CHAPTER THREE

THEAGON

INTRODUCTION

The long-awaited entry of Menelaus at line 348 marks the commencement of the plot proper, following the lengthy series of expository scenes with which the play opens. The ensuing scene is a crucial one because our understanding of Orestes' character and of the general tenor of the play depends largely on our interpretation of the tactics employed by Orestes before Menelaus and particularly in the agon with Tyndareus. Chapter Two examined the place of the scene within the general structure of Orestes and the characterization of Menelaus. We have noted (above, pp. 70-73) how Menelaus' rejection of Orestes' plea is presented as a triumph of base self-interest over the demands of xapts and cpLALa. We have also seen the way in which Euripides deliberately emphasizes Menelaus' treachery (in a manner reminiscent of Medea's Jason and Hecuba's Odysseus) in order to portray the latter's perfidy as one link in the series of injustices that eventually lead to Orestes' violent and bloodthirsty reaction. The present chapter will examine more closely the speeches presented by Orestes and Tyndareus in the course of the agon, as well as Orestes' vcrnpos Myos following the departure of the irascible Spartan elder. In the past, the interpretation of these speeches has proven to be a particularly thorny problem. The difficulty may be summed up as follows: whereas the words of Tyndareus, for all of their vehemence and unpleasantness, present a case that appears to be both reasonable and founded upon objective concerns for justice and social order, the arguments of Orestes, the putative hero of the play, are felt to be extraordinarily bad, abounding in sophistries and in extravagancies both of speech and of thought. Thus, although no recent scholar has been tempted to second the excessively fanciful interpretation of the scene presented by Verrall,1 most agree that the impression made by these two speakers is more ambiguous than is the norm in other Euripidean agones of this type - that Tyndareus is provided with more credibility than is

1 Verrall (1905) 225-34. 100 CHAPTER THREE the typical blocking figure, while the integrity of Orestes' position (and of his moral insight) is undermined by his manner of argumentation. The degree to which this reading of the agon is pursued varies from scholar to scholar and has resulted in a fairly wide range of interpretations. Virtually all agree, however, that the speeches (particularly those of Orestes) reveal important insights into the ~0os of the speakers and that the audience is intended to employ these insights in its interpretation of the scenes that follow. The present chapter will attempt to demonstrate through the various arguments proposed by Orestes and Tyndareus that, while these arguments do provide important insights into the personalities of the two speakers, the interpretation of the speeches themselves requires the recognition of other contributing factors, particularly those of rhetoric, Greek dramatic convention, and Euripides' own predilections (especially those of his later period). 'H0o,roda is important to the agon, but is far from being its exclusive concern. We shall find, despite the apparent force of Tyndareus' arguments and the extravagance of those of Orestes, that the general impact of the debate on the audience's view of the protagonist and his situation is consonant with the overall strategy of the play as outlined in Chapter Two. The audience is impressed by the picture of an abandoned, betrayed, and desperate Orestes who even at this relatively early point in the play shows signs of readiness for the violent revenge plot suggested later by Pylades. The Orestes of the agon is neither the heroic scion of the house of Atreus familiar from earlier tradition, nor the villainous, completely amoral self-seeker detected by many modem critics; he is instead a flailing, helpless, self-doubting, and not a little melodramatic, pseudo-hero of the type familiar from Iphigenia among the Taurians, Helen, Phoenissae, Iphigenia at Aulis, and the pseudo-Euripidean Rhesus. Too feckless to fit the heroic mold attributed to him by tradition, he is equally incapable of sustaining the darkly villainous role assigned to him by many present-day interpreters of Orestes. 2

2 The most important recent discussions of the agon are those of O'Brien (1988a) and Lloyd (1992) 113ff. Earlier, see Wilamowitz (1924) 254-62. Will (1961) and Schmidt-Berger (1973) 3 lff. present useful analyses of Tyndareus' character. Interesting observations on issues relevant to the agon can also be found in T. Miller (1887) 64, Howald (1930) 168, Tietze (1933) 88-93, Wolf (1952) 2.420-25, Strohm (1957) 39ff., Duchemin (1968) passim (especially 79-80 and 143), Collard (1975b) 69-71, and Solmsen (1975) 59-60.