Aeschylus: The Oresteia 9781472539632

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INTRODUCTION

The Aganzemnon is perhaps the greatest of all Greek tragedies, and the most read. An introduction to it should therefore say something about tragedy in general ; and since the Agamemnon serves as an introduction to the Oresteia, the trilogy of which it is the first play, an introduction to the Agamemnon must be to some degree an introduction to the Oresteia as a whole. 534 B.C. is the traditional date at which the festival of the god Dionysus observed annually in Athens at the end of March came to include a performance which later developed into what we know as tragedy. We are painfully ignorant of the early stages of its development; the earliest complete tragedy that survives is the Persians of Aeschylus, produced in 472 B.c., and of the tragedies earlier than that we have only a few small fragments. But fortunately it is less important to know the origins of tragedy than to understand the extant specimens. Tragedy was a solemn performance, enacted in the precinct of the god and forming part of his annual festival. In a certain sense it was a religious ritual; but it was a ritual of a religion very unlike modern Christianity, and since the expression carries Christian associations for most modern readers, its use has led to serious misunderstandings. A tragedy enacted a story from heroic myth ; but since the early Greeks recognised no fixed boundaries between myth and history, a comparatively recent event might occasionally be the subject of a tragedy, if like the defeat of the Persian expedition against Greece in 480179 B.C. it seemed to possess heroic magnitude. T h e mythic subject was presented against the background furnished by Greek religion, which is not easy for a modern man to understand. Most moderns tend to assume unconsciously either that since the Greeks

AESCHYLUS: ORESTEIA

THE CHOEPHOROE ('The Libation Bearers')

Translated with notes by

Hugh Lloyd-Jones Regizrs Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford

DUCKWORTH

INTRODUCTION

(The introduction to Agamernnon in this series contains much which is relevant to the trilogy as a whole.) Aeschylus' version of Orestes' return and revenge was not the only one extant in antiquity, and it is of some interest to compare his account with those that preceded it. In The Odyssey, Zeus sends his messenger Hermes to Aegisthus, when Aegisthus is plotting the murder of Agamemnon, to warn him that if he carries out his plan Orestes will one day avenge the murder. Nonetheless, Aegisthus kills Agamemnon, and in due course Orestes returns from exile and kills Aegisthus. W h a t happens to Clytemnestra is not revealed; she dies at the same time, but we are not told that Orestes kills her. Orestes himself returns to Argos from exile in Athens. The first author to have him spend his exile at the court of Strophius, the king of Phocis, seems to have been Agias, author of the post-Homeric epic Nostoi, which describes the return of the chief Greek heroes from Troy. This was probably a work of the seventh or sixth century; by that time the Delphic oracle had already become important, and the change may have been dictated by the wish to make Delphi, which lay in Phocian territory, prominent in the story. Orestes' revenge was described in the Oresteia of the famous sixth-century lyric poet Stesichorus of Himera in Sicily. Unfortunately we know few details of his work, but he seems to have introduced the figure of Orestes' nurse, who according to Pindar