Eumenides 517–25 contains a centrepiece of Aeschylean ideology—the role of punishment and fear in the ruling of the city. However, the text is vexed by serious issues at lines 522–5. This paper reassesses the main problems, reviews the most influential emendations, and puts forward a new hypothesis. It argues in favour of circumscribing the corruption, offering a new interpretation that permits retention of parts of the text that most editors have deemed impossible to restore.

Recent scholarship has shown that the Eumenides of Aeschylus, far from presenting a complete and coherent picture of the well-ordered polis, in fact offers something quite different, namely, a complex set of questions, concerns and conundrums regarding the very nature of political society. But I suggest that the literature has not yet provided a fully satisfying account of the ways in which those questions are underwritten by the specifically literary practice of Aeschylus as it develops the play’s larger theoretical – (...) especially moral – implications. I argue that the Eumenides can fruitfully be read as a sustained exercise in the subversion of expectations that unsettles its audience and thereby opens up a discursive and aesthetic space for the development of a distinctive political problematic; and further, that this problematic involves a challenging series of meditations on what today would be called political ethics, broadly conceived. (shrink)

The word Eμενδες occurs six times in our texts of Greek tragedy and once as a play title . This may make ‘Eumenides in Greek tragedy’ sound like a restricted subject, but it is one that has seldom been discussed as a whole, and scholars have tended to consider each of the three plays in question in the light of unargued assumptions about the other two, and about the nature and affinities of Eumenides in general. I shall begin with some (...) introductory remarks on cults, since not all the information is readily available in reference books, and then discuss the three plays in turn, starting for convenience with the Orestes. (shrink)

The word Eὐμεν⋯δες occurs six times in our texts of Greek tragedy (four times in Eur.Or., twice in Soph.O.C.) and once as a play title (Aesch.Eum.). This may make ‘Eumenides in Greek tragedy’ sound like a restricted subject, but it is one that has seldom been discussed as a whole, and scholars have tended to consider each of the three plays in question in the light of unargued assumptions about the other two, and about the nature and affinities of Eumenides (...) in general. I shall begin with some introductory remarks on cults, since not all the information is readily available in reference books, and then discuss the three plays in turn, starting for convenience with theOrestes. (shrink)

Having withered you while you live I will lead you down so that you may give recompense for the miseries of your slaughtered mother. And if anyone else of mortals has done wrong, committing impiety against god or any stranger or his own parents, you will see him getting his just deserts. For Hades is a great euthunos of mortals below the ground, he oversees all things with his tablet-writing mind.

The difficulty in this antistrophe is found mainly in its last line and is caused by κενου which, as it stands, does not make sense and is also unmetrical . It is noticeable on the other hand that the basic meaning of the antistrophe is not really affected by omitting †κενου†, and it looks as though the scholia did not pay any attention to it in commenting as follows:.

"This essay focuses on the third play in the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides. Telech provides a compelling reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s reading of Aeschylus's masterpiece, saving the reading from the complaint that it oversimplifies and sentimentalizes the Oresteia by celebrating the triumph of a modern and liberal understanding of law's rationalist virtues over customary and traditional forms. Telech provides an alternative Nietzschean reading that is consistent with Nietzsche's own, that reintroduces passion and irrationality into the trial and sentencing of Orestes, refrains (...) from romanticizing law, and along the way makes a case for institutionalizing a role for mercy in contemporary legal processes." (OUP abstract). (shrink)

This paper argues that Aeschylus' Eumenides presents a coherent geography that, when associated with the play's judicial proceedings, forms the basis of an imperial ideology. The geography of Eumenides constitutes a form of mapping, and mapping is associated with imperial power. The significance of this mapping becomes clear when linked to fifth-century Athens' growing judicial imperialism. The creation of the court in Eumenides, in the view of most scholars, refers only to Ephialtes' reforms of 462 BC. But in the larger (...) context, Athenian courts in the mid-fifth century are a form of imperial control. When geographically specific jurisdiction combines with new courts, it supports and even creates a developing imperial ideology. Moreover, the figure of Athena and the role she gives the Athenian jury emphasizes a passionate pro-Athenian nationalism, a nationalism that the text connects to Athens' geographic and judicial superiority. This imperial ideology did not spring from Aeschylus' imagination fully formed; it reflects a trend in Athens of promoting her own cultural superiority. This sense of cultural superiority in fact disguises the realities of Athens' developing power and increasingly harsh subjection of her former allies. (shrink)

Drawing upon the dual status of the Eumenides as metics who were neither included in nor excluded from Athenian democratic politics, this essay attempts to bring the last scene of The Eumenides to contemporary political settings wherein we observe the duality of immigrants—that is, the tension between political citizenship and cultural foreignness—in our liberal society. The controversial bride kidnapping cases among Hmong immigrants show that the liberal regulative principles such as reciprocity and mutual respect cannot work in the context of (...) powerful and irreconcilable cultural and moral conflicts, which go beyond the line that we can tolerate in the name of cultural diversity. Instead, this essay focuses on the Athenian citizens’ and the Eumenides’ courageous decision to suffer together, not merely to live together, in an attempt to find a new possibility of democratic coexistence. (shrink)

‘The issues surrounding Orestes’ purification are some of the most difficult in all of Aeschylus’ wrote A. L. Brown in 1982. Despite the appearance since then of an overall treatment of pollution and three editions of the play, there continue to be disagreements about the matter. In this paper I suggest that we may be better able to understand the treatment of purification if we focus on the importance of Orestes’ pollution to the particular version of the story constructed in (...) Eumenides. (shrink)

Cette étude vise à reconstruire la fonction dramatique des interjections attestées dans la première partie des Euménides (ὠή, ἰοὺ ἰοὺ, πυπάξ, ὢ πόποι, ἰώ), afin de montrer les effets que peuvent produire dans le texte les emplois ou les contre-emplois d’une interjection donnée.

Cette étude vise à reconstruire la fonction dramatique des interjections attestées dans la première partie des Euménides (ὠή, ἰοὺ ἰοὺ, πυπάξ, ὢ πόποι, ἰώ), afin de montrer les effets que peuvent produire dans le texte les emplois ou les contre-emplois d’une interjection donnée.

The earliest ancient Greek text to narrate the resolution of a large-scale conflict by judicial means is Aeschylus's tragedy Eumenides, first performed in Athens in 458 BC. After explaining the historical context in which the play was performed—a context of acute civic discord and the imminent danger of an escalation of reciprocal revenge killings by the lower-class faction in Athens—this article offers a new reading of the play and asks if it can help us think about the challenges inherent in (...) conflict resolution today. The prosecutors are the Erinyes, the archaic supernatural agents of murder victims; their responsibility, in predemocratic Greece, before the invention of law courts, was to punish murderers. The defendant is Orestes, who has killed his mother but argues that, since she had killed his father, he was acting justly. The judges consist of eleven Athenian citizen jurors plus the presiding god, Athena, whose twelfth vote carries slightly more weight than any of the others. The article concludes that some aspects of the procedure are exemplary, especially Athena's insistence on respecting each side's right to be heard, her sensitivity toward the grievances felt by the defeated Erinyes, and the compensation they are offered. On the other hand, the tragedy clearly shows how difficult it is for a fair legal judgment to be made without a view to larger issues of national expedience, security, and inherent power structures, especially that of patriarchy. (shrink)

Allusions to the Panathenaia 1 in the final scene of the Eumenides have been pointed out by a number of scholars.2 Headlam identified the red robes of the Eumenides with the cloaks worn by the Metics in the Panathenaic procession.3 In Athena's pronouncement at 1030–1.

In the surviving plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles the gods appear to men only rarely. In the Eumenides Apollo and Athena intervene to bring acquittal to Orestes. In Sophocles' Philoctetes Heracles appears ex machina to ensure that the hero returns to Troy, and we learn from a messenger how the gods have summoned the aged Oedipus to a hero's tomb. In Sophocles' Ajax Athena drives Ajax mad and taunts him cruelly. Prometheus Bound might seem to be an exception, since all (...) but one of its characters are gods. But nonetheless the intervention of the gods in the life of the one human character, Io, brings pain and trouble as well as promise of benefit. Io has been driven mad because she has refused to obey the dreams that tell her to go to the meadow where Zeus wants to have intercourse with her. The god does not make his request in person, and it is only in the course of her wanderings that Io learns how Zeus will bring a gentle end to her sufferings. Her informant is another god, Zeus' adversary Prometheus, who answers her questions, at times grudgingly , and in ways that are not immediately clear to her. (shrink)

This essay offers an exegesis and critique of the moment of community formation in Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project. In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben searches for the site of a non-sovereign community founded upon the oath [horkos, sacramentum]: an ancient institution of language that produces and guarantees the connection between speech and the order of things by calling the god as a witness to the speaker’s fidelity. I argue that Agamben’s account ultimately falls short of subverting sovereignty, however, because the (...) sacramentum derives its power, at a fundamental level, from the ‘monothetic’ structure of truth—what Agamben calls ‘the name of God’ [il nome di Dio]. I propose we may yet salvage the oath as a means of subverting sovereignty, however, if we reconsider it in the context of polytheism, where the names of the gods [i nomi degli dei] can be many, while remaining powerful. First, through a reading of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, I argue that the Greeks understood the oath to function even where truth and falsity were inherently undecidable. Second, I argue that if we separate the truth and power functions interwoven in the sacramentum, we find a second formula, the decisory oath, which can be taken in order to produce a community even in the absence of one sovereign truth. As a kind of magical speech, the decisory oath provides the limit conditions for the possibility of distinguishing true from false in the sacramentum, and thus founds it. (shrink)

Nel 2011 il National Theatre di Londra celebrava il trentesimo anniversario della produzione dell’ Oresteia (Agamennon, Choefori e Eumenides) con una grande mostra che raccontava il lungo processo di creazione di uno degli allestimenti più famosi del teatro inglese degli ultimi quarant’anni; si tratta dell’adattamento e della traduzione della Trilogia di Eschilo a opera del poeta e scrittore inglese Tony Harrison, con la regia di Peter Hall (direttore del Teatro Nazionale dal 1973 al 1988) e le scene e le maschere (...) di Jocelyn Herbert. Questa mostra curata da Cathy Courtney, arrivava sette anni dopo la grande esposizione dedicata alla scenografa inglese intitolata Jocelyn Herbert at the National (2004).Il presente saggio racconta il lungo percorso creativo che ha portato alla definizione, oltre che di un’originale traduzione, anche di un particolare allestimento scenico che prevedeva l’uso di maschere per i soli attori uomini, create dalla Herbert, una delle più famose stage designer britanniche. I materiali preparatori sono stati messi a disposizione online negli ultimi anni, grazie a un progetto di digitalizzazione del National Theatre in collaborazione con Google Culture Institute. Proprio alle maschere della Herbert e alle diverse proposte e trattamenti della maschera greca in chiave contemporanea è dedicato un contributo critico finale che le affianca comparativamente sia a quelle del mascheraio e studioso di teatro greco classico Ferdinando Falossi, sia alle maschere video digitali e fotografiche create rispettivamente da Teatrino Giullare e da Marzio Emilio Villa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conflict and Reconciliation in Hegel’s Theory of the TragicJ. G. FinlaysonἊϱης Ἂϱει ξυμβαλεῖ, Δίϰᾳ Διϰα. (Κοεφοϱοι 461)this article has two related aims: to expound and defend Hegel’s theory of the tragic; and to clarify Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. These two aims are related in that a widespread, but misleading, conception of the tragic and a common, but mistaken, understanding of Hegel’s concept of reconciliation can seem to offer mutual (...) support. According to the misleading conception, the tragic consists in the defeat of human lives and projects that arises from irresolvable conflict. Goethe is the most notable exponent of this view. In 1824 Goethe writes that “everything tragic rests on irresolvable opposition. As soon as resolution enters or becomes possible the tragic vanishes.”1 The mistaken understanding of Hegel’s concept of reconciliation is that it consists in a triumphal and wholly affirmative resolution of contradiction through the attainment of harmony. It is easy to see how the two views support one another. For Hegel presents the tragic as a dialectic of conflict and reconciliation in human action, a dialectic in which the moment of reconciliation is ineliminable. So, if one conceives reconciliation as an harmonious resolution of conflict and one also subscribes to Goethe’s view that the tragic rests on irreconcilable opposition, one is not likely to take Hegel’s theory of the tragic very seriously. If, however, we keep in mind what Hegel means by ‘reconciliation, ’ then we can begin both to understand and to defend his theory of the tragic. [End Page 493]1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGICLet us begin with a preliminary delineation and defense of the concept of the tragic. Hegel does not have a theory of tragedy, he has a theory of the tragic. A theory of tragedy would be genre-specific, a theory about tragedies, the works of theater and not the pitiable and terrifying events they represent.2 Aristotle’s Poetics is a theory of tragedy. It is a theory about the composition of tragic poems, about their parts and their function. One can call a theory of tragedy loosely an ‘aesthetic’ theory, to the extent that it is a theory of the experience of a work of tragedy, indeed for the ancient Greeks, an experience not just of beholding but of participating in the performance of a tragedy. By contrast, a theory of the tragic is not a theory about tragedies. It is not genre specific, for not only tragedies are tragic. And neither is it an ‘aesthetic’ theory about the experience of a work of tragedy. Rather, it is a theory about what makes a work of theater into a tragedy, about what it is to be a tragedy. True, the essence of tragedy has to do with experience, but it has to do primarily with the experience of the tragic hero, not the experience of the actor or the spectator.Furthermore, whereas a theory of tragedy tells us something about tragedies, a theory of the tragic tells us something about human experience, human actions and the ethical-life of a community in which the actions are played out.3 The tragic arises from the way in which institutions, customs, and practices within which we become what we are, shape our actions on the one hand, and take shape through our actions on the other. Hence the question of the tragic enjoys a certain priority over the question of tragedy. The works of theater we call tragedies exist because of the tragic, not vice versa.There is another reason why we should grant that the question of the tragic as such is interesting and relevant. Tragedy is not a vague term; historically at least the matter of classification has been settled. It is not as if, in significant instances, it is impossible to decide whether a work of ancient drama is or is not a tragedy. Lebeck may argue, rather unconvincingly that the trial scene in the Eumenides is a parody of Athenian litigation; but she does not dispute that it is a tragedy.4 Steiner may claim that “tragedies end badly,” in flagrant disregard of the evidence, (the Eumenides of Aeschylus, and Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Oedipus at... (shrink)