Violence, Revenge, and Metaphor in Aeschylus's Oresteia

chapter 1 Violence, Revenge, and Metaphor in Aeschylus’s Oresteia

Violence in the Oresteia is traumatic and emulative, with roots in the primal crimes and mythic precedents of the past: it both disrupts and reestablishes basic foundations of social order, hereditary and political identity, and lan- guage. The trauma of irreplaceable loss not only results in the perversion of rituals and structures that typically stabilize civilization and identity, but even destroys distinctions between metaphor and body. Such traumas—the sacri- fice of a daughter, the butchery of a father, regicide, matricide, and conflict between Olympian and chthonic gods—create the agent of vengeance: the conflicted agent determined, in a double and ambiguous sense, to reconstruct a shattered identity through retributive violence. The Oresteia exemplifies the prototypical agent of vengeance, and this model establishes conventions of the role for revenge drama in the European tradition and beyond. There is a dynamic pattern to violence and revenge in the Oresteia that sim- ilarly sets precedent for European revenge drama and its global reception: the logic of revenge. While there are important variations and divergences between the key works explored in this study, the Aeschylean logic of revenge is seminal and formative. Aeschylean revenge germinates in the primal crimes of a mythic or inaccessible past. The Oresteia dramatizes a collapse of law through the failure of the patriarch, Agamemnon, to protect the basic distinc- tion between human and animal. Because the individuating limits necessary to self-definition no longer function, identity fragments and metaphor becomes corporeal, frequently with a reversion to the traumatic reenactment of body rending. As the boundaries of cosmic order disintegrate, shades and immortal avengers of the underworld may take human form to battle for the minds and souls of living actors and members of the audience. This chapter explores the logic of violence and revenge in the Oresteia with a focus on subjective and political aspects of Aeschylus’s agents of vengeance, sketching the collapse of metaphor, the fragmentation of identity, and its reclamation through the violent transformation of trauma. The portrayal of the agent of vengeance as a morally conflicted actor infiltrated by the agency of chthonic and hereditary others, in particular, is one important aspect of the Aeschylean logic of revenge that endures into Roman drama and beyond.

From the inception of the revenge drama genre, agents of vengeance trans- form the patterns of past tradition. The Oresteia’s revenge has roots in primal crimes of the mythic past, as these primal crimes furnish precedents and evoke both divine judgments and avenging spirits of the underworld that compro- mise the agent’s will through atē (moral blindness). Aeschylus and his audience would have been familiar with the mythic history of Agamemnon’s clan, some of which the Oresteia highlights explicitly. Agamemnon’s ancestors have a long history of transgression against the gods and violence within the family. The founder of the dynasty, Tantalus, butchered his own son, Pelops, and attempted to feed him to the immortals, who in turn punished Tantalus and banished humans from the company of the gods.1 It is fitting that this lapsarian myth of deception (dolos) and violent atrocity (hubris), resulting in human- kind’s irrevocable separation from the gods, underlies the founding narrative of the revenge drama tradition. Pelops, restored to life by the immortals, was as treacherous to other people as his father had been to the gods. He defeat- ed Oenomaus in a chariot contest to the death2 when the king’s charioteer, Myrtilus, sabotaged Oenomaus’s axles.3 The chariot then broke apart during the race and Oenomaus perished.4 Pelops repaid Myrtilus by murdering him, and Pelops and his progeny received Myrtilus’s dying curse.5 The family in- curred yet another curse in the following generation when Atreus, Agamem- non’s father, took vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, for seducing his wife. Atreus butchered his nephews and tricked Thyestes into eating their flesh.6 Thyestes then called down his own curse upon Atreus and his descendants. Aeschylus brings these motifs to the stage in spectacular and altered forms that reanimate tradition: outrage against the immortals, the revenge banquet, kin murder, the chariot, the conflation of contest (agon), marriage (gamos),

1 Homer describes Tantalus’s punishment in the underworld (Od. 9.582–592). Pindar makes direct reference to the butchery of Pelops, but offers an alternate, sanitized, version of the myth (Ol. 1 46–51). 2 Pind. Ol. 1 88. 3 While there are differing versions of who corrupts Myrtilus and how he sabotages the chariot, the dolos of Oenomaus’s charioteer seems to date from at least the sixth century bce. See Apollod. Epit. E2.6–8; the scholiast on Apollon. 1.752. 4 The ekphrasis of Jason’s mantle in Apollon. 1.753–758 describes the wreck; also see note 3 above. 5 Eur. Orest. 989–1000 and 1547–1548; Soph. El. 502–515; Plat. Crat. 395c–395d; Pausanias 5.10.6 names the figures of Myrtilus and Oenomaus on the East pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. 6 Ag. 1095–97; 1217–22; 1242; 1502–04; 1512; 1577–1606.