The Eumenides by Aeschylus and Theogony - Assignment Example

The Eumenides by Aeschylus and Theogony The Eumenides written by Aeschylus and Theogony written by Hesiod are two texts exhibiting similar themes. In order to understand the different concepts that presents themselves in this two articles, it it is important to know about the curse on the House of Atreus. The Curse on the House of Atreus originally began with the feud between two brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, wherein the latter was forced to run away. Thyestes' made efforts to restore peace between him and his brother Atreus by returning with his children. Atreus feigned appeasement and had invited Thyestes to a feast. Unknown to Thyestes, Atreus had secretly murdered all of his children and have served them to him in a way that the true origin of the meat was disguised. Needless to say, he had unwittingly eaten his own children. Atreus had revealed to him the true nature of what he has been eating by the end of the meal, and Thyestes, in his rage, called down a curse on Atreus' house. With Aegisthus, his sole surviving child, they fled from the house. (2) Agamemnon and Menelaus are Atreus' sons. Agamemnon wedded Clytaemestra, and Menelaus wedded Helen. Menelaus wife, however, was seduced by Paris of Troy, with whom she went willingly with back to his city. Agamemnon and Menelaus had arranged the chieftains of Greece into a massive force in retaliation to win her back. The fleet met at Aulis, but was incapable of setting sail due to the anger of the goddess Artemis who had been keeping the weather against them. The prophet Calchas said to Agamemnon that in order to pacify the goddess, the king would have to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigeneia. As he did so, he and his troops were able to set sail. They waged a war against Troy for ten long years, which eventually destroyed the city and killed or enslaved all of the people in the city. On their journey back home, Agamemnon's contingent was faced by a terrible sea storm wherein only Agamemnon's ship was able to survive. In his return, Agamemnon brought with him a captive mistress, the prophetess Cassandra. His wife, Clytaemestra, had taken a lover while he was away who just so happened to be Aegisthus, the only surviving son of Thyestes. Not long after Agamemnon's return, Clytaemestra murdered the king in his bath. Her next victim was Cassandra. The prophetess, with the conviction that she is incapable of changing her fate decided to walk wittingly towards her own death. (5) Clytaemestra exhibited the corpse of the king while proclaiming that justice had been served. Her motives were a tangled mix of her own desires for power as well as her love for Aegisthus. At the same time, her deeds were also a revenge for Agamemnon's murder of their daughter. Subsequent to the king's death, Clytaemestra and Aegisthus posed themselves as the unconventional rulers of Argos. However, Clytaemestra, feared the possibility of her children making attempts to avenge the murder of their father. As solution to this dilemma, she had reduced Electra to servitude and exiled Orestes. However, the god Apollo ordered Orestes to return to avenge the death of his father. He was aided by group of co-conspirators in killing Clytaemestra and Aegisthus. Like his mother had done to his father's body, he displayed the bodies with the proclamation that justice was served. The catch though was the rage of primal goddesses called the Furies who began chasing after him for murdering his mother. (2) Orestes took the supplicatory position before Athene's statue, the one who is to judge his case, and begs for her help. His torment began with the arrival of the Furies with their of promises and bribery. Athene entered the scene and demanded to know what is going on. After hearing about Orestes' case, she went to get twelve jurors and gathered up the citizens of Athens. She looked on the case as an opportunity to instruct her people as this was the first court hearing they had for judging a homicide. As she presided over the trial, the citizens watched and were educated with the ways of trial procedures. Apollo came to offer his support to Orestes by testifying on his behalf. (2) Apollo did most of the talking on Orestes' defense as he and the Furies got into an argument about justice and the justifiability of Orestes' crime. In the end, Athene and the jurors decided in favor of Orestes and he left with a depth of gratitude to Athene. In his return, he was finally a king. The Furies were outraged by the determination of the court but Athene's attempts to reason with them eventually won them over. Athene offered them a place in Athens to no longer be treated as outcasts and instead, they became the city's protectors. Though initially skeptical, the Furies were won over by Athene's gifts of persuasion and the generous offer. They welcomed by the people of Athens and were escorted by the women who attend to Athene to their new home under the earth of the city. The women sang praises to Zeus and Destiny for bringing about what they perceived as a grand arrangement to come by. (5) Based on the vision of the Oresteia, fear is a sister to justice wherein both are a necessity in preserving order. The rationales of the Olympians, with their trials, orderly proceedings as well as their plans, must be conjunctive with the brutality of the Furies that inspires terror. As the trilogy represents things, the Furies' antiquated version of justice, with its grave emphasis on fear and punishment, must not be wholly abandoned.(2) Violence begets violence; the murders of Thyestes children continued to haunt the House of Atreus after two generations. Regardless of how each new murder were in their own different ways justified, each new killing inescapably led to other (4) new killings. Thyestes' Curse is, of course, partly supernatural and superstitious while the other part is probably just a result of the nature of violence itself exacting vengeance. In the end, the gods had to intervene in order to put a halt to the seemingly endless chain of murders. The Greeks were shrewdly aware of the innate tendency of various moral systems to come into conflict. A good number of tragedies featuring two opposing characters designed to defend different moral systems have been written, wherein each character were reasonably right in his own way. In The Libation Bearers, when Orestes has his own doubts of his capability to murder his own mother, Pylades told him that he should consider all men despicable to him instead of the gods. He was ordered by the god Apollo to kill Clytaemestra (5) wherein it is justifiable by his right to vengeance for she had killed his father while at the same time, he had a responsibility to his dynasty. The moral conflict however remains that is his mother. By making his choice, despite the fact that his actions were justifiable, matricide itself had its own consequences that were in itself inescapable as are many things in life itself. The Furies and Apollo argued from two different point of views which had their own logic and moral code. (2) The two materials reviewed had very interesting concepts regarding kinship and politics. It is also concept that other Greek materials have shown. The characters were not evil through and through, but traits of betrayal and cruelty were evident. The beginning of the story, where the curse of the house began was in itself a very shocking insight to the story's view on kinship. A grave betrayal of a brother against brother, to the extent of slaughtering your children and serving them to you for dinner is probably more scary than fearing the wrath of your worst enemy at war. The cunning and deviousness of those closest to you bears an even worse betrayal than any that one will face in a war. (2) Kinship in this context is then shown as something fragile and vulnerable to human desires for revenge and power. Blood is not thicker than water in this case, as justice is seen to take precedence over any other emotion. Love for family and children did not seem to hold that much importance in their characters. Politics also enters into this. Aegisthus did not have any qualms about sacrificing his daughter to win the favor of the goddess so that he could have a safe passage. Raging a war was more important than the life his daughter. Despite human laws (4), it was also apparent that the gods plays a significant role in their politics. If not for the interference of the gods, the cycle of killing for sake of justice will never end. The human law, it would seem, follows an eye for an eye concept. The intervention of the gods in resolving the disputes restored the peace in the story though it is reasonable to think that it was a little bit too late as two generations had by then already withered under the curse of the house. Works Cited: 1 MLA Referencing style guide. University of Western Sydney Library. Revised version 2011. 2 Aeschylus. “The Oresteia.” Translated by Robert Fagles. Reprinted with revisions 1979. ISBN: 0140443339 3 Hesiod. “Theogony: Works and Days, Theognis Elegy.” Translated by Dorothea Wender. Penguin Books. 1973. 4 KJ Dover . “The Political Aspect of Aeschylus's Eumenides- The Journal of Hellenic Studies.” JSTOR. 1957 5 Holmboe, Henrik. “Concordance to Aeschylus' Eumenides.” Book (ISBN 8775360691 ). 1973. Read More