This month's reading, "Agamemnon," by Aeschylus, dates from fifth century B.C. Athens. The play was first performed as part of a festival known as the Great or City Dionysia held in honor of Dionysus, god of fertility, vegetation, ritual dance, and mysticism (big portfolio!). "Agamemnon" is the first part of the great Oresteia trilogy, the only surviving Aeschylean trilogy.
To the citizens of fifth century Athens, "Agamemnon" was a well-known tale from the legendary past. The Greek leader Agamemnon's returns in victory to his home in Argos from the Trojan war. Upon his arrival, Agamemnon and his captive, the Trojan princess Cassandra, are murdered by Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus (who also happened to be Agamemnon's cousin).
In the second play of the trilogy, "Libation Bearers," Agamemnon's son Orestes avenges his father's murder by killing his mother Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and in the third and final play, "Eumenides," Orestes is tried for his act.
Simon Goldhill asks in his book Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Cambridge University Press, 2004) : "How does tragedy as a genre and the festival in which tragedy was performed relate to democracy? Is there a necessary link between democracy and tragedy?"
I'll take a stab (no pun intended) at a response with the not-so-original observation that human relations can be messy, and those of our prominent leaders even more so. In Greek tragedy, actors wore buskins, or cothurni (lace-up boots) that raised them higher than members of the chorus. By means of such a device, the audience perceived these central players to stand larger than the hoi polloi, the masses.
Tragedy staged in a public venue in effect helped free citizens to find mechanisms to adjudicate conflicts that arose in society.
In their classic How to Read a Book (Touchstone, 1972), Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, both leading proponents of continuing adult education in the classic texts of Western civilization, comment that the reading of play scripts allows you to become, in effect, the director of the the play in your mind. In so "directing" a tragedy such as "Agamemnon," your imagined audience are also citizens of an imagined polity : fifth century Athens, the twenty-first century United States, etc.
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In response to your question about the link between democracy and tragedy, I can offer what I read in the introduction to my old copy of the trilogy leftover from college days:
“The plays of Aeschylus were all written within some thirty years after the battle of Marathon, while the new Athenian democracy was bursting into full life, and preparing with boundless confidence to take upon itself the leadership of the Greek world. Aeschylus and his contemporaries had spent their youth amidst tyrannies, revolutions, and wars. They were now called upon to govern, to judge, and to legislate. . . . One problem therefore occupied their minds insistently: What is justice? What is the relation of justice to vengeance? Can justice be reconciled with the demands of religion, the force of human feeling, and the intractability of Fate?” The author (Philip Vellacott) says that the trilogy incorporates the older Greek religion that equated justice with vengeance (dictated by the Furies), and then the later idea of consulting an oracle – but that still demanded an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” so to speak. By the end of the third play, when resolving what will happen to Oresetes, Aeschylus offers a more balanced resolution: “As Agamemnon is dominated by the relentlessness of Fate, The Choephori by the command of Apollo, so The Eumenides presents the true justice of Athene, expressed in the authority and wisdom of an established court of law, the Athenian Areopagus.”
[source: Penguin Classics edition of the Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus, pages 15-18 of the Introduction]
-Elyse Hayes
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