Classical Myth Lecture 11

Murder and Retribuon: The House of Atreus The House of Atreus: Family Tree

hp://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/oresteia.html The death of Agamemnon Red figure krater from Athens (c. 470 B.C.E.)

hp://www.uncg.edu/cla/myth/agamemnon.htm The House of Atreus in Homer Odyssey and Aeschylus Oresteia

Trilogy of plays, wrien 458 BCE, Athens • Agamemnon • Libaon Bearers • Eumenides (= Erinyes, Furies) (see readings on LMS)

• Odyssey 11.451-545 (= Lamore 11.387-464) • Odyssey 1.42-62, 1.344-46, 3.208-14, 4.545-73 (= Lamore 1.26-51, 1.279-305, 3.303-10, 4.512-47) Goldhill (1992) Aeschylus: The Oresteia on the Odyssey vs. Oresteia

1. Homer: Aegisthus and Agamemnon Aeschylus: Clytemnestra - gender trouble

2. Homer: oikos vs. Aeschylus: polis Athens - Areopagus court Goldhill (1992) Aeschylus: The Oresteia on the Odyssey vs. Oresteia

1. Homer: Aegisthus and Agamemnon Aeschylus: Clytemnestra - gender trouble

2. Homer: oikos vs. Aeschylus: polis Athens - Areopagus court Archaic vs. democrac law

Archaic – Furies – daughters of nux • mantra of ‘fury and uer hate’ • 792 ff. = 820 ff. & 847 ff. = 879 ff. • -> ‘Eumenides’ • cthonic, metoikoi (1021) • support Clytemnestra

Democrac - Areopagus court • Apollo, Athena – Olympians • support Orestes (and Agamemenon) Froma Zeitlin ‘Dynamics of Misogyny’

‘social evoluon is posed as a movement from female dominance to male dominance, or as it is oen figuravely phrased, from “matriarchy” to “patriarchy”’.

(in Peradoo & Sullivan The Arethusa Papers: 161).

Clytemnestra as terrifying female

• Cassandra: = Scylla, amphisbaina, and as ‘woman-lioness’ (1258) • ‘You try me out as if I were a woman and vain’ (Ag. 1401). • ‘Bring me quick, somebody, an ax to kill a man’ (LB 888). Persian effeminacy

‘do not try me in some woman’s ways to make/ me delicate, nor, as if I were some Asiac/ bow down to earth’. (Ag. 918-19) Archaic vs. democrac law

Archaic – Furies – daughters of nux • female but sterile • support oikos and Clytemnestra

Democrac - Areopagus court • Apollo, Athena – Olympians • support polis, Orestes Nicole Loraux Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman

• female death = ‘law of femininity’ • the synoikein death

Orestes: You love your man, then? You shall lie in the same grave with him, and never be unfaithful even in death. (LB 881-2)

Clytemnestra: I think, child, that you mean to kill your mother. Orestes: No It will be you who kill yourself. It will not be I. (LB 909-10)

Dying at the hands of a woman

Eumenides 625-28 Apollo: It is not the same thing for a man of blood to die honored with the king’s staff given by the hand of god, and that by means of a woman, not with the far cast of fierce arrows, as an Amazon might have done...