Justice and Revenge

In Aeschylus’ Eumenides the trial of Orestes strongly suggests that the corollary of polyphony in the play is the potential for diverging interpretations in the audience. The jury of Athenian citizens pressed in service to vote in this first-ever homicide trial is equally divided, and Orestes is acquitted on the vote of Athena (734-43, 752-53). Thus the cycle of retaliation is broken, but the issue of the justice of Orestes’ revenge is not resolved. Eumenides introduces no new, abstract conception of dike as justice to contrast with the dike as retaliation invoked by the characters of the previous plays of the trilogy (Goldhill 1986a, 29-31, 37-51; 1992, 26-37). It is true that each avenger of the previous two plays sees his or her vengeance as just, and a disjunction is contrived between irreconcilable claims to justice (Libation Bearers 461; cf. Agamemnon 1560-64). This disjunction is a consequence of a reciprocal conception of dike that is encapsulated in the dictum that ‘‘the doer shall suffer’’ (Agamemnon 1564, Libation Bearers 313); the fact that all instances of offence and retribution take place within the same family creates an apparently interminable series of dilemmas in which the infliction of just retribution on the offender is simultaneously an act of injustice on the part of the avenger (see Orestes’ words at Libation Bearers 930: ‘‘You killed whom you should not; now suffer what you should not’’). But the notion of an

Abstract ideal of justice { dike) underlying its partial or perverted implementation is as old as Hesiod’s Works and Days, in which Dike, the daughter of Zeus, personifies the standard by which are judged the judgments { dikai) of disputes between parties who each represent their own dike {Cairns 1993,153-56). Equally, in the Oresteia, there is no simple movement from dike as revenge to dike as justice; rather, acts of revenge seek to instantiate a standard of justice that is constantly invoked but never realized. The divided jury of Eumenides shows that the institution of the law-court does not necessarily execute perfect justice {the dike by which a husband-killer is punished is still balanced by the dike which demands that a matricide be punished), but it does bring the series of competing claims to an end. It does not exclude vengeance, but allows the prosecutor to pursue vengeance through the duly established institutions of the city, to enlist the citizens’ anger, their desire for vengeance, in support of his own case. The anger of the Erinyes {Furies) remains embodied in the institution of the Areopagus {690-706, esp. 705), and this idea that the institutions of state punishment should be not dispassionate but irascible toward offenders is mirrored in the strategies of prosecutors in genuine fourth-century Athenian law-court speeches {Rubinstein 2004; Harris 2001, 188-90), where the regular term for what prosecutors seek and juries impose when they condemn the defendant, namely timOria, encompasses both punishment and revenge. Emotional attitudes remain crucial, but are now embodied in the institutions of the state. The audience of Eumenides is invited to conclude, therefore, that their city is fortunate in possessing a mechanism not for discerning where true justice lies, but for circumventing interminable cycles of personal vengeance {cf. Euripides, Orestes 507-25).

The Oresteia thus instantiates a major difference between the world of tragedy and that of the audience - tragic vengeance is typically extreme and bloody, but in classical Athens the pursuit of vengeance by violent means is {in most cases) outlawed. A question thus arises regarding the relation between the passion for vengeance that is so prominent in tragedy and the place of vengeance in the values of the audience. In a series of articles, Herman {1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998) has argued that this relation is weak: despite the frequency of revenge in tragedy, Athenian society, with its legal mechanisms for containing vengeance, exhibits a marked tendency toward compromise and conciliation rather than retaliation. His chief evidence for this conclusion is a number of passages in fourth-century forensic oratory in which the speaker advertises his forbearance in the face of provocation and his reluctance to seek legal redress. This view may be contrasted with that of Burnett {1998), for whom Athenian society is permeated by an attachment, given artistic expression in tragedy, to a notion of timee in which vengeance is natural and unproblematic. Neither view can be accepted without qualification. It is significant that the Athenian state succeeded in imposing a {near-) monopoly on the punishment of offenders, and that retaliation is pursued by legal and peaceful means; it is also clear that there is mileage in representing oneself as slow to take offence and reluctant to pursue satisfaction via the law-courts {for example, Demosthenes 54.6; cf. Clytemnestra at Euripides, Electra 1030-31; further examples in Herman’s articles; cf. Harris 2001, 184-86). As we have seen, however, the notion of vengeance is by no means excluded from the legal process: not only do angry litigants seek timOria by enlisting the anger of the dikasts, but there are cases in which litigants frankly admit their enmity toward their opponents {for example, pseudo-Demosthenes 53.2;

Further examples in Dover 1974, 182; Cohen 1995, 61-86; Rhodes 1998), and others in which there is at least a strong suspicion that litigants are engaged in a protracted, personally or politically motivated cycle of suit and countersuit (see, for example, the ongoing feud between Demosthenes and Meidias, as discussed by MacDowell 1990, 1-13; Cohen 1995, 87-118; and Rhodes 1998). If the dikai of the Athenian dikasterion may, in some cases at least, represent the pursuit of the vendetta by other means (Blundell 1989, 55), then the violent retaliation carried out in tragedy may strike a chord in an Athenian audience.

Burnett’s view of tragic vengeance is, however, over-simple. For tragedy consistently contrives situations in which an abstract acceptance that people are entitled to retaliate when harmed will be problematic in practice. Thus, while there is extra-tragic evidence that ordinary Athenians believed that it is right to do good to those who have helped you and harm to those who have harmed you (helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies is offered as a definition of arete, excellence, at Plato, Meno 71e, and of dikaiosune, justice, at Republic 334b; see Blundell 1989), the reality in tragedy is frequently that those whom one regards as one’s enemies (echthroi) also have a strong claim to be regarded as one’s friends (philoi) - as in the Oresteia or in Sophocles’ Antigone - or that the logic that drives one to harm a philos who has become an echthros also leads one to harm one’s dearest philoi - as in Euripides’ Medea. The pursuit of revenge will be unproblematic only in a minority of cases - cases such as the murder of Aegisthus in all three tragedians, where the actions of Orestes and Electra in killing an adulterer approximate to what a cuckolded Athenian husband was, in certain circumstances, permitted to do himself (MacDowell 1978, 124-25).

Different ways of handling the clash between the drive to take revenge and other imperatives can be seen in Euripides’ and Sophocles’ treatments of the Orestes story. It is very unlikely that, having seen the remorse of Electra and Orestes and heard the pronouncements of Castor, the deus ex machina, that Clytemnestra ‘‘has her just deserts, but your [Orestes’] action is not just’’ (1244), and that Apollo’s oracle was not wise (1245-46), the audience will not conclude that in Euripides’ Electra the pursuit of revenge to the extent of committing matricide is presented for their condemnation. The issue is the same as in the Oresteia, that an act of retaliation may be just punishment for its recipient and unjust violation of the closest of obligations for its perpetrator. The same general notion is expressed in slightly different form in Euripides’ Orestes 194, where the chorus observes that Orestes’ matricide was just (dikai men), and Electra rejoins that it was not honorable (kalos d’ou). That previous stages of the cycle of violence may be characterized in the same way is clear from the chorus-leader’s comment in Euripides’ Electra (1051) that Clytemnestra’s arguments in favor of her retaliation show justice, but that her justice is shameful (dikai’ elexas, he dike d’ aischros echei). A similar sentiment is given to Electra herself in Sophocles’ play (558-60). In an influential study of Greek values, Adkins (1960,156,185-86) argued that this formulation, in which the just (dikaion) is opposed to the honorable (kalon, opposite aischron), as opposed to the opposition of dike to dike in Aeschylus, constitutes an attempted ‘‘solution’’ to the problem of interfamilial revenge, on the basis that to designate an action aischron ‘‘trumps’’ the claim that it is dikaion. This was, however, not only an odd way to think about uses of moral language, but an erroneous piece of intellectual history: Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon is considered aischron already in the Odyssey (11.433), and if this ‘‘solved’’ the problem of interfamilial revenge, no one thought to tell Aeschylus. The presentation of such revenge as a clash of competing dikai complements its presentation as the pursuit of the dikaion by means of the aischron: Aeschylus’ Orestes firmly believes that his revenge is just; his spontaneous aidOs (shame) at the thought of matricide in the same scene (Libation Bearers 899), however, is a sign that his act of justice is also traditionally shameful (aischron). This clash of values is not the problem’s solution, but its essence. Sophocles’ Electra does indeed use the dikaion/ aischron antithesis to condemn Clytemnestra’s revenge; but a distinct parallel between mother and daughter emerges in the way that she justifies conduct which she acknowledges as shameful (605-9, 616-21) by appealing to the necessity of retaliation: ‘‘shameful deeds are taught by shameful deeds,’’ as she claims (621). Some notice the similarity of motivation that emerges in this scene and extrapolate to the matricide which results, while others take the matricides’ exultation in their action at face value. The issue, however, is much harder to judge in Sophocles than in Euripides; all we have are the arguments and reactions of the characters (and the partisan chorus) themselves; there is no deus ex machina, and the play ends without exploring the consequences of matricide. The varying modern interpretations of this play (straightforward celebration of justified revenge versus ‘‘ironic’’ undertones of its dubiety) depend less on unambiguous indicators in the text than on the suppositions that interpreters bring with them.