Cosmos and Tragedy

An Essay on the Meaning of Aeschylus

Brooks Otis

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469640112
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nel teatro

Otis clarifies the moral and theological issues raised in the Ortesia and relates them to certain stylistic and structural qualities of the three plays. He tackles the central questions of guilt, retribution, and the relation between human and divine justice, and he sees a carefully prepared evolution in the trilogy from a primitive to a more civilized form of justice. Otis treats the trilogy as a poem, a play, and a work of theological and philosophical reflection. Originally published in 1981. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

II. THE AGAMEMNON: I

Most modern readers of the Oresteia are much more impressed by the Agememnon than by the other two plays. What stands out is the murder of Agamemnon, not the murder of Clytemnestra or the court scene of the Eumenides. Indeed, the rest of the trilogy appears to be an appendage. Once he is killed, he must be avenged, and once he is avenged, his vengeance must be made to stick and not be defeated by the counter-vengeance of his wife’s representatives, the Furies. In another sense the Agamemnon seems isolated from the rest of the trilogy. In that play we are concerned above all with the guilt of Agamemnon as it bears on the Trojan War, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the sins of the house of Atreus. Thereafter the question of Agamemnon’s guilt disappears; the emphasis is on Clytemnestra’s guilt and even more on the guilt or innocence of Orestes. There is a brief allusion to the entire sequence of events in the house of Atreus at the very end of the Choephoroe (1065–76), but in the Eumenides the problem is Orestes’ guilt (vis-à-vis Clytemnestra’s), and the house of Atreus is not mentioned. Agamemnon’s death marks the decisive turning point, the point that separates past from present and future and enables a solution of the problem of guilt. This is why his tragedy—or murder—looms so large and why it seems to sum up and at the same time push aside the problems of the house of Atreus, the problems that dominate the Agamemnon itself.

From such considerations we might reach the apparently paradoxical conclusion that the guilt of Agamemnon is both stressed and discounted, or that the Choephoroe contradicts the Agamemnon and changes the emphasis of the trilogy. Agamemnon’s tragedy is the event that shifts and eventually removes altogether the burden of guilt from the house of Atreus and from all houses or people similarly subjected to an apparently self-perpetuating chain of guilt and crime. The drama of Agamemnon’s murder telescopes the past and brings it into the open where it can be defined and dealt with. As a result, Orestes’ guilt assumes a totally different character, as do the actions of Apollo (Zeus) on the one hand and of the non-Olympian powers on the other. The tragedy of Agamemnon is the principal sacrifice that brings peace both cosmic and political, or the human event that sets in motion the contest of the supernatural powers and the “new Creation” that the victory of the good powers makes possible. In one sense the guilt of Agamemnon is expiated by his death; in another sense he is the good man murdered by the evil woman in such a way that the whole character and meaning of guilt and vengeance are changed. We move from past ambiguity into present and future clarity.

The importance of viewing the Oresteia in this way is that it greatly facilitates our understanding of its dramatic character. We can see why Aeschylus arranges the episodes and choruses as he does and why the poetry is fused with the action as it is. To a certain extent, scholars, particularly Bruno Snell and Jacqueline de Romilly,¹ have correctly described this peculiarly Aeschylean sort of tragedy—its emphasis on active decision, its dilation or thickening of the tragic moment and enormous buildup of tension around it, its excitation of phobos, dreadful expectation, as opposed to the Euripidean concern with pathos and the pathetic—but they have not, I think, really explained its essential raison d’être, which we can best define as the tragic resolution of a dreadful ambiguity. Aeschylus wanted to portray a tragic event which would permit the right kind of resolution. The vengeance of Atreus on Thyestes was that of one criminal on another, of a frightful murderer on a shameless adulterer. So long as such crimes succeeded one another there could be no hope of breaking the chain of guilt and vengeance. In each case the sinner deserved his fate. A vengeance was needed that would be out of all proportion to the crime avenged and would thus set the avenger in opposition to dike, or justice. So a final vengeance on the evil avenger would approximate dike and require the support of the god (Zeus) who already stood for dike. Guilt had to be reduced to such a point that further vengeance would mock the very name of justice. Only in such a situation would Zeus be called upon to uphold his theodicy, and the rule of dike be clearly opposed to the older rule of mere retaliation. Aeschylus had to change the balance of guilt but not to eliminate guilt altogether. All retribution was for guilt of some sort: the problem was not to abandon retribution but to make it just or consistent with a genuine theodicy.

Agamemnon approximates the flawed hero of Aristotle’s Poetics. But his fate is not merely tragic—in Aristotle’s and Sophocles’ sense—but genuinely sacrificial, or, more exactly, a curious and dreadful blend of punishment and sacrifice. This is why it is so shocking and so problematic, why it sets in motion so much more than the retributive powers that had heretofore been at work.

Aeschylus had to show (1) that Agamemnon’s guilt was part and parcel of the guilt of his house, of the past, and was bound to incur the retribution that ran in his house; (2) that the retribution was also excessive and wicked; and (3) that this very fact had cosmic significance. He had (1) to emphasize both the guilt and the greatness (or eminent virtue) of Agamemnon, both the punishment incurred by the first and the obligation of vengeance demanded by the second; (2) to build up the evil eminence of Clytemnestra, the great excess of guilt over justification in her crime; and (3) to bring out the extrahuman or divine forces at work in both characters. He was concerned not with the tragic fate of man in general but with the cosmic question posed by the fate of a particular sort of man, a particular dramatic moment. If it were posed with enough salience, it would almost inevitably receive an answer. The ambiguity in which human and divine existence had heretofore been veiled would burst open in spectacular horror, with sufficiently explosive force to change the cosmic and political orders, to create a new world.

The task for his tragic art was one of expanding or dilating a single tragic act or moment into a panorama of human and divine life—the entire past of the house of Atreus and the Trojan War; the enigmatic designs of Zeus and the dark Erinyes. The moment was the return and immediately ensuing murder of Agamemnon. This, though really one moment since Agamemnon is killed almost as soon as he returns, is for dramatic purposes divided into a series of episodes each of which comes at a (dramatically) shorter interval from the other and from the murder itself: the sighting of the beacon; the celebration of its good news; the herald; the entrance of Agamemnon and Cassandra; the interval between Agamemnon’s and Cassandra’s exits into the palace.

Between these events, each of which progressively increases tension and fearful expectation, come the choral passages and finally the kommos and dialogue of Cassandra and chorus. Here the event is set in a frame of human interpretation (the chorus) that clearly anticipates the crime to come. Though the chorus is ostensibly celebrating Agamemnon’s victory over Troy, it does so in such a way that victory is turned into woe. Its emphatic silence about and ambiguous hints at the true situation in Argos are reinforced by the ambiguity of its lyrics—their ambiguous mixture of apparent joy and actual woe. The chorus knows that events have taken place and are about to take place that challenge both the justice of Zeus and the morality of man. Against this human ambiguity and doubt is set a divine voice, that of the prophetess Cassandra, which breaks through the veil of poetry into “prosaic” utterance (in iambic trimeter), but not so as to affect or change the foreordained tragedy. The aged chorus had dealt with Troy and Agamemnon’s role there and with the war-guilt that came of his slaying of Iphigenia; Cassandra, Trojan though she was, deals with the quite different scene at Argos, the woes endemic in the house of Atreus. It is remarkable how the two complementary voices—the human one of the chorus, the divinely inspired one of Cassandra—expand the scope and meaning of the tragic moment of Agamemnon’s death. There is first a combination of retrospect and foreboding; then, finally, with Cassandra, a more explicit combination of retrospect and prophecy, in which past and future are made to swell the actual time of drama. But this is not all: both the chorus and Cassandra see all this in a supernatural light that grows from vague conjectures about the divine to the actual divine presence in Cassandra. The divinity is at hand and strikes!

This lyrical development is inserted into the action: the stasima and kommoi are unintelligible without the episodes. While the parados and stasima concentrate on the war, and the guilt of Agamemnon as connected with it, and are ominously silent—with the sort of silence that speaks—about the guilt of Clytemnestra, she herself is the true center of the drama; her hypocritical inversion of the truth, her masculine energy, dominate the episodes. The living Agamemnon is the center of only one brief scene, and this too is dominated by Clytemnestra, who makes him walk the carpet to his doom. All this time the guilt of Clytemnestra has been silently building up. Its eruption in the Cassandra kommos and in her brutal revelation of the corpses requires the final full confrontation of chorus and Clytemnestra. As last the guilt problem is seen in a different light: it is no longer Agamemnon’s but Clytemnestra’s guilt that is at issue; it is no longer the will of Zeus but the dreadful Erinyes of the house of Atreus, that raises the great theological question, the question of dike. With Aegisthus’ belated appearance at the end, the whole locus of guilt has shifted and the next, Oresteian, phase of the problem has begun.

We must constantly bear in mind that all this is poetry with different functions, but poetry nonetheless. The various aspects of this poetry—the different rhythms and metaphors, sound-sense correspondences, narrative passages, moral reflections, recurring symbols or leitmotivs—all express and reflect the drama going on; it is intrinsically different from the nondramatic lyric of Pindar or the narrative of Homer. For the guilts of Agamemnon or Clytemnestra are not related in a narrative or exemplary way but shown at work. This is true of any poetical drama, but in Aeschylus the drama is invested with a momentum and duration which we might call “trans-tragic,” something designed to outrun and overtop any possible denouement. The tragedy is cosmic transformation: the central event—the murder of Agamemnon—is designed to reach out and change all the previous expectations of men. To say that the poetry has a special dramatic vitality means little unless we see concretely how the dramatic and poetic elements (to distinguish for purposes of analysis what are really inseparable) support one another in this particular drama. The various elements of the poetical drama—the iambic trimeter episodes, the parodos, the stasima, the kommoi, and the epirremata—have each a special dramatic function, a function connected with the actions and viewpoints of the dramatis personae.

It is not simply the voice of Aeschylus or the superpersonal mind of the author but that of specific people, the puzzled yet reflective and in a sense theologically concerned elders of Argos, men who have lived through a long experience with the house of Atreus, who have seen the war start and continue for ten long years while at home they have witnessed or heard about unmentionable doings in the palace. They are groping for understanding, for a clue to the designs of Zeus, not beca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Editorial Note
• I. The Guilt of Agamemnon
• II. The Agamemnon: I
• III. The Agamemnon: II
• IV. The Choephoroe
• V. The Eumenides
• VI. The Oresteia and The Other Plays of Aeschylus