal of Orestes in a court of publicly administered formalized law.

The contest for the salvation of Orestes becomes a contest between Old Versus New Gods. Specifically, it is a contest between an older generation of gods, including the ancient Furies, and the younger Olympians, including Apollo and Athena. This contest is reflected in the very first lines of the play, where the Pythia describes that the temple has belonged to several generations of gods, from the primordial earth goddess Gaia, to the Titans Themis and Phoebe, before finally being given “as a birthday gift” (7) to the new god Apollo. Audiences would have known Apollo as a representative of the younger gods who, according to Greek mythology, seized control of the cosmos from the Titans. The juxtaposition between the old gods and the new becomes important in the play. The prologue and first episode highlight that whereas the old gods represent “powers gray with age” (150) whose functions call for the punishment of pollution and blood-guilt, the new gods govern the world with a different idea of justice that is based on law. The result is that the old and new gods have competing ideas of right and wrong, ideas that come to a head in the debate between Apollo and the Furies (a conventional “type” scene in ancient drama known as the agon). While the Furies, subscribing to a rigid understanding of blood-guilt, refuse to let Orestes go because of the pollution he incurred by murdering his mother, Apollo insists that Orestes’s actions were justified because they taught an important lesson: that wives who murder their husbands will be punished. In the end, the trial at the Areopagus will confirm the legal basis of codified justice while undermining the retributive, primordial vengeance of the Furies, cementing The Legal Basis of Justice.

The contest between the old and new gods is also expressed as a contest between masculine and feminine, part of the play’s interest in Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy. Within the play, the old gods are represented by the female Furies and the mother goddess Gaia, while the new gods are represented by the male Apollo, who is subject to the father god Zeus. The old gods are associated with the feminine earth (the Furies, for example, were what the ancient Greeks called chthonic deities, or deities worshiped in connection with the earth and the Underworld), while the new gods are associated with the masculine sky, embodied in the male god Uranus. Bridging the gulf between these opposing powers is Athena, a female Olympian goddess whose dual nature will prove essential to reconciling the old and new gods.