the wrong done to Agamemnon and Orestes’ just revenge which met with the gods’
approval. In the Oresteia, the myth serves as a vehicle for the dramatic expression of
a conflict between men and women involved in a blood feud and between the rival
claims of different generations of gods. The conflict has both a political and a religious
dimension which are not easily separable. The victory of the Olympian gods of the
upper world, Apollo and Athena, together with the mitigation of the older Furies
(deities from the nether world) which is attributed to the unseen workings of Zeus
through persuasion, has clear symbolic force. ‘Cry sorrow, sorrow,’ sings the chorus
(Agamemnon, l.121) ‘but may the good prevail.’ The good that prevails after all the
individual suffering is a communal good, the establishment of Athenian justice
sanctioned by the gods. The learning that comes through suffering in the Oresteia does
not, therefore, come by way of the individual soul but comes by divine dispensation
from without. The court scene on the Areopagus is clearly designed to represent what
was historically the solution to the old tribal system of justice through blood-feud in
the development of the laws and institutions of the polis. The resolution of the conflict
in historic terms, and the celebration of Athens at the close, mean that the drama in
its overall effect is not, in the fullest sense of the word, tragic. In the greatest tragedy
we are caught up in the fate of individual protagonists and are not to be deflected by
the compensation of ameliorating social or political consequences. But for all that,
the Oresteiais not a comfortable experience. In the court scene, we may feel that in
their bizarre arguments the gods work in mysterious ways that reflect the arbitrariness
with which judgements are frequently arrived at in human courts of justice.
Furthermore, although the play offers an escape from the cycle of crime and guilt and
countercrime, it also puts us into raw contact with the primitive roots of human
behaviour which the social institutions of civilization are designed to restrain.
Although the protagonists become entangled in a fatal net that is not of their own
devising, they also show a determined willingness for ruthless action and a capacity
for unholy deeds that is appalling, the effect of which is most feelingly dramatized in
the prophecies and fate of the innocent Cassandra before she is murdered alongside
Agamemnon. The burden of what has gone before is by no means lifted or transmuted
by the end.
Sophocles (c. 496–406)
The note of celebration apparent in the Oresteiais also to be found in a famous choral
ode in Sophocles’ Antigone:
Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these
Is man, who rides the ocean and takes his wayLITERATURE 153