Attempts to escape the prima facie meaning have taken the following forms: My reason for discussing it once more is that not enough attention has been paid to the immediate dramatic context of the passages by which this re-direction is effected or to the relation between these passages and the language of Greek politics in general.Įditors of Aeschylus have assumed that these words cannot mean what they appear to mean: ‘Now new ordinances are overthrown, if the cause pleaded, and the injury done, by this matricide are going to prevail.’ The old laws, not the new, it is said, are in danger of overthrow, and it can only be the old laws which the Chorus defend and lament.
The nature of this re-direction, and its implications, if any, for Aeschylus's own standpoint, are no new problem. But Eumenides, like much that Aeschylus wrote, is unusual, and one of its unusual aspects is the clarity and persistence with which the hearer's attention is engaged in the political present as well as in the heroic past one might almost say, directed away from the past and towards the present. A classic discussion of the meaning of Greek tragic plays, by a specialist.The ransacking of Tragedy for indications of the political views of tragic poets is seldom profitable and may be disastrous. A discussion by a specialist about the life of Aeschylus and why his plays are written the way they are. Fagles is a great translator! Includes a version for performance.Īeschylus, by John Herington (1986). The most famous of the plays Aeschylus wrote. The Oresteia, by Aeschylus, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics). More Greek plays: Sophocles Bibliography and further reading about the Eumenides: Learn by doing: hold your own jury trial for Orestes. However, in the future, the relatives of murder victims will go to court, and not avenge crimes on their own. Apollo performs the ceremony that cleans Orestes and makes him able to rejoin society. The jury deadlocks, half on each side, but Athena casts the deciding vote that lets Orestes go free. Orestes being purified by Apollo (Eumenides Painter, about 380 BC)
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