Oresteia

... you know?

You also have an essay about one of perhaps my favorite, uh, pieces of text in antiquity, which is the Oresteia-

Mm-hmm

... which I think was one of my favorite things to have read, and something that I find myself going back to repeatedly and reading differently at many different times in my life.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Yes, I love the Oresteia, and I, I feel the same way, that I think I, I, I also studied it when I was 18, and I think my, my awareness of just how, how ambiguous the narrative of that trilogy is has developed over the, you know, decades I've been rereading those plays.

And the way that it traces this narrative that moves from the Agamemnon, the longest play in the trilogy, where we have this dark, riddling language, and I think it's a fascinating play to read sort of juxtaposed with Homeric epic because it sort of tells this counterpart story to the story of The Odyssey of what happens when the warrior comes home from Troy, but actually he's not the one we're really gonna focus on.

The sequel plays with a second question.

Is it right for a son to kill his mother in order to avenge his father's death? But the trilogy of the Oresteia, besides being concerned with feminist problems, is a living gallery of woman types.

Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Electra and the Nurse, the Chorus of Maidens in the Corifuri, and the Chorus of Women Furies in the Eumenides.

in the agamemnon the two women are sharply contrasted clytemnestra the queen who will not submit to man's rule cassandra the victim predestined by fate to suffer the caprices of a master and to pass from the treacherous lover apollo to the brutal owner agamemnon no one can read the play and feel much sympathy with the murdered king he is done to death with every circumstance of horror returning home after many years absence in a foreign land where he has been fighting for his country he finds within his house not a faithful wife but a secret enemy she conceals her hatred allures him to the bath and there with her own hands murders him and yet the dramatist and his readers find the wife rather than the husband the sympathetic character it is partly the intolerable callousness and brutal pride of agamemnon who has sacrificed his daughter's life to help on his political schemes and now brings home with him from troy the concubine whom he has compelled to share his bed but there is also the feeling that clytemnestra is really the better man of the pair that she is naturally born to rule and that her subjection to a man would be against the law of nature certainly in the play she takes the first place and cassandra a part vocally the most important of any comes next the men agamemnon the watchman the herald aegisthus and the helpless chorus of aged counsellors are merely foils to the manlike queen the contrast indeed between the resolute woman and the irresolute men in the closing scenes is almost comic and the play ends with her triumph in the sequel the libation bearers the main action is again in the hands of women electra and her friends the maidens of the chorus orestes it is true does the actual killing but there is this difference between brother and sister electra acts on her own initiative and is a woman as strong-willed as clytemnestra herself orestes acts only in obedience to the promptings of others electra feels no remorse orestes as soon as he has killed his mother is tormented by imaginary terrors among the characters of the second play by far the most interesting is the old nurse She is obviously studied from the life, and is one of the most vivid figures of Greek drama.

The sequel plays with a second question.

Is it right for a son to kill his mother in order to avenge his father's death? But the trilogy of the Oresteia, besides being concerned with feminist problems, is a living gallery of woman types.

Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Electra and the Nurse, the Chorus of Maidens in the Corifuri, and the Chorus of Women Furies in the Eumenides.

in the agamemnon the two women are sharply contrasted clytemnestra the queen who will not submit to man's rule cassandra the victim predestined by fate to suffer the caprices of a master and to pass from the treacherous lover apollo to the brutal owner agamemnon no one can read the play and feel much sympathy with the murdered king he is done to death with every circumstance of horror returning home after many years absence in a foreign land where he has been fighting for his country he finds within his house not a faithful wife but a secret enemy she conceals her hatred allures him to the bath and there with her own hands murders him and yet the dramatist and his readers find the wife rather than the husband the sympathetic character it is partly the intolerable callousness and brutal pride of agamemnon who has sacrificed his daughter's life to help on his political schemes and now brings home with him from troy the concubine whom he has compelled to share his bed but there is also the feeling that clytemnestra is really the better man of the pair that she is naturally born to rule and that her subjection to a man would be against the law of nature certainly in the play she takes the first place and cassandra a part vocally the most important of any comes next the men agamemnon the watchman the herald aegisthus and the helpless chorus of aged counsellors are merely foils to the manlike queen the contrast indeed between the resolute woman and the irresolute men in the closing scenes is almost comic and the play ends with her triumph in the sequel the libation bearers the main action is again in the hands of women electra and her friends the maidens of the chorus orestes it is true does the actual killing but there is this difference between brother and sister electra acts on her own initiative and is a woman as strong-willed as clytemnestra herself orestes acts only in obedience to the promptings of others electra feels no remorse orestes as soon as he has killed his mother is tormented by imaginary terrors among the characters of the second play by far the most interesting is the old nurse She is obviously studied from the life, and is one of the most vivid figures of Greek drama.

And I could be completely wrong about this.

But you know, the dramatic cycle of the death of Agamemnon is most famously told in Aeschylus' Oresteia.

Agamemnon comes home.

He's murdered by his wife.

Call a halt to the great level of war.

Don't court the rage of Zeus who rules the world.

So you feel the impulse of either Homer or some latter embroiderer to build a bridge towards a new moral framework, like maybe the one you see in the Oresteia in this last chapter.

And this last chapter is an odd one in a couple of ways.

You can't find Athena all over Greek literature.

The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Oresteia, the Homer at Thames, modern pop culture.

She's in DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Percy Jackson, God of War.

Assassin's Creed, Odyssey, and about a thousand fantasy novels.