The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [136]
This is the question posed by the only complete trilogy of tragedies to have survived from ancient Greece, the Oresteia of Aeschylus.
We begin with the tragic cycle which is unleashed when the great king of Mycenae, Agamemnon, returns home victorious from the Trojan War. During the years he has been away, his wife Clytemnaestra has enjoyed a long adulterous affair with his cousin Aegisthus. At the prospect of her husband returning, she conceives a treacherous plan to murder him, succumbing to the fantasy that she will then be able to marry Aegisthus and settle down to many more peaceful years of life in Mycenae (Anticipation Stage). When Agamemnon returns, she promptly commits the dark deed, in peculiarly shocking manner. She gives him a lavish welcome, prepares a hot bath and stabs him three times as he lies in it (along with the Trojan prophetess Cassandra whom he has brought home with him). She then comes out of the palace to proclaim to the world what she has done, exultantly describing how her husband's blood had spurted forth at her blows. The first play of the trilogy, the Agamemnon, thus ends on the Dream Stage of her fantasy, as she and Aegisthus rejoice at their deliverance.
As the second play, the Choeophori, begins, the murderous pair are into the Frustration Stage. Clytemnaestra is being troubled by ominous dreams. Worse, her son by Agamemnon, Orestes, who has escaped into exile, has now returned secretly to Mycenae where he meets his sister Electra. They conspire to avenge their father: opposition is constellating against the murderers. Orestes wins admittance to the palace by arriving in disguise and promptly kills Aegisthus. After putting the villainess Clytemnaestra through a Nightmare Stage, by holding her beneath his sword while telling her at length what he thinks of her wickedness, he kills her too. The monster has been overthrown. The five-stage cycle which began with Clytemnaestra conceiving the plan to murder her husband is concluded.
But suddenly Orestes, the triumphant instrument of vengeance, finds himself surrounded by the Eumenides, the horrible, shrieking Furies, threatening him with destruction in turn. After all, he has committed one of the gravest crimes imaginable, by killing his own mother. Who is to say that this should not properly be the beginning of a new tragic cycle, and that he should not pay the price for his crime? Precisely this question is the theme of the concluding play of the trilogy, the Eumenides.
Pursued by the shrieking, taunting Furies, Orestes tries to take sanctuary in the holiest spot of the Greek world, the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here he is told that he must go to Athens to see the goddess of wisdom Athene, who will finally decide where justice lies.
The play concludes with Orestes in effect on trial for his life, with the vengeful Furies leading for the prosecution. Orestes pleads in his own defence that he has committed a crime, but only in righteous punishment for one much more terrible. Furthermore he has already suffered grievously for it by having to endure the torments of the Furies (who also represent the torments of conscience). Athene finally agrees that, through his suffering and remorse, he has purged his sin and should be released. The Eumenides are conciliated by the promise of a permanent place of honour in Athenian life. The play ends with the sense of some huge shadow having at last been lifted, enabling life once again to flow free.
An important aspect of the argument in the Eumenides is the general admission that Orestes has committed a crime, but that he had been able to expiate it. In other words, in committing his act of vengeance, he has become a dark figure (though nothing like so dark as Clytemnaestra), and only by enduring his subsequent sufferings has he won his way through