Flora Unveiled

200 i Flora Unveiled

Aeschylus’s Furies: Ancient Agricultural Goddesses

Beginning in the sixth century in Ionia, ancient myth and religion co- existed with the new
rational/ secular philosophy in Greek culture. As is true in any age, the latter way of think-
ing impacted ordinary citizens hardly at all. Not only did it fail to displace religion, the new
natural philosophy was sometimes erroneously deployed to shore up cherished beliefs.
The presumed physical and mental superiority of men over women, fortified by myth,
was a central tenet of the Greek patriarchal belief system and was used to justify an entire
corpus of law depriving women of equal rights. A self- serving example of the use of reason
and logic to validate legal arguments in favor of patriarchal rule can be found in Aeschylus’s
The Furies, the Roman word for Erinyes, or “angry ones,” the last play in his Oresteian tril-
ogy. In this famous sequence, Aeschylus invokes both myth and pseudo- science to assert
that fathers are the sole biological parents of their children.
To propitiate the wind gods so that the Greek fleet can sail to Troy and achieve victory,
Agamemnon has sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia. Ten years later, Agamemnon returns
home from Troy with his concubine, the captured Trojan princess Cassandra, and is mur-
dered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in revenge for sacrificing their daughter. Clytemnestra is
then murdered by her son, Orestes, in revenge for killing his father. Orestes believes that
his act of matricide was sanctioned by Apollo and that he will be forgiven by the gods.
Hounded by the Furies— ancient female spirits— who demand his punishment for the
crime of matricide, Orestes seeks protection from Apollo. In true Athenian fashion, Apollo
calls upon Athena and a panel of judges to decide Orestes’s fate.
A panel of judges, including Athena as chief judge, is soon assembled, with the Furies
acting as prosecutors and Apollo speaking on Orestes’s behalf. In the testimony that fol-
lows, Orestes claims that his action was justified and that the Furies should have hounded
his mother for killing her husband. The Furies counter that a child’s bond with its mother
takes precedence over a wife’s bond with her husband because “[t] he man she killed was not
of her own blood.” Orestes then asks, “But am I of my mother’s?” The Furies express outrage
at Orestes’s sacrilege and denigration of the mother’s role: “Vile wretch, she nourished you
in her own womb. Do you disown your mother’s blood?”
Orestes then appeals to Apollo to testify on his behalf, and Apollo obliges with the follow-
ing “scientific” argument, employing logic in the manner of the rationalistic philosophers:

The mother is no parent of that which is called

her child, but only nurse of the new- planted seed

that grows. The parent is he who mounts. A stranger she

preserves a stranger’s seed, if no god interfere.

I will show you proof of what I have explained ...

There she stands, the living witness, daughter of

Olympian Zeus.^36

Here, Apollo expresses the conventional wisdom, traceable to the Bronze Age, that the
female merely incubates the seed from the male, as the soil incubates and nourishes the
growth of grain in the plowed field. Apollo then cites Athena’s own birth from Zeus’s head
as further proof that men can father children on their own. At the end of the trial, the