Oresteia

Oresteia by Aeschylus, translated by Richard Lattimore, 171 pages

The Oresteia is a cycle of three plays relating the tragedy of the royal house of Mycenae in the aftermath of the Trojan War.  Agamemnon tells the story of the return of the king, accompanied by the captive Cassandra, and his murder by his wife Clytemnestra, who had taken his cousin Aegisthus as a lover during his decade-long absence.  The Libation Bearers continues the story as the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra avenges his father by slaying his mother.  Finally, in The Eumenides, the goddess Athena stands as judge between the titular Furies and Orestes, in the process establishing Athenian jurisprudence and domesticating the goddesses of vengeance.

Robert Lowell once admitted that it is impossible to recover the power of Aeschylus' drama, "something no doubt grander than any play we can see."  Perhaps some intimation of that power is available to us in these post-Enlightenment times, for meeting it outside the cramped blood-soaked ground of the grand narrative of progressive history, what the reader is immediately struck by is its earnest religiosity.  It is certainly possible for a crippled soul to dismiss Apollo, Athena, and even the Furies themselves as dramatic contrivances and ignore the atmosphere that surrounds them in favor of shallow psychologizing.  It is likewise trivial to invert the tale, to turn Clytemnestra into the righteous avenger of her sacrificed daughter, inevitably ending with her liberation of Cassandra into an unconvincing sisterhood.  If Aeschylus does not have true religion, it is certainly more true than any of the modern simulacra.  Aeschylus' cycle is a real myth, his tragedy rooted in a legacy of crime and guilt inherited both by the sons of Atreus and the daughters of Leda, a shared fault that stretches back into remotest antiquity, where it assumes unknowable cosmic proportions, and which can only be expiated by cult and sacrifice.