Barry Stocker Department of Humanities and SocialScience [email protected] Faculty of Science and Letters http://barrystockerac.wordpress.com SPRING 2019 TOPICS IN LITERATURE AND SOCIETY NOTES WEEK THIRTEEN EURIPIDES ORESTES In Orestes, Euripides returns to a story that Aeschylus deals with in The Oresteia, which we discussed in the first three weeks of the course. He gives a very different version of the story, as is normal in the way that ancient Greek writers used the tradition of stories and myths, know to all, in their own ways in new versions of an old story which had alway s been changing according to who was telling the story. In the ancient people’s ideas of religion, history and religion all come from retelling and reinvention of stories in accordance with the mind of the writer, the events of the tine and all the ways that context changes. One thing that distinguishes the context of this play by Euripides from Aeschylus (Oresteia first performed 458BCE) is that Euripides is writing (408BCE) in the context of the Peloponnesian war (431-404BCE). This is the war between Athens (with allies) against Sparta (with allies) for domination of the Greek world. In Orestes, the Spartan King Tyndareus is presented in a negative way, or at least is placed as opposed to the Athenian oriented resolution of the story. The story, as in Aeschylus has its background in the return of Agamemnon, King of Argos, from the Trojan War. His wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murder Agamemnon in the the royal place immediately after his return. This is revenge for the killing of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Agamemnon sacrificed her to the gods so that the wind would blow in the right direction to take the Greek fleet across the Aegean to Troy. There is a war between Greeks and Trojans because the Trojan prince, Paris, took Helen the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, to Troy. Euripides changes the status of Menelaus as Tyndareus is presented as King of Sparta. As in Homer and Aeschylus, Menelaus is the brother of Agamemnon, but he does not have a separate kingdom. He hopes to take over Argos after the death of Agamemnon. This is what Orestes claims. Tyndareus is the father of Helen and Clytemnestra as in previous versions of the story. However, in the previous stories Tyndareus had retired as king, giving the title to Menelaus and then died before the end of the Trojan War. In Euripides’ story he is still alive after the murder of Agamemnon and then Clytemnestra. According to Euripides, though he is outraged by Clytemnestra’s murder to Agamemnon, he wants Orestes and his sister Electra who helped him in the murder of his mother, to be !2 stoned to death. He strongly emphasises that this is necessary to remain true to the laws of Greece. As there was no unified Greek state at this time, Tyndareus means the shared sense of justice and what law should be in the Greek world. Orestes and Electra expect to be stoned to death after trial by the citizens of Argos. Helen appears after secretly coming back to Argıos from Troy. She is aware that she is hated by everyone for starting the Trojan War, which lead to the death of many Greeks, because she ran away from her Greek husband with a Trojan lover. She is therefore afraid to go to the grave of her sister Clytemnestra and perform a mourning ritual. She discusses the situation with Orestes and Electra who advise her to send her daughter Hermione instead. Helen is worried that her daughter who is unmarried will cause a scandal if seen in public. The issue here is that it was not respectable for an unmarried young woman to be seen in public. Electra says that Hermione is grateful to Clytemnestra because Clytemnestra raised her while Helen was in Troy, and Helen decides it will be alright for Hermione to perform the ritual which is to pour a libation of wine, honey and milk over the tomb of Clytemnestra. The theme comes up here, as in the Oresteia and Sophocles’ Antigone and in Euripides’ The Supplicant Women of a woman denied the chance to mourn the death of a loved one, though in the previous cases the women all wished to mourn male family member. Orestes is in a state of insanity at the beginning of the play, which everyone takes as a punishment from the gods. The gods in this case refers to the Erinyes, fates, fierce female divinities who cruelly enforce divine justice. The characters in the play refer to them as eumenides, ‘kindly ones’ in order to avoid their anger. Orestes emerges from his madness and nightmares in order to fight his likely execution. Orestes and Electra think about dying together in a scene of brother- sister closeness that could be compared to the obsessive love and mourning that Antigone has for her brother in Sophocles’s Antigone. The god Apollo appears in the play, as in Euripides’ Ion as just as much an agent of injustice as a being of divine justice. Orestes points out that it was a divine command from Apollo in Delphi, the place of his sanctuary referred to here, as was normal, as the centre or navel of the world, which led him to murder his mother. The final resolution of Orestes is associated with justice of Athens, following a pattern normal in Athenian tragedy. Before the resolution happens, Orestes shows a violent women hating murderous character beyond what Apollo ordered. When his friend Pylades arrives, they make a plan to escape from Argos by taking Hermione hostage and either killing Helen or escaping from Argos with the help of Menelaus. Apollo avoids this situation by taking Helen to be a goddess and telling Orestes to take his case to Athens. There he will be acquitted and the conflict with Menelaus will be resolved by marrying Hermione..