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EuripidesOrestes
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 409A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Problem with Vengeance and the Limits of Justice
Orestes was performed in the 50th anniversary year of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy the Oresteia, which is based on the same body of myths as Euripides’s Orestes. The Oresteia is the one surviving trilogy from antiquity. It includes the plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. The first depicts Agamemnon’s fatal return home; he arrives with his “war prize” Cassandra in tow, and Clytemnestra murders both. In The Libation Bearers, Orestes returns home, having been instructed by Apollo to avenge his father by killing his mother. Orestes has trouble executing the act but Pylades encourages him, reminding him of Apollo’s command. The play ends with the Furies hunting Orestes down to punish him. The Eumenides finds him fleeing to Athens with Apollo and Hermes’s help. There, Athena sets up a trial by jury with 12 Athenian citizens. When the jury’s verdict is tied, Athena casts the deciding vote, finding Orestes innocent. The Furies become enraged, but Athena assuages their anger by promising that they will be offered a place of honor in Athens. They accept and are renamed Eumenides, meaning “kindly ones.”
When Aeschylus produced his Oresteia, Athens was at a high point. The general and politician Pericles was instituting policies that moved democracy forward in the city across all classes. The city’s protective long walls had begun construction, which would enable them to withstand siege and warfare by safeguarding their harbor, and the city was rising in influence and importance across the Greek-speaking world. Aeschylus’s trilogy reflects this golden era, providing a mythical origin story. The gods resolve the apparent conflict between vengeance and justice in a way that is acceptable to all involved. Rather than vengeance, which breeds a destructive cycle of murder, those who are wronged can seek redress through legal procedure.
Euripides’s Orestes can be understood as engaging in conversation with Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Euripides tackles the same mythological narrative but from a very different moment in time. At the other end of the century, Athens had become devastated by plague and decisions that depleted financial resources and citizenry. Survivors were left in a state of despair and shock. Even Athens’s democracy, in which its citizens took such pride, had been overthrown, albeit briefly.
What exactly Euripides meant to convey, about his city and the gods they worshipped, continues to be strenuously debated. Tyndareus’s portrayal provides a clue that legal procedure alone cannot save citizens from their own worse natures. It is possible to justify even the worst atrocity while couching it as justice. Tyndareus judges Orestes harshly for taking matters into his own hands while seeking the same outcome: death for those who he considers enemies and wrongdoers. Orestes and Pylades also demonstrate that claims to justice can ring hollow, as when they insist their murder of Helen is appropriate to her “crime” instigating the Trojan War that brought so much death to the men of Hellas.
Pity as the Proper Response to Human Suffering
What Euripides intends to communicate about the gods is a subject of debate among scholars. Across the classical period and especially late in the fifth century, Athenian historians, poets, and philosophers had been questioning and critiquing how poets portrayed the gods. Some scholars have extrapolated that the ancients were questioning the existence of the gods, rather than human understanding of them. Scholars who embrace the former view tend to argue that Euripides was subversive, in some way mocking or discrediting the gods, while those who subscribe to the latter view conclude otherwise.
Given the performance context at religious festivals designed to gain the gods’ favor and invoke their benevolent protection, the notion that Euripides intended to subvert faith seems difficult to defend. Impiety was seen not as a private failure but a public menace that could provoke divine punishment. It seems unlikely that the city would select plays that called into question the foundation of their belief system.
Yet Euripides does show the gods upholding conflicting standards. Though his judgment can otherwise be suspect, Orestes is correct when he claims that he was caught between obeying the mandate that sons avenge their fathers—represented by Apollo’s command that he murder his mother—and the mandate against kin murder. The idea that only the gods can resolve this conflict is accurate because only the gods can understand what seems inexplicable to mortals, who lack sufficient insight into divine workings. Mortals’ lack of insight evidently causes them to suffer. Historical audiences would be aware of this via tragic events that played out in their lives, both private and public. In Orestes, Orestes’s tortured and remorseful state mutates into rage that he projects outward. His condition represents a familiar equation within epic poetry, best exemplified via the figure of Achilles in the Iliad: grief coupled with rage leads to destruction. Orestes’s grief, rage, and feeling of helplessness causes him to go to extremes, threatening the lives of innocents.
If, as later Athenian writers contended, tragic playwrights functioned as the conscience of the city, then perhaps Euripides’s Orestes was selected for performance because it suggested an antidote to suffering and destruction: pity and empathy. Tyndareus and Orestes demonstrate that even justice can lead to destruction when it becomes an excuse for exacting the same kind of brutal punishment as vengeance. Helen and Menelaus seek not to destroy but to reconcile. They show how pity for victims and perpetrators alike is the proper response to suffering, a lesson Achilles learns at the end of the Iliad but that the city of Athens in 408 BC had yet to understand.
The Decline of Athens
A popular legend about Euripides describes him leaving Athens in 408 BC, the same year that Orestes was produced, and moving to Macedon in the north, which would become a rising power in the following century. Some recent scholarship has challenged the veracity of this legend, but it remains appealing as an interpretive lens. It suggests that Orestes may have served as Euripides’s farewell to Athens, a city in decline that allowed arrogance and overconfidence to ravage its prestige and people.
The Athens-Sparta war, which officially broke out in 431 BC, almost immediately inflicted suffering on Athens. Pericles’s strategy to concede the Attic countryside to Sparta led to disaster. Residents were crammed inside the city walls for protection, but the subsequent overcrowding led to an outbreak of plague, of which Pericles himself eventually died. Athens managed to overcome this initial disaster and seemed hopeful about the war. When tribute state Mytilene revolted in 427 BC, Athens resisted the urge to brutally suppress it. Eventually, however, their desire for ascendency overrode their sense; they attempted to expand their empire in the west, in Sicily, despite their existing empire in the Aegean being insecure. One mistake led to another as Athens became increasingly desperate. Their expedition was completely destroyed, the Athenian fleet lost. During the same period, they destroyed the island of Melos after it refused to renounce its neutrality and become an Athenian tribute state, and eventually, in 411 BC, Athens’s democracy was overthrown. Though it was restored a year later, Athens was limping toward an ignominious loss.
Against this backdrop, Orestes and Electra’s desperate lashing out, indiscriminate violence, and rejection of peaceful attempts at reconciliation seem to reflect the ravaged conditions of Athens by a playwright on his way out. The Chorus’s complicity, against its better judgment, may mirror the behavior of the Athenian assembly that allowed itself to commit resource after resource toward a ruinous attempt at empire-building. Sparta king Menelaus and his wife Helen prove the most gentle and conciliatory, perhaps expressive of Spartan offers of peace that Athens rejected. The deus ex machina at the end of the play may be wish fulfillment, a longing for peace and reconciliation for a city that seemed intent on destroying itself.
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By Euripides
