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

Lines 235-565Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 235-396 Summary: “Second Episode and First Stasimon”

The setting is now the temple of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens. Orestes enters and takes up a suppliant’s position in front of a statue of Athena that stands in the center of the orchestra. He commits himself to the protection of the goddess, “blunted at last, and worn and battered on the outland / habitations and the journeyings of men” (238-39). He is interrupted by the Furies, who have tracked Orestes to Athens by the “welcome smell of human blood” (253). Spotting Orestes, they accost him and tell him he must pay for shedding his mother’s blood. When Orestes protests that he has been purified of his guilt by Apollo and calls on Athena to help him, the Furies as Chorus respond by singing the first stasimon. As they sing, the Furies dance around Orestes and utter a “spell” (306) to immobilize him (because of this, this stasimon is sometimes known as the “binding song”). They expound on their role—punishing those who have committed misdeeds—and insist on their importance in maintaining order, despite the fact that Zeus and the younger gods do not honor them. The Furies emphasize that they are powerful and implacable; even if they are hidden beneath the earth “privilege / Primeval yet is mine” (393-94).

Lines 397-565 Summary: “Third Episode and Second Stasimon”

Athena enters, having heard the commotion; she is coming from Troy, where she was taking charge of the new lands conquered for her by the Greeks in the Trojan War. She asks Orestes and the Furies who they are. The Furies speak first, emphasizing their rights and denouncing Orestes actions as matricide and that he must be punished by them. Athena then asks Orestes for his side. Orestes explains that he has already been purified of his bloodshed, telling Athena of his identity and lineage and of the crime that he was driven to commit in vengeance for his father, “Agamemnon, lord of seafarers” (456). He underscores the fact that it was Apollo who urged him to do as he did. Athena, deciding that “the matter is too big for any mortal man / Who thinks he can judge it” (470-71), sets out to appoint a jury of Athenian citizens and leaves Orestes and the Furies to prepare their respective cases.

After Athena leaves, the Furies sing the second stasimon. They speak of the dangerous implications that Orestes’s acquittal would have and reiterate their importance as “the Angry Ones” (499) who make sure the misdeeds of human beings are justly punished. They extol the use of fear of retribution in human society, and imagine the anarchy that would ensue if this fear is undermined. Under their watch, the just are safe, while wrongdoers are always punished in the end.

Lines 235-565 Analysis

Unusual for an Attic tragedy, Aeschylus’s Eumenides has two episodes (what modern audiences might call “scenes”) before the first stasimon (the name used for the choral songs typically sung between one episode and the next). This is just another element of the complex and unique staging of this play. The setting also changes with the second episode, with Orestes’s arrival at Athens. Athens, of course, is where the play would have originally been performed (Aeschylus was an Athenian playwright, and most of his works were first produced at the City Dionysia, a festival in honor of Dionysus that was celebrated in Athens). Unsurprisingly, then, there are various nods to patriotic ideals throughout this part of the play. Athena even describes the city to Orestes as “the place of the just” where it is forbidden “to speak evil of another who is without blame” (413-14). The Athenians were proud of their political and legislative institutions, which they regarded as a model for other Greek city-states. It would have therefore seemed only natural—at least to an audience made up primarily of Athenian citizens—that Orestes should come to Athens to finally receive a just and fair trial.

The Furies, pursuing Orestes to Athens, further highlight their values and motivations in this part of the play. In the so-called “binding-song”—the song they sing to incapacitate Orestes both mentally and physically—the Furies make much of their role in punishing transgressors and maintaining order in the world: “We hold we are straight and just” (312), they say to Orestes. They explain their function in more explicit terms too: “as witnesses / Of the truth” (318-19), they are charged with punishing those who commit murder. Even more specifically, though, the Furies align themselves with the primordial maternal powers of the cosmos—with the power of the mother and maternal duty. Hence their references to maternal figures (such as their mother, the goddess of night), or their preoccupation with “motherblood” (327) that they represent. Given this allegiance, readers or the audience can better understand why the Furies are so determined never to let Orestes go: Orestes, after all, killed his mother.

Athena’s arrival introduces the middle ground between Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy. For though Athena does belong to the newer generation of gods, she is also female, and thus belongs, in a sense, to both worlds. Unlike Apollo or the Furies, Athena does not just subscribe to one definition of right, but rather admits that Orestes’s case is too challenging to be decided by any one entity. Orestes must undergo a trial—a process that undergirds the formalized Legal Basis of Justice. Athena’s decision thus sets the stage for the murder trial of Orestes at the Areopagus, which takes up the second half of the play.