University of Manchester Classics Lecturer Roberta Mazza looks at how The Oresteia reflected life in ancient Greece and how it is still an important play 2,500 years later.
Staged for the first time in 458 BC Athens, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia was originally composed of three tragedies, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers (Choephori), and The Eumenides, which have survived, and a satyr-play, Proteus, lost. The Oresteia has been a blockbuster since its première at the Athenian religious festival of Dionysus: Aeschylus won the prize as the best of the tragic writers who competed that year, and the trilogy has been successful on stage worldwide from that moment onwards.
Theatrical performances in Greece were radically different from ours. While what we nowadays see is a condensed version of the three tragedies, in antiquity all of them were performed one after the other, concluded by the satyr-play (intended to release the tension from the audience), in the wider context of religious celebrations in which the entire polis, the city-state, participated.
Going to the theatre was an intensely emotional religious and political experience; it was a ritual including music (the chorus sang their parts) and sacrifices, about which we are only partially informed because what has survived are fragmentary texts and the ruins of ancient theatres in Greece and elsewhere.
The Oresteia narrates the fate of the Atreids, the household of Agamemnon, leader of the Trojan expedition, when he came back to his kingdom, Argos, after 10 years of war. In the first tragedy, Agamemnon faces the consequences of the sacrifice of his and Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia, an act he performed to placate the anger of goddess Artemis and let the Greek ships sail to battle. Back from Troy with his war slave Cassandra, the seer daughter of Priam, the king will be killed by Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. This homicide will put Argos under the tyranny of Aegisthus, and will cause more death among the Atreids.
The son of Agamemnon, Orestes, flanked by his sister Electra, has now to vindicate the father, through the killing of the mother and her lover. The chain of vengeance could be only interrupted by divine intervention, because – as the Chorus explains – “for taking human life there is a payment that has to be paid.” Chased by the Eumenides, terrifying divinities of vengeance and fate, Orestes is ordered by the god Apollo in Delphi to go to Athens to beg for the help of the goddess Athena: ‘there’ – the god adds – ‘you shall be judged by men that I have appointed’.
Athens and her democratic institutions – the Areopagos, the Athenian supreme court of justice, mentioned by Apollo – is the real protagonist of the concluding piece of the trilogy. The Oresteia is an in-depth meditation on violence and conflict, and the fate of killers and victims, winners and losers. Although staged in the mythical past of the heroic kings, the tragedies sounded terribly modern to the Athenians. Athens had just led the last Greek victorious campaign against the Persians, a deadly long-lasting conflict in which Aeschylus himself and his fellow citizens took part as soldiers. They were veterans who survived the war and came back with memories of violence, pain, and death on both sides.
According to Aeschylus, safety lays in the city-state, in ‘his’ Athens. It becomes clear then why The Oresteia is still important to us today, 2,500 years on: because it brings on stage a tormented meditation on, and celebration of, democratic progress. Aeschylus thought that the only way out from brutal violence was the Athenian model extended to all Greece and beyond. This solution looks comfortable to the modern spectator when applied to our civil and criminal justice; nonetheless it opens a number of questions and doubts about exporting democracy as an answer to international conflicts, as we know only too well.
Roberta Mazza is a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester, and an academic honorary curator, Graeco-Roman Egypt antiquities, at Manchester Museum.
The Oresteia runs from Fri 23 Oct – Sat 14 Nov 2015. Find out more and book tickets here.
