Embattled by Emily Katz Anhalt

Author:Emily Katz Anhalt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

We know, as Aeschylus and his contemporaries did, that there’s an alternative. The Athenian lawgiver Solon established the trial by jury in 595–594 BCE, nearly a century before the advent of democratic government. But this solution was still controversial and divisive when Aeschylus produced the Oresteia in 458 BCE. Even today, the short-term satisfactions of vengeance continue to appeal to many people. A good legal procedure is fine, but it only works if everyone understands that it is necessary, that it is better than violent retaliation to violent crime, and that it operates fairly.

But how do you convert the traditional certainty that vengeance equals justice into a new understanding of justice as a communal legal procedure? Even after you have institutions in place, how do you get everyone to accept judicial outcomes whether they like them or not? You need a good story. And the Greeks had plenty. From the late sixth throughout the fifth century BCE, Athenian tragic plays reenacted, with revised details and emphases, ancient tales long familiar from epic poetry. New versions of old tales sparked reassessment and debate. Athenian tragedies helped to expose the destructiveness of the traditional tribal goals of helping friends, harming enemies, and pursuing vengeance. They promoted new ideals more conducive to preserving civil society and democratic institutions.

Although ancient Greeks were often suspicious of change (their word for “new,” neos, also meant “unexpected, strange, evil”),1 Aeschylus’s Oresteia directly challenges the traditional view, emphasized in the Odyssey, that Orestes’s vengeance on his father’s murderer is morally correct and unquestionably admirable. Produced exactly a half century after the establishment of democratic government in 508 BCE, and nearly a century and a half after Solon instituted jury trials, this trilogy traces the causes and consequences of a series of reciprocal vengeance killings. The first two plays (Agamemnon and Libation Bearers) emphasize the escalating violence. The third play (Eumenides) validates the jury trial as an imperfect but preferable alternative.2

Hundreds of years before Aeschylus produced the Oresteia, the Iliad and Odyssey began to question the usefulness of vengeance, but both epics nevertheless present revenge as fully compatible with and necessary to good social order. The Odyssey especially implies that revenge can be essential, constructive, and admirable. Odysseus’s successful homecoming and his vengeance on the suitors marks the accomplishment of Zeus’s justice.3 Agamemnon’s homecoming is notably less successful, but the Odyssey’s characters insist that his son Orestes admirably and justly avenges his father’s death by killing the murderer. The Odyssey says nothing about Orestes killing his mother Clytemnestra as well. Gods and mortals in the epic all view Orestes as a dutiful, exemplary son. His vengeance is morally unproblematic and thoroughly praiseworthy.4

While the Odyssey presents Agamemnon’s murder as an unambiguous injustice and commends Orestes’s act of vengeance, the Oresteia shows instead that the traditional definition of “justice” as “vengeance” constitutes a problem—for everyone. By changing crucial details, Aeschylus undermines the Odyssey’s unquestioning admiration for Orestes. In Aeschylus’s retelling, Orestes achieves nothing glorious or praiseworthy by avenging his father’s death.

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