Revenge from Greece to Denmark
Reviving Orestes: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Boys Caught Up in Regicide
In a random shelf pull, I wound up with a beaten copy of Richard Lattimore’s translation of The Oresteia of Aeschylus, a trilogy of plays that tell the tale of Agamemnon’s return from Troy, which he tries to spin as triumphant but that ends in a generational tragedy.
Lattimore, a U.S. Navy veteran during World War II, whose brother was blacklisted as a China-sympathizing communist and who produced most of his work as a translator and poet during the post-World War II reconstruction of the world around the Cold War was in every sense the tweeded academic, rather than a hippie. Still, Aeschylus has him asking what war is good for.
In his commentary, Lattimore describes the sacking of Troy, led by Agamemnon, as a massive over-reaction to Helen leaving Menelaus to live with Paris in the kingdom of Priam. The Greek poets and tragedians shared this view, he argues. Greeks reflecting on the Trojan war legend are as skeptical about the motivations of their leaders as we are when questioning the causes of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.
Aeschylus really focuses on the sacrifices and costs of the conflict. It starts before the invasion even begins. Agamemnon has assembled his fleet, but the winds are still and the armies can’t leave. This isn’t just an inconvenience. As described in Homer, this gathering of fighters leads to a massive over-population of Mycenae, which was a drain on the community’s agricultural and structural resources, a threat to social cohesion and a public health matter as these soldiers swapped diseases.
Agamemnon consulted a priest who divined that Artemis had been angered and demanded that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia. Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra (and Helen’s sister) begs her husband to find some other way, but he follows his priest’s instruction and kills his daughter. They set sail. He’s gone for more than 10 years.
Now, the Greek legend-makers give us two cautionary tales about what happens when you leave your kingdom for a decade. For Odysseus, who is gone twenty years, Ithaca is overrun by suitors who want to marry his wife Penelope and take his throne. Penelope refuses to choose one of them, an act of loyalty to her absent husband but, beyond that, a choice that keeps the lineage of the throne in the family, so that Telemachus can one day become king.
Clytemnestra, already wounded by Agamemnon’s sacrifice takes a lover in Aegisthus, who gas generational history with Agamemnon’s family. Aegisthus’ father Thyestes had usurped power in Mycenae from Agamemnon’s father Atreus. In an act of revenge not to be seen again until Eric Cartman on South Park, Atreus killed all of Thyestes’ children except for Aegisthus, and fed them to him. Clytemnestra takes Aegisthus as a lover and her shows up with a personal bodyguard that he uses to enforce his position as a tyrant which, Lattimore explains, in Ancient Greece really means somebody who claims the throne outside of their lineage, often by appealing to populist sentiment, rather than the straight of dictator we associate with tyranny today. In this case, we might imagine that the people of Mycenae are willing to take a king who is at least paying attention to local concerns rather than spending 10 years and untold treasure invading a faraway land in a dispute over his brother’s wife.
Aegisthus convinced Clytemnestra to send her son Orestes away, knowing whether Agamemnon returns, Orestes will one day contend with him for the crown. So here we have a mother who is stricken over the sacrifice of her daughter who betrays her son. The psychology of loss and trauma here, both personally and in the large scale of politics, is central to the story. Hurt people hurt people, says the cliche? Here we see it played out at home and war.
When Agamemnon returns, he tries to make a triumph out of it but Aeschylus surely notices that the king left for Troy with 100 ships from Mycenae (and commanded over 1,000 in the combined fleet) and returned with one. Over in Ithaca, Odysseus returns a full decade later than Agamemnon and manages to bring home no ships at all. So, Agamemnon won the war but at the cost of his daughter, 10 years away from the city for which he is responsible, 99 ships and all of their soldiers and what does he bring home? Some meager treasure that couldn't possibly compensate for the costs of the war? Oh, and Cassandra, who he took as a slave and lover and who has a gift for prophecy but a curse that nobody ever believes her. So, add a sense of betrayal and jealousy to Clytemnestra’s already besieged psyche here.
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed Agamemnon and Cassandra. Maybe it’s the only way to truly end a story of war and retribution that goes back decades. They will finish the Trojan War era and set Mycenae on a new course.
That’s all dealt with in the first play. In The Libration Bearers, Orestes and his sister Electra return to the city. Apollo tells Orestes that he should do what he knows he wants to do anyway, which is to avenge his father by killing the mother who betrayed them both and taking out the usurper Aegisthus along the way.
This is where Denmark comes in because Hamlet faces a similar situation when his father’s ghost appears to tell him that Claudius, now his mother’s lover, murdered him with poison and has to be dealt with. But, there’s a big difference. Orestes gets his instructions from a god, while Hamlet gets his from a ghost that could be a devil in disguise or even a hallucination. Hamlet lives in a world of doubt while Orestes has certainty and an endorsement from Mount Olympus. Orestes and Electra go to their father’s grave, not to get advice from his ghost but to stir up his dead spirit for vengeance. The spiritual forces between Ancient Greece and Elizabethan England couldn’t be more different, which will come into play later.
Orestes acts decisively. Hamlet does not and is criticized both for his hesitation and the hubris of not killing Claudius while he is praying, for fear that his sins will be forgiven and his soul admitted to heaven. The end of Hamlet, which sees all of the major characters dead is widely attributed to the refusal of a young man to take on the often nasty work of adult responsibility.
Well, maybe Hamlet had learned about Orestes while studying abroad. Because this young prince is punished despite his justifications and divine sanctions. There’s a line in a Kurt Vonnegut short story that sticks with me here, where a character is described as having learned that acts of sacrifice are, in fact, sacrificial and not often rewarded for the good intentions or morality behind them.
In the third play, The Eumenides, Orestes is punished by primeval forces that rival even the Olympian gods in their power. Lattimore describes Apollo, the god who set Orestes on his quest, as the embodiment of Greek civilization. Later, Nietzsche would contrast Apollo, as the force behind enlightenment and construction with Dionysus, a source of uncontrolled passion and appetite. Apollo is a civilized, high culture figure. Dionysus is all tongue and stomach. Apollo cares about things like the proper lineage of kings, Dionysus burns down the castle. Dionysus is older than Apollo, who represents progress from the state of nature. But even Dionysus is young compared to the Furies, who are gods from a pre-civilized era who do not deal in nuance.
The Furies represent a primitive ethos in Greek culture where nomadic tribes guided themselves by unbreakable rules and taboo. Murder, particularly murder of a family member would have to be harshly punished in such settings, without exception, because a whole tribe could be undone by a single act. It’s the Apollonic society that has all sorts of exceptions an excuses for murder, from self-defence, to justice, war and retribution. The Furies have no time for any of that.
So, when the Furies see what Orestes has done, they set themselves on him and torture him. Are they a physical force acting on him from outside or a manifestation of his own guilt? Yes, to both, we have to assume. They drive him out of Mycenae and to the temple of Athena, where he seeks refuge and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategy who sprang from the head of Zeus, takes up Orestes’ case. She tells the Furies to cease and desist. Orestes had a mission from Apollo, she said. He had justification to kill both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, she said.
Amazing, The Furies refuse her. They don’t acknowledge her authority. They are daughters of Uranus (who represented the skies and heavens) and Gaea (the Earth) who also gave birth to the Titans, including Chronos (Time), who gave birth to the Olympian gods. The Furies have seniority and a lineage to reality itself.
But the gods aren’t powerless here. They may be younger, but they are ascendant. They represent the ascendency of people who might be subject to reality but who can also understand it, manipulate it and bend it. Athena is also a bridge between the protean and the modern. She has all of Apollo’s sophistication (and then some) as well as a connection to war, which is primeval and barbaric. She knows that the Furies represent something fundamental in mankind. Lattimore describes them as a child-like and barbarous force but, he says, Apollo is no less ruthless, having ordered Orestes to murder two people, whatever his reasons.
Athena convinces the Furies to stop tormenting Orestes, who she absolves of his guilt but she also welcomes the Furies into the religious and legal traditions of Athens, acknowledging that the great Greek cities owe themselves to the tribal roots of the people who built them. She oversees a union of contemporary and ancient that embraces progress without, to paraphrase Lattimore obliterating the past.
Thoroughly modern, Hamlet did not have to fear punishment from ancient spirits but he could also not call directly on his gods for certainty or absolution and so he wound up paralyzed by indecision and caught by the distinctly humanist and existential dilemma which is that not to choose is also a choice.
Orestes survives his ordeal and Hamlet doesn’t. Sometimes risks aren’t totally obvious and though much of what Orestes endured traces back to the pre-societal world, that is also where the enchantments that saved him originated. Those were unavailable in Shakespeare’s Denmark where we saw a similar story play out in a disenchanted world not unlike our own.