Aeschylus’ tragedies, which do not sever the individual from the community or from the gods, do not separate the future from the most remote past. In Persians, the evocation of the past serves only as a foil for the present: the ghost of Darius, appearing at the very center of the play, goes back to the beginnings of Persia’s history to contrast its unbroken record of successes with the defeat of Xerxes, before prophesying other disasters to follow in the near future, according to certain oracles once given to him (739-41). In Prometheus Bound the hero, who has inherited the prophetic skill of his mother Gaia/Themis, is able to tell of the past wanderings of Io as well as the future of her descendants, from Epaphus to Heracles.
In Agamemnon, Cassandra’s visions not only juxtapose but also connect the past atrocities - the adultery of Thyestes and the feast at which he was served the flesh of his own children - and those now impending - her own murder and the revenge to come. Indeed, as long as justice is synonymous with retaliation, the past determines the future and the punishment rigorously mirrors the crime: ‘‘a woman shall die,’’ says Cassandra, ‘‘in return for me, a woman, and a man for a man unfortunate in his wife’’ (Agamemnon 1318-19). Furthermore, ‘‘the murderers, who by cunning slew an honored hero, are to be taken by cunning, perishing in the same snare’’ (Libation Bearers 556-58), and the wife who ‘‘killed whom [she] should not’’ has to ‘‘suffer what [she] should not’’ (Libation Bearers 930).
In Eumenides Orestes’ acquittal coincides with the end of retaliation. But there is no radical break with the past. The new court remains closely associated with the old deities and is given the same covenant (thesmos). they were in charge of‘‘the ruin of households, when violence nurtured in the home strikes a dear one down’’ (354-56). The Areopagus, their mortal counterpart, is entrusted with restraining the citizens from internecine war and from unjust action by fear. Moreover, at least half of its members (if the number of jurors is even, as is argued by many scholars from Muller 1833 to Podlecki 1989) - or perhaps the majority of them (if there is an odd number of human jurors, as other scholars from Hermann 1799 to Sommerstein 1989 have argued) - side with the Furies. In any event Athena is responsible for Orestes’ acquittal, whether she decrees that Orestes is the winner if the votes prove equal (741) or whether by casting her vote for Orestes she first creates a tie (735-40) and then announces that the tie will be in favor of Orestes (741). She gives her support to Orestes because ‘‘There is no mother who bore me; / and I approve the male in all things, short of accepting marriage, / with all my heart, and I am wholly on the side of the father’’ (736-38) - thus echoing Apollo’s argument that the son is closer to his father than to his mother, since the father alone is the begetter, whereas the mother is only a ‘‘nurse’’ (658-61). This reasoning has shocked modern readers, but it is only ‘‘the statement, in physical terms, of a principle thought necessary for moral and social order’’ (Macleod 1982, 143) and the translation into biological terms of an existing cultural fact. In Athens the legitimate child had to be acknowledged as such by his father and integrated by him into the family, when he was given his name at the festival of the Amphidromia, and subsequently into the city, when he was registered by him as a member of his phratry.
By and large, the conclusion of the Oresteia, by incorporating the old into the new cosmic and political order, demonstrates that a new order, if it is to last, has to make room for parts of the old order - a lesson that comes straight from Hesiod. According to the Theogony, the new ruler Zeus assigned to Aphrodite (203-6) and Hecate (42125) the spheres they had ruled from the beginning. He confirmed and even increased the privileges of the Styx (399), married venerable deities such as Themis (901-6), Mnemosyne (915-17), and Leto (918-20), and became the father of the Fates (9046). Such a conclusion is adumbrated by the prayer of the Pythia that opens Eume-nides. Contrary to the dominant tradition, according to which Apollo took possession of Delphi by force from a chthonic power, Aeschylus invents a peaceful transfer of the oracle possessed first by Earth, and next by her daughters Themis and Phoebe, who gave it to Apollo as ‘‘a birthday gift’’ (7). This version, which may well be an Aeschylean invention, foreshadows the later reconciliation of Olympian and chthonic powers at Athens, where the young goddess Athena will give a dwelling near her temple and a cult to the old daughters of Night. The comparison with the Prometheus trilogy, where the two generations of gods were also reconciled at the end, suggests some kind of confidence in progress and the healing power of time.
World History
