Part 3

We have already seen Achilles reappear abridged in the Watchman—Achilles1, that was, the mother bird who “used to watch through many a sleepless night” (9.323)—but the Watchman is only the precursor of Clytaemestra, who describes herself too as sleeplessly waiting for the beacon fires (889). He calls on her to arise, to take up his cry as he falls silent, to awaken with the wrath of Achilles1, to assume the hero’s role. (She takes up the cry, 587; her cry awakens the house, Ch 35; she awakens the Furies, E 94.) It is she, contriver of the fires swifter than Achilles, who will perform the deed he left undone: she it is that has received his spirit, she is Achilles1 transmitted to Argos, she possesses what Calchas foresaw, the wrath that would rise again, the μῆνις παλίνορτος that was once Achilles’, the instrument of the daimôn of the house of Atreus; and no god will restrain her.

Now wrath is a potent thing: the wrath of Zeus brought about the fatal wedding of Helen and Paris that was sorrow (κῆδος, “care for others,“ 699), and we know what the wrath of Achilles did. (Indeed, μῆνις is active, or associated with action, wherever it appears in Iliad and Oresteia.)  But of course Clytaemestra has not the power of Zeus or the might of Achilles; so to bring her wrath to bear, like Nestor she must employ her wits, μῆτις (she is μεγαλομήτις, 1426); she must scheme, μήδομαι—not for nothing does her name suggest “famous schemer” (Κλυται-μήστρα: “What is (she) scheming? … A great evil is being schemed in this house” τί ποτε μήδεται; … μεγ᾽ ἐν δόμοισι τοῖσδε μήδεται κακόν 1100-1102, cf. κλυτά βυσσόφρων [”deep-thinking” < βύσσος ”the depth of the sea,” where Iris finds Thetis (to send her to Achilles 24.80)] Ἐρινύς Ch 651, δολόμητις Odyssey 11.422). By her fire she has overcome distance and time; her beacons were lit from the burning city; in her mind’s eye she saw the flame leaping from height to height, as if transmitting life force, and now she pictures the occupation (320ff) as if present at Troy as its conqueror, as though as Achilles1 she has taken it with Patroclus as Achilles wished they might (16.97). And confirming herself as the Watchman’s successor, in her imagining she echoes his words: his bed was a “night-wanderer’s” (νυκτίπλαγκτον 12), the soldier’s toil she envisions is the same (νυκτίπλαγκτος 330); he longs for “release” (ἀπαλλαγήν 1) from his vigil on the open roof, the soldiers are “released” (ἀπαλλαχθέντες 336) from the “frosts and dews of the open air.”

One may ask how it is Achilles1 whose role Clytaemestra assumes, and not Achilles2. Wasn’t the original Watchman Achilles in his tent, whereas her action like that of Achilles2 follows upon the sight of fire? And isn’t she to take vengeance on Agamemnon, as Achilles2 did on Hector? As to the first point, the weary dog-like Watchman truly represents not Achilles in his tent, but Achilles who has worked like a dog for Agamemnon before the Iliad begins; the Trojan fire that first rouses Achilles is not the blaze on the ships, but the hot fury of Agamemnon compelled to face what his desire for Troy has brought him to; Achilles’ dramatic call to attention is not the late destructive cry across the battlefield, but the early eruption of his wrath into an outburst damning the king. As to the second point, remember that in Hector Achilles2 slays his former self Achilles1, that was guilty through self-love, with its blind inadvertence, of Patroclus’s death; whereas the original anger of Achilles1 at Agamemnon is wholly just and pure. Clytaemestra’s is like that. Achilles in his tent held back from all the action at Troy. She hears of the war by report, she plans (1377), she takes up with Aegisthus; but she is not biding her time in the way Achilles1 was, for from the moment Iphigeneia was slain her purpose of vengeance was complete. The right comparison is with Achilles when Agamemnon demands Briseis: Achilles means to kill him on the spot. For Clytaemestra time has stood still since the slaying of Iphigeneia; for her it is as though she dispatches Agamemnon without delay, as Achilles at first thought to do at Troy. The “dramatic time” that brings together the sacrifice at Aulis with the opening of the Iliad is real time for her. By her fires Argos and Troy have been united in disregard of conventional time and space, to the bewilderment of the Chorus. For her the absence of Agamemnon was like a long nightmare (857ff); “now” that he is back, and “then” when he left, are close together (1412ff, cf. 606ff). Indeed, is not Agamemnon still on the point of leaving? For while he is present, Clytaemestra has seen to it that he has not returned home: the Herald with his first words greets the soil of Argos (503), but she will not let Agamemnon touch it (906); she keeps him above the earth, as his people held Iphigeneia over the altar (231). For this welcome he has been spared by the Thracian winds of sacrifice that in the storm (654) as at Aulis have worn away his fleet.

That Clytaemestra acts like a man is repeatedly said (11, 351, 940); resisting this confusion of the sexes, the Chorus from first to last would have her a foolish woman, childish, incapable (272ff, 483, 592, 1251ff, 1401; she will mock them in turn by spelling out her deed in simple language, 1404–­1406). But she knows what she is about. Her daughter was entrapped and slain, and by the child’s death she herself was locked in anger, as if in the stillness of suspended animation, or an eddy of Time; so now she means to be the man and put Agamemnon in the position he condemned them to.

The Chorus prepares the way for the reception she has in mind, bringing us back to Aulis by recalling that there the king made a very inartistic picture in its eyes (ἐμοὶ … κάρτ᾽ ἀπομούσως ἦσθα γεγραμμένος 799). The Greek says, literally, something like “to me you were depicted very un-muse-ly,” ἀπομούσως; or, if the verb can be middle, “to me you pictured very un-muse-ly for yourself.” The second possibility, if real, is attractive, since Agamemnon chose to sacrifice Iphigeneia, and of course directed the deed, so the scene as presented (231-43), which is specifically compared to a picture (ὡς ἐν γραφαίς; some emend θ᾽ ὡς to τώς), was painted by him. Thus the middle would suggest condemnation of his act of sacrifice: he painted, but not as Muses do, the picture of the sacrifice of his daughter, a most musical singer (243-47, cf. 1418). Further, the Chorus next says that Agamemnon was managing ill the tiller of his mind (πραπίδων 802), which recalls the veering wind of his mind (φρενός 219), and his being knocked aside, deranged (παρακοπά 223), before the sacrifice. Moreover, the next lines refer obscurely to sacrifice (803-804, with the emendation ἐκ θυσιῶν, which both Smyth and DP accept). As DP says, “a suitably cryptic reference to Iphigeneia’s sacrifice is very much in place here, for it might be expected that the Chorus would give this as the reason why they disapproved of Agamemnon at the start of the war,” etc. It is noteworthy that a word similar to “un-muse-ly” describes the “bloody stroke of Atê” in Libation-Bearers (παράμουσος, Ch 466).

Once the king arrives, Clytaemestra has to manage time and the man as carefully as Homer did in preparing the sacrifice of Patroclus: he is pampered like a woman (918) or luxurious Priam (935f), and in the face of Cassandra’s muteness Clytaemestra exclaims,  “I have no leisure, no time to waste” (οὔτοι … μοι σκολὴ πάρα τρίβειν 1055, σκολή repeated 1059). With skill she fences Agamemnon around with the robe or net (Cassandra makes Clytaemestra herself the net 1115f), immobilizes him as he froze her years before; and the death he faces in the bath is a travesty of the hazard of Achilles in the river, which sought to re-establish that hero’s former immobility; not only because of the water, but also because the thing wrapped around him is ἄπειρον, “endless” (1382), like the circular motion of an eddy. Its length is also indicated by the expression an “evil wealth of garment” (1383), which further belongs to the frequent theme of insatiable getting productive of downfall. He suffers the endless “woven snare” (1580, cf. 949) because he walked on the long fabric path, and he did that because Clytaemestra entangled him in speech “long stretched out” (916) (as Zeus had entangled him in Atê), the weaving that is woman’s strength; and so he is made into the net she had imagined him as long before (868). It is fitting that he calls her first blow καίριος: both “in the right place” and “at the right time” (καιρίαν πληγήν 1343)—well managed; and part of the credit is his own, in view of Clytaemestra’s assertion that Agamemnon has slain himself: with his crimes, she says, “He has filled a great mixing-bowl in this house, which now, on returning here, he himself has had to drink up” (1397). Perhaps the “silver-sided bathtub” (1539) in which, unlike his comrades in their foundered ships, he chokes on his own salt blood, can be likened to that mixing-bowl—“ ’Tis true there’s better boose than brine, but he that drowns must drink it” (Housman); and with regard to the metaphor of the woven snare we may recall the Chorus’s vision of his net cast over Troy that could not be overleaped, “of slavery and all-catching ruin” (δουλείας … ἄτης παναλώτου 357; cf. his own image of the lion that leapt into the city (827)): Agamemnon dies by his own means.

Agamemnon, as I have proposed, has been above all men insatiable, striving for his unrecoverable daughter as well as for Troy. (“Insatiable” is ἀκόρεστος [or ἀκόρετος], five times in Agamemnon; from κόρος, “satiety,“ “excess“ [382], it is Attic for Homeric ἀκόρητος; could ἀ-κόρ-, or better ἀ-κόρη-, suggest the want of a κόρη [Homeric κούρη], “daughter,“ “maiden”?) The city gained, the army has given him the “choicest flower of rich treasure” (954), a prize that closely resembles his lost Iphigeneia: Cassandra, “fairest of the daughters of Priam” (13.365), whom he has brought with him (ostensibly to replace or supplement Clytaemestra—again, the daughter/wife confusion) as one more, and the most suitable, replacement for the victim of his initial sacrifice. Not only is Cassandra the daughter of his royal adversary; like the daughter of Chryses, she is close to Apollo; and like Agamemnon himself, she has been at odds with the god. Clytaemestra has the wit to induce Agamemnon to take her path into the house by having him put himself in the place of Cassandra’s father Priam, the rich barbarian king who would not have hesitated to “walk on embroideries” (935); and his last words, as he enters the fatal gates, express his kinship with Cassandra—in servitude (953).

Cassandra too, the last “Iphigeneia” to comfort Agamemnon in life, will long remain up in the carriage, evidently kept there by the presence of Clytaemestra (invited by Clytaemestra to come down at 1039 [in the same words as to Agamemnon at 906], again by the Chorus at 1070). It is likely that she descends immediately after Clytaemestra has gone inside, when the pitying Chorus urges her, “Come, unhappy one, leave the carriage, yield to the necessity before you, and take on your new yoke” (1070). This yoke of slavery is what Clytaemestra a moment before called a “bridle“ (χαλινός 1066), which is the thing that silenced Iphigeneia, when Agamemnon had his attendants “restrain by a guard of her fair-prowed mouth a voice sounding a curse upon the house, by force and the speechless power of bridles” (235). Cassandra, who is slow to accept the curb, speaks at length, setting out the curse past and future; she utters what Iphigeneia could not. Listening to her call upon “insatiable Discord” (στάσις … ἀκόρετος 1117) to raise a cry of triumph, the frightened Chorus affirms Phoenix’s warning of the swiftness of Atê (1124). As Agamemnon used to have Iphigeneia sing at his feasts to accompany the third libation (243), so Clytaemestra, having implied that she dealt Agamemnon his final blow as a celebrant offering a third libation (1385), will mock Cassandra as bringing a side-dish for her pleasure, after singing like a swan (1444; i.e., Apollo, Birds 879, or in any case his bird). And in her final words the singer affirms her mysterious affinity with the former victim. Iphigeneia over the altar, you remember, stood out “as in a picture”; Cassandra expresses pity for unhappy mortals by saying, “If one has ill fortune, with wipes a wet sponge destroys the picture” (γραφήν 1328).

Cassandra’s own picture she had painted herself: “Instead of a father’s altar, a butcher’s block awaits, bloody with the hot preliminary slaughter (προσφάγματι) of the woman cut down (κοπείσης)” (1277; I have not assumed “my father’s” or identified the woman implied by the feminine participle). The classicist formerly known as “Miss Lorimer” (Elizabeth Hilda Lockhart Lorimer, quoted in DP) explains that “The πρόσφαγμα [πρό-σφαγμα < σφαγή, etc.] is the libation of blood offered to the dead as the preliminary rite of a Greek funeral in the heroic age … The meaning of προ- is purely temporal”; thus Cassandra’s blood will provide the libation for Agamemnon’s funeral. Very well, but the “preliminary slaughter” can also be the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at her father’s altar, the more so because “preliminary rites,” προτέλεια, have already been mentioned in connection with that sacrifice and, apparently, the treacherous luring of Iphigeneia to Aulis, as well as with other priestly slaughter (65, 227, 720). With this interpretation Agamemnon, by “staining a father’s hands with streams of a maiden’s blood” (209), as he described it himself, has provided his own libation; an act appropriate for a self-slayer. For Clytaemestra the blood of Iphigeneia is still fresh; the seer Cassandra perceives it through Clytaemestra’s eyes as the cause of her own death. Moreover, after she is slain with Agamemnon the Chorus sings of Helen, “You have crowned yourself with a final crown (?), long to be remembered” (δι᾽ αἷμ᾽ ἄνιπτον) “through / by means of [or possibly ‘by reason of’] blood not / not to be washed away. Truly at that time (τότ᾽) there was a Spirit of Strife in the house …” (1458ff). The blood of “that time” is the unexpiated blood of Iphigeneia, through which the death of Agamemnon was to come about (so DP).

Agamemnon has been slain in the bath, naked and screaming like Achilles1 being reborn as Achilles2; so he too reappears, as his cousin Aegisthus, the surviving son of Thyestes (no doubt played by the same actor) steps into his place in the story: with his first line he greets the light of day, as if he were newly born (1577); vulgar, insecure, and violent, he is so much like Agamemnon that we could call him Agamemnon2; though he is quite without majesty. The Chorus calls him “woman” (1625), as Clytaemestra insinuated of Agamemnon (1446), and, like Cassandra (1224), decries his cowardice (1635, 1643) as Achilles did Agamemnon’s (1.225); Orestes will call him woman too (Ch 304).

It is for the sake of Aegisthus—his usefulness, if nothing else—that Clytaemestra has sacrificed her daughter Electra: drawn in as Achilles was to imitate Agamemnon’s slaying of Iphigeneia, for Aegisthus she has condemned Electra to social death, denying her marriage; though to be sure Electra has not actually been slain; her suffering is less acute than Iphigeneia’s (in keeping with the worldview of Nestor). Although she is absent from Agamemnon, we may understand that as with Orestes (877ff), the suffering has well begun before the death of Agamemnon—that she has already been denied her proper place in the family. As she puts it later, she and her brother have been sold like captives sent abroad into bondage (πεπραμένοι, Ch 132, repeated by Orestes 915), in order to purchase Aegisthus; she is in the position of a slave, she says (ἀντίδουλος, Ch 135); Orestes calls her an exile like him (Ch 254), and she agrees (Ch 337); she has been shut up like a vicious dog (Ch 447). Although the text is corrupt, in all likelihood she prays to her father to grant her a husband; she does pledge to offer him libations at her bridal (Ch 481, 486; she may have spoken before of the importance of perpetuating the house, 255ff if spoken by her). In evidence of her suppressed existence, when she first appears she doesn’t know how to speak, what to say (Ch 87); but with the help of the Chorus of slave-women she composes a prayer. Subsequently, with her brother and the Chorus she will be able to sing for Agamemnon (Ch 332). The suffering, the libations, the silence, the song: all tell us that Electra, bringing solace to her father’s shade, is the last incarnation of Iphigeneia, and the circle (ring, eddy) is complete: Iphigeneia, Chyseis, Briseis, Cassandra, Electra—from one loving daughter of Agamemnon to another.

Now at length Clytaemestra has played out her role as it corresponded to that of Achilles1. She is done with being the man; urging peace she concludes, “Such is a woman’s speech (λόγος), if anyone thinks it worth learning from“ (1661). She has resigned, her confidence is gone, she cannot assert herself as in the past (348, 614, 1401); formerly she scorned dream-visions (275), soon they will terrify her (Ch 33, 523). Once she boldly imagined the night-wandering of a soldier at Troy; soon she will suffer “wandering terrors of the night” (Ch 524) fearing the specter that will prove to be Orestes (in whose care his Nurse once wandered at night, Ch 751). So she has only to be slain, although she will resist that as well as she can, and return for a last effort as a shade.

Aegisthus persists, and now we have to realize that he fills a twofold role, cast in both its parts by Clytaemestra. He is in the place of Agamemnon of Argos, of course, received there by her; at the same time he is in the place of Priam of Troy. For Agamemnon made his entrance with Priam’s daughter, as though she were his; and Clytaemestra confirmed him as the double of the barbarian king, exhibiting him as walking on embroideries. It was not enough that he was her enemy, she meant to show that he was the great enemy of the house of Atreus. So transformed, he went to his end. It was only to be expected, therefore, that the novel aspect he had just assumed would persist in his reincarnation. Thus not only has Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, usurped the kingship of the house of Atreus, dispossessing the founder’s descendants; he is by nature the enemy of that house, the kind of ruler to trample on what is most precious in it, just as the Trojans profaned its sacred table of hospitality and slew its men.

In this state of things the Chorus calls for a man, a hero, an ἀνήρ (Ch 160) to come and set the house free; and that is Aegisthus’s younger cousin Orestes, the son of his first cousin Agamemnon (thus Aegisthus’s first cousin once removed, Agamemnon being Atreus’s son, not grandson: Ἀτρέως παῖδας 60, Ἀτρεὺς … τούτου πατήρ 1583). He comes bidden by Apollo (Ch 269ff), and as if summoned by Clytaemestra’s nightmare (Ch 523, 549f). In many respects he resembles Achilles. His relation to Aegisthus recalls the proposals that Achilles become the son-in-law of Agamemnon—husband to Iphigeneia before Aulis, or to another of his daughters, as proposed by Agamemnon for the embassy: “If we should return … he would be my son-in-law (γαμβρός); and I will honor him equally with Orestes“ (ἶσον  Ὀρέστηι, 9.141); whereas Agamemnon had previously denied that Achilles was equal to himself (ἶσον ὲμοί, 1.187). Orestes represents himself as an ἀνήρ now ashes in an urn, “well wept over” (Ch 686), like one of those warriors Ares has sent back from Troy (438); the Chorus speaks of him as wrestling (Ch 866), which they did at Troy (63); he compares himself to a charioteer, recalling Achilles’ word (his verb is ἡνιοστροφῶ [< -φέω] Ch 1022; Achilles’ was ἡνιοχεύς 19.401). And although Pylades is not given the role of Patroclus, that Orestes has this dear comrade increases his resemblance to Achilles. Above all, like Achilles he has been robbed by the leader of property for which he toiled; the loss and recovery of property is a constant theme (Ch 135ff χρημάτων… πόνοισι; 260, 275, 301, 408, 444, 480, 482?, 503, 864, 915).

Orestes arrives from abroad, where like Achilles he has long remained in idleness (a by-sitter, ἔφεδρος Ch 866)—by external rather than internal compulsion, as a guest of Strophius (Pylades’ father), whose name, which brings to mind the wheeling birds at Aulis (στροφοδινοῦνται 51), might be translated as Eddie—while his father has been slain and his sister has been sacrificed to slavery. He dedicates a lock of hair to Agamemnon, because he was not there to mourn him (Ch 8); and although in his exile he was not directly guilty of Electra’s suffering, the fact is that he was not there to protect her, any more than Achilles was at the side of Patroclus, whom he sent out alone despite his talk of “we two” (νῶι 16.99). The absence of idle Achilles gave Patroclus up to the Trojans; the absence of idle Orestes subjected Electra to the Trojan-like Aegisthus. Hearing of her misery before revealing himself to her, Orestes is like Achilles1 learning of the death of Patroclus; so he fits that role almost as neatly as his hair and footprint confirm that Electra is his alter ego, as Patroclus was Achilles’ (Ch 168ff, 205ff). Thus the lock goes to Electra (Ch 168ff), as Achilles’ did to Patroclus (23.141ff). If on finding Electra sacrificed to slavery he does not actually undergo symbolic death, still he knows himself reduced to a nobody and exposed to the same fate as his father (Ch 246ff). It is time for him to be reborn, to become the avenger Orestes2.

So Clytaemestra’s dream is related to him, and immediately he knows that he inhabits it, as once he did her womb; he is “turned serpent” (ἐκδρακοντωθεὶς δ᾽ ἐγώ Ch 548, cf. 928), nascent (νεογενές) like that “monstrous portent” (ἔκπαγλον τέρας): his mother has borne him anew. With his first words he proposes safety for Electra—she is to go inside—as Achilles2, still an infant, saved Patroclus’s body by shouting. She vanishes into the house (Ch 584), not to be seen again, after he has delegated her to “watch well over matters within the house” (Ch 579)—a promise of her future role as mistress of her own home. Then he proceeds with the first of his tasks analogous to those of Achilles2, the slaughter of pseudo-Trojan Aegisthus; but no battlefield warrior, as his mother’s son he accomplishes it by deception (Ch 557, 888). In this he is helped by his old nurse, guided by the Chorus; her recollection of his infancy (Ch 749) both reinforces the fact of his rebirth, and calls attention to how far his resemblance to Achilles fails to capture the brilliance and dignity of the original. Suffice it to observe the contrast between the account by the noble “charioteer Phoenix“ (ἱππηλάτα 9.432, etc.) of infant Achilles “sputtering out wine” (9.491), and the account by the complaining Nurse of Orestes’ soiling his diapers! —Well, the end is achieved all the same. How swiftly events follow one upon another! Epic is long, tragedy short.

Now for the second task: Orestes must kill his mother, from whom he sprang—his former self, so to speak. I imagine that she looks like him, as much at least as Hector in borrowed armor looked like Achilles. Indeed, he could hardly be closer to her: he lives in her dream, like her he is a serpent (Clytaemestra is: 1233, Ch 249, 994, 1047); their blood is one, as the Furies will argue (αἷμ᾽ ὅμαιμον E 653). His guilty absence was her doing, she kept him inactive when action was needed. To destroy her is to reclaim his proper place, to “regain possession of our father’s house” (Ch 237), so as to perpetuate the family and raise the house up (Ch 260). Another Watchman rouses Clytaemestra to announce a return, crying a riddle, a line that admits two interpretations: τὸν ζῶντα καίνειν τοὺς τεθνηκότας λέγω (886; the syllable τε [or στε] is short; καίνω is collat. form of κτείνω): “The dead ones are killing the living one, I say” or “The living one is killing the dead ones, I say.” The plural, if not simply generalizing, in the former, which is the regular meaning of the Greek, may refer to Orestes and Pylades, and may hint as well at participation by the shade of Agamemnon; in the latter, it surely looks forward to the next killing, of Clytaemestra. In any case, the plural is inessential; what matters is that the sentence epitomizes the double affront to Time that I have already identified in the case of Achilles. With the first sense, the dead idle Orestes1 is refashioned as the live active Orestes2, who slays as the former ought to have done; with the second, the living Orestes2 is killing (or about to kill) the dead guilty Orestes1, in the form of Clytaemestra.

So Orestes in anguish does slay his mother, encouraged by Pylades to accomplish the task as Achilles was by the memory of Patroclus. Then he too must perform a lengthy purification, only after which will he be fit to stand judgment in the face of the Furies, who yield nothing to his challenge to Time.

For in multiple ways these are eternal (e.g. παλαιγενεῖς … μοίρας E 172, μένει … μοιρόκραντον … παλαιόν E 381ff, αἰανῆ [“everlasting,” or “dread” probably as never-ending] E 416), belonging to their own ever-flowing streams, of blood rather than water: their laws have always been the same, they do not forget; this world and the next are one to them, who pursue a blood-trail even unto Hades (466, 1188, E 175, 246ff, 267, 339). And they, the “band of kindred Furies in the house” (κῶμος ἐν δόμοις … συγγόνων  Ἐρινύων 1189), whose name at home is  Ἀραί, “Curses“ (Ch 406, E 417), embody the curse on it, which seems perpetual; thus they sing of “derangement” (παρακοπά E 329), repeating what Agamemnon suffered (223), aiming to begin the story again without change. In fact they are a manifestation of the overseeing daimôn, they wield what is named in the last words of Libation-Bearers, the “furious might of Atê” (μένος ἄτης 1076). The Achaeans, by the will of Zeus (362ff) following Helen’s traces to the gates of Troy (695), might be compared to a god-sent Fury (55), but they were human and finite; their leader, and his successor in Argos, could be dealt with by humans. The real Furies are in a different class: from their first appearance to Orestes they have whirled him about (στροβοῦσιν Ch 1052), and their last song before the trial recalls Achilles helpless in the face of the river’s might: the one who offends their justice, they sing, “calls them who do not hear, in the midst of the hard-to-wrestle eddy”; the daimôn laughs at him, the waves are too high for such a one (E 558; cf. Agamemnon 396). (In the Oresteia laughter is bitter, mocking, deceiving: -γελ- 794, 1264, 1271, Ch 30, 222 [taken as mockery], 447, 738, E 253, 560, 789 = 819.) Only by divine aid can the new hero be drawn out of the infinitude that threatens to overwhelm him. To Achilles Hera sent Hephaestus with saving fire, but that was not enough to free him from vain repetition; Zeus himself raises his scales to settle the fate of Hector, and finally sends Priam to provide a temporary truce and reconciliation. Orestes too brings matters to the point where divine agency takes over. He is freed, not by counter-violence such as saved Achilles from the river—though there is a threat of the fire of Zeus (E 827)—but by the prudent management of Athena, the female that favors the male, who at Troy had kept Achilles from his quick vengeance, in order that the curse on the house of Atreus might work itself through. It was eternal indeed, but not as a curse; the name of Arai that the Furies have in their home beneath the earth means Prayers too; they too are reborn, so that their “furious might of Atê” is not destroyed, but transformed to nourish the human through endless time (ἐς αἰεί E 836, πρόπαντος … χρόνου 898). Athena is acknowledging the dominion here below of these goddesses that represent the temporal stream of blood, as her father Zeus acknowledged that of his son, the river of Time itself. Their newly benevolent sway replaces the old severity, even as the torch-lit procession fills the stage with its bright stream.

 

Appendix

Here is a brief outline of our analogy between Iliad and Oresteia. The parallel is maintained throughout, except that the members of the sequence (6), (7), (8) correspond respectively to (7’), (8’), (6’).

In Iliad:

(1) Agamemnon takes Briseis
(2) Achilles1 would kill Agamemnon, but he persists
(3) Achilles1 remains in an eddy of Time
(4) Serving his anger, Achilles1 uses Hector against Agamemnon to gain vengeance
(5) Achilles1 sacrifices his “child” Patroclus to Hector
(6) Achilles1 “dies” (in the dust) but persists in Hector and in himself as guilty
(7) Achilles1 is reborn as Achilles2, and as his first act saves Patroclus’s body
(8) Achilles2 obtains satisfaction from Agamemnon
(9) Achilles2 opposes the water-stream of Time, (i) by killing Trojans to undo the idleness of Achilles1 (which he now attributes to Zeus)
(10) Achilles 2 kills Hector, and thereby (ii) opposes Time by killing the past Achilles1
(11) Achilles is pursued as guilty by the ghost of Patroclus
(12) Achilles purifies himself (funeral, games)
(13) Achilles is still trapped in guilt (eddying with Hector)
(14) Achilles accepts judgment and is freed (restores Hector)
(15) The war goes on, and Achilles goes on to his death

In Oresteia:

(1’) Agamemnon takes Iphigeneia
(2’) Clytaemestra would kill Agamemnon, but he persists
(3’) Clytaemestra remains frozen in Time
(4’) Serving her anger, Clytaemestra uses Aegisthus against Agamemnon to gain vengeance
(5’) Clytaemestra sacrifices her child Electra to Aegisthus
(6’) Clytaemestra kills Agamemnon
(7’) Clytaemestra “dies” (resigns) but persists in Aegisthus and as herself guilty; her son Orestes1 too “dies” (reduced to a nobody)
(8’) Orestes1 is reborn as Orestes2 and as his first act saves Electra
(9’) Orestes2 opposes the bloodstream of Time, (i) by killing Aegisthus to undo the idleness of Orestes1 (whom he now asserts is dead)
(10’) Orestes2 kills Clytaemestra, and thereby (ii) opposes Time by killing the past Orestes1
(11’) Orestes is pursued as guilty by the ghost of Clytaemestra and her Furies
(12’) Orestes purifies himself (travels, rites)
(13’) Orestes still must stand trial (subject to the blood-cycle)
(14’) Orestes wins judgment and is freed
(15’) The Furies become Eumenides, and Orestes goes on with his life