For some reason that escapes me at the moment I picked up my worn old copy of Paul Roche’s translation of The Oresteia last month. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t answer the question — “what is going on here?” —  40 years after a young man’s reading.  As usual, when re-reading enduring classics, not only are we reminded what we’ve forgotten, but we  see things our eyes were not capable of seeing the first time, or times, around

If you’ll remember, the Oresteia is composed of three plays, about the bloody history, likely fall and ultimate rescue of the House of Atreus/Agamemnon.  Following his equally ill-fated forbears, going back to Tantalus,  Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, taking revenge against his twin brother Thyestes for having cuckolded him, killed and served Thyestes’s sons at a “reconciliation” dinner.  Thyestes, with advice from an oracle, had a son with his own daughter, Pelopia, who abandoned the infant in shame for her incest. The child, Aegisthus, is found and brought to Atreus who raises him as a son, along with his own sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus.  Aegisthus finally reveals to Atreus that he is both father and grandfather to him, and kills him.   This is the set up before Agamemnon and Menelaus head off to Troy to bring back Helen, Menelaus’ wife and sister to Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra. Agamemnon, heeding an oracle, sacrifices his daughter, Iphegenia, to get the wind for the fleet to depart. Aegisthus, convinced that he should be heir to Argos wins Clytemnestra’s allegiance while his half-brothers, and her husband, are away. No more need be said to prove there is a curse hanging over the house.

In the first play, “Agamemnon” the king comes back to general rejoicing at the successful conclusion of the 10 year war in Troy.  That night, Clytemenstra and  Aegisthus (see above) kill him –to revenge Iphigenia’s death, to secure the kingdom, to keep their love/alliance in tact. And they kill him in the bath, as a woman would be killed, not a warrior.  In the second play, “The Libation Bearers,”Orestes comes back from years of exile, and kills his mother and Aegisthus –his Uncle, her lover– in revenge, urged on by Apollo. To not have taken revenge would have been an offense to the gods, and the order of things.  The third play, the “Eumenides,” is the enormous thematic and political point of the plays.  Orestes, after fleeing from the Furies who are bent on drinking his blood for the killing of his mother, winds up at the Acropolis and the Temple of Pallas Athena where she presides over a trial — with 12 citizens.

The Furies argue that killing his mother should be punished.  Apollo testifies that the father must be avenged.  Points are made about blood relations vs non-blood, ancient traditions vs new ones, the old gods vs the young upstarts, women and men.  In the end the jury casts their stones in a tie and Athena breaks it in favor or Orestes — thus giving the house new life with, presumably, the curse washed clean.  The Furies threaten to poison Athenian soil for the injustice.  Athena talks them out of it with promises of a fine dwelling and an honored place among the citizens, no longer as Furies but as the Eumenides — essentially, a recognition that beneath this new device of reason and trial, lie passion and blood vengeance that must be honored.

Rebellion, that ravenous horror,
never must rear on the city
its hideous roar. I beseech;
And never the dust drink up
the dark of the people’s blood
(Gulping vendetta’s down);
Slaughter for slaughter and ruin
Raging over the town.
Reciprocate graces instead
with mutual notions of love
and a single one of hate:
Such is the cure for much among men. [Chorus]

For many feminists the events indicated by the plays mark  the rise of the state, civil justice and male dominance– with Athena’s help– over ancient, more emotional and more female equality in the culture.  The Oresteia began to enter European culture in a big way with Robert Potter’s 1777 translation, which went into hundreds of editions. It had a profound effect on the Romantics, and Shelly in particular.  Interest surged again in the late 19th and early 20th century.  Richard Wagner, as he began his monumental Ring Cycle was profoundly impressed by his reading of the Oresteia (“it’s effect on me was indescribable.”) Robert Browning did a celebrated translation in 1877.  Eugene O’Neil, T.S. Eliot and W B Yeats all have work with major debts to the plays.   It continues to this day, with revivals and new readings being taken to Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall, speaking of course not just to a family caught in a cycle of revenge but of  society and endless cycles of blood coming into new possibilities with legal systems, citizen participation and an accommodation with the ancient Furies.

 

The Roche translation which I have  is from 1962, [Mentor Classics] and quite good to my ear.  He provides a reasoned, and passionate, explanation of what he has tried to do to keep up with “the master.”  Of course reading it is not like skimming a good mystery novel.  We go at a slower pace, wanting to go back often to satisfy the question:  what just happened here?  Or, wow, what an image !

Around him like a net of fish
I swung that smothering looseness–
A fatal opulence of gown.
Then I struck him twice.
So he went down,
Life pumping out of him
and gurgling murderous spurts of blood
Which hit me with a black-ensanguined drizzle.
Oh, it freshened me like drops from heaven
When the earth is bright and budding. [Clytemnestra]

Or,

I ask and anxiously wonder
Where to escape from a house which is falling.
Covered I wait while the blood-beating rainstorm
Shivers the dwelling, no longer in drops….   [Chorus]

Or,

Think of the yearling whose father you loved
traced and dragging a wagon of sorrows…

Or,

“See them overcome now, these fiendish crones:
stilled into sleep, these damsals of disgust
hoary urchin hags with whom no god can mix,
nor man nor beast – ever. [Apollo]

There have been many translations done since Roche’s.  I’m interested to see Robert Lowell, 1977 and Ted Hughes, 1999.  It’s interesting that for all the importance of  The Oresteia to feminist theory, starting with Simone de Beauvoir, only one woman, Anne Carson, is listed in Wikipedia’s list of translators, and that her’s is a compilation translation of three different playwrights.

 

Here’s an excellent 45 minute discussion of the play and its modern influence,  on the BBC, 2005