Ancient Greece’s Legacy for Liberty: The Wraiths of Wrath

As the play begins, Orestes is being pursued by the Furies, spirits of divine retribution, as vengeance for his having killed his mother Clytæmnestra, which he did as vengeance for her role in the slaying of his father Agamemnon – an act which in turn was motivated in part as vengeance on Clytæmnestra’s part for Agamemnon’s having ritually sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia.² (Evenings around the dinner table must have been awkward.) Orestes arrives in Athens, as foreign suppliants generally do in Greek drama, and asks the goddess Athena, divine patron of Athens, for protection against the Furies. The Furies in turn state the case for the social necessity of institutions of punishment:

The god Apollo, by contrast, who appears as Orestes’ advocate, regards with loathing the Furies’ obsessive vengefulness:

Athena, in good (and once again anachronistic) Athenian democratic fashion, puts the issue to a jury vote; when the votes turn out equally divided, however, it’s up to Athena to cast the deciding vote. But she refuses to side unequivocally with either the Furies or her brother Apollo. Against the Furies, Athena chooses to pardon Orestes, thus ending the cycle of revenge. But she rejects Apollo’s contemptuous attitude toward the Furies, insisting that vengeance deserves an ineradicable place in human social institutions. She tells Orestes:

But while the Furies will wreak havoc if they are repressed, allowing them free rein is no less harmful to social order. Hence Athena seeks – ultimately successfully – to “tame” the Furies by incorporating them into the Athenian community. Her plea to the Furies is as follows:

In short, civic punishment both enshrines the spirit of vengeance and moderates it.

The idea of human passions as godlike forces that will destroy society if they are utterly repressed, and so must somehow be honored and made room for despite their destructive power, is also the theme of Euripides’ Bacchæ, whose hero Pentheus is torn to pieces as a result of his attempt to suppress the cult of Dionysus. In addition, one can see Aeschylus’s Eumenides as an anticipation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock, a Fury-​like representative of an older religion of retribution (as Shakespeare’s audience would have seen Judaism), is required by the wise, Athena-​like female arbiter Portia to abandon his quest for vengeance and convert to a younger religion of mercy.⁷

Athena’s compromise between unbridled vengeance and entirely suppressed vengeance is paired with the political compromise between excessive freedom and unmitigated despotism. Such a compromise is hailed both by the chorus of Furies –

– and by Athena herself:

Presumably, the endless cycle of vengeance championed by the chthonic Furies represents anarchy, while the complete suppression of vengeance represents despotism. (One could read the pairing the other way, but the context seems to support the former interpretation.) Political life and the rule of law, then, constitute a golden mean between vengeance unrestrained and vengeance entirely squelched.¹⁰

But there is a further complication to the trial of Orestes, one that introduces some rather odd gender politics. The opposition between the Furies (subterranean female deities) and Apollo (a male sun-​god), as Aeschylus presents it, already lends itself well enough to the popular anthropological theory of conflict between the older earth-​mother deities associated with agricultural peoples, and the newer sky-​father deities associated with the nomadic peoples who conquered them. Moreover, in Aeschylus the Furies are avengers not of all killings but only of killings involving blood relations; hence their concern for Orestes’ having killed his mother but not for Clytæmnestra’s having killed her husband:¹¹

Apollo, by contrast, despite his professed repudiation of vengeance as a “feast … the gods spit out,” actually has no problem with Orestes’ vengeance against his mother, and in fact admits having urged him to it. He justifies this in part because of his conviction that “married love between / man and woman is bigger than oaths, guarded by right of nature¹³ (so that a wife’s betrayal of her husband is a more serious matter than the Furies acknowledge), and in part because, inasmuch as the father’s and mother’s roles in sexual generation are active and passive respectively, it is only the father who is truly the parent of the resulting infant, and so matricide is a less serious matter than parricide:

Absurd as this theory of sexual generation may sound to us, it was widely accepted in ancient Greece.¹⁵ However, Apollo’s corollary of matricide’s being no big deal would not have been similarly accepted; at any rate, a passage in Aristophanes’ Clouds suggests that the average Athenian would have found violence against one’s mother even more shocking than violence against one’s father.¹⁶

The Furies raise other objections to Apollo’s argument, appealing to inconvenient facts about Greek mythology:

Apparently feeling compelled to choose between the Furies’ specious arguments for downplaying the seriousness of killing one’s spouse, and Apollo’s specious arguments for downplaying the seriousness of killing one’s mother, Athena opts to side with Apollo (and thus with Orestes), on the grounds that since she was born full-​grown from Zeus’s head, she must consequently be “always for the male” since “no mother anywhere … gave me birth.”¹⁸

Notably, this is a reason for favoring Orestes’ case that could apply only to Athena, and thus seems to offer Aeschylus’s audience, all presumably having been born in the normal way, no reason to share her judgment. Despite the play’s apparently happy ending – with Orestes freed, the Furies placated, and the cycle of violence brought to an end – the central issues are arguably left less than completely resolved. As we shall see, a number of later Greek writers looked more favorably on both women and anarchy, and less favorably on retributive punishment, than Aeschylus’s Athena does here.