The Eumenides

Overview

The Eumenides is the only surviving Greek tragedy whose third act is a court case, and the only one in which a chorus of monsters is talked into taking a job.

Two things make it unlike the plays before it. It moves: Delphi, then Athens, then a hillside, with a scene change in the middle, which Greek tragedy almost never does. And the chorus is not a group of bystanders commenting on other people’s disaster. The Furies are a party to the action, they prosecute, they lose, and the final third of the play is about what happens to them.

Ancient sources say the first appearance of the Furies caused pandemonium in the theatre, and although the details of that story are not reliable, the effect was clearly meant to be extreme. They are described as black, snoring, dripping, with snakes, and nobody had put anything like them on a stage.

The politics are immediate and deliberate. In 462 BCE the reformer Ephialtes had stripped the council of the Areopagus of nearly all its powers, leaving it with jurisdiction over homicide, and he was murdered shortly afterwards. Aeschylus staged this four years later, showing Athena founding that exact court for that exact purpose. What he meant by it, endorsement of the reform or a plea for what survived it, has been argued over ever since.

What happens

The priestess of Apollo at Delphi opens the play with a calm, formal prayer to the gods of the shrine, goes inside, and comes scrambling out on her hands and knees. There is a man at the navel-stone with blood on his hands, and around him a sleeping ring of creatures she has no name for.

Apollo wakes Orestes and admits responsibility: he ordered the killing, and he will not abandon him. He has put the Furies to sleep, which he says is the most he can do, and sends Orestes to Athens to embrace the ancient statue of Athena and find judges. Hermes will guide him.

Then the ghost of Clytemnestra, who does not appeal to anyone but simply wakes her hounds, reproaching them for sleeping while her killer runs. The Furies rouse themselves and quarrel bitterly with Apollo on his own threshold. Their case is a good one and they state it clearly: they hunt those who kill blood kin, that is all they do, and Clytemnestra’s crime was against a husband, who was no blood relation of hers. Apollo calls them disgusting and tells them to get out of his temple.

In Athens, Orestes clasps Athena’s statue and the Furies close in and sing the binding song, a hymn meant to tie him up in madness where he sits.

Athena arrives and does something unexpected: she asks questions, hears both sides, and then says the matter is too great for any one person to decide, herself included. She will appoint a court from the best of her citizens, bind it by oath, and make it permanent.

The trial is short and strange. The Furies cross-examine Orestes and he admits the act. Apollo appears as advocate and makes three arguments: that the oracle came from Zeus, that Agamemnon’s murder was the worse crime because he was a king and died shamefully in a bath, and finally the biological claim, that the mother does not generate the child but only carries another’s seed, so Orestes did not kill a blood relation at all. His proof is Athena, standing there, who had no mother.

Athena announces that she votes for Orestes, giving her reasons: no mother bore her, and she is for the father in all things. She rules that a tie acquits. The votes are counted and are equal. Orestes is free, thanks Athena, promises that Argos will be Athens’ ally forever, and leaves the play.

That is two thirds of the way through, and the remaining third is the part that matters. The Furies are not placated by a verdict. They are ancient, they have been overridden by younger gods, they have lost their function, and they promise to drop a poison on Attica that will kill crops and children. Athena does not threaten them, though she mentions twice that she knows where Zeus keeps the thunderbolt. She offers: a home in the earth beneath the city, sacrifices, first honours, a share in every marriage and birth, and a standing role as the thing Athenians are afraid of when they consider doing wrong. She makes the offer four times. They accept, their song turns from blight to blessing, and the trilogy that began with a man lying on a roof in the dark ends with a torchlit procession escorting them to their new home under a new name.

How to read it

Read the whole trilogy in sequence, and read this one in a single sitting. It is eighty pages and the shape only works entire.

Read the trial twice. The first time, follow who says what. The second time, notice how bad Apollo’s arguments are, and ask whether Aeschylus knew. Many readers conclude the verdict is meant to look thin, and that the real resolution is what Athena does afterwards rather than what the court decides.

Pay attention to the Furies’ own case. They are not evil and they are not stupid. Their song about fear as a necessary guard is a serious political argument, and Athena endorses it in her own charge to the jury a few hundred lines later.

Note what the settlement costs. The Furies keep their function and lose their independence; Orestes goes free on a technicality about parenthood; the mother’s claim is never actually answered. Whether that is a resolution or a suppression is the standing question.

Watch for the change of name. They become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, only at the very end, and the title of the play is therefore a piece of information withheld until the last minutes.

Questions it raises

• Apollo wins with the claim that the mother is not a parent. Does the play endorse that argument, or expose it?
• Athena breaks the tie by declaring herself for the father in all things. Is a judge who states that bias before voting giving a reason or an excuse?
• The court replaces the feud. What exactly has been solved, and what has only been moved somewhere else?
• The Furies are bought off with honours. Is that reconciliation, or the older order being absorbed and silenced?
• If a tie acquits, the system is designed to let the guilty go rather than punish the innocent. Is that the right setting?
• The trilogy ends in a procession and a blessing. Does the house of Atreus actually get peace, or only Athens?