Oresteia Thoughts

Having finished the Iliad, our Great Books class has moved on to the Oresteia, a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus. Given a different personal history than many of my classmates, I find it useful to clarify my view of the work prior to the class discussion. 

The Oresteia is a work about family in the context of society. I don't view the work as primarily about gender or race although it seems as if every book is now read through those lenses. "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does that make it sexist or racist?" seems like a poor way to go through life. I believe that the work attempts to look at the relative power of intrafamily loyalties and how they function.  

While boating on a lake in Buffalo, NY when I was engaged to be married, my good friend Monsignor Henry Gugino asked me, "If your wife and your child both fell overboard and you had one life preserver to save just one, who would you throw it to?" I thought for a moment and answered, "my child." He told me that was the wrong answer. He informed me that the marriage bond was more important than the parental bond. 

Since I had not yet experienced the joys of a teen child, I argued that any parent would want to save the child. He argued back that we could always make more children. Further, he made an argument that as marrieds, we were united as one person and should have each other's back. I never really felt like that worked for me and that may have identified me as divorce-bound. For me, The Oresteia presents a similar problem.

First of all, there are three infidelities involved. #1 is background with Thyestes having an affair with his brother Atreus's wife. #2 is also background with Paris having an affair with Menelaus's (Atreus's son) wife. #3 is in the first part of the Oresteia with Aegisthus (Thyestes's son) having an affair with Agamemnon's (also Atreus's son). One takeaway is that if the men in the Atreus family were adequate lovers, then everyone would've been much better off. But they weren't and very different forms of hell break loose in response to infidelities #1, #2 and #3.

Hell form #1 is also background as Atreus calls his brother Thyestes back from exile to a dinner of reconciliation where he serves Thyestes his children as part of the meal. The marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. Hell form #2A is background as Agamemnon carries out a war to retrieve his brother's wife and sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia to do so. Again the marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. Hell form #2B is core to the second part of the Oresteia as Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra kills her husband when he returns home. Here the parental bond violation sets up the marriage bond violation. Hell form #3 is core to the third part of the Oresteia as Agamemnon's son Orestes kills Aegisthus and his own mother Clytemnestra. Again the marriage bond violation sets up a parental bond violation. 

Hell form #1 seems completely insane. Hell form #2A seems unnecessary in terms of the child sacrifice for setting sail in what was going to be a long war anyway. But the real contrast of the Oresteia is hell form #2B versus hell form #3. Which is worse: to be a parent that kills a fellow parent for killing a child or to be a child that kills a parent for killing a fellow parent? The first structure places the parental bond above the marriage bond while the second places the marriage bond above the parental bond.

The first word of the work, θεους, sets up the divinities as the expressive forces at work. The older generation of divinities supported reproductive power, no different than the animal kingdom. These divinities supported condemnation of Orestes for placing marriage bond above parental bond. However, the newer generation of divinities were more concerned with human communal arrangements of peace and prioritized the communal power of marriage. These divinities supported Orestes and the work ends as a celebration of unity of peace.

I understand this concept and those words from Msgr. Gugino, but my heart still is unmoved and I feel 100% connected to Clytemnestra. Those old divinities still seem alive and well in me.