The myth of Orestes killing his mother to avenge his father goes back to Homer’s Odyssey, where it is introduced several times as a tale already well known to both the characters in the poem and the audience. Agamemnon on his triumphant return from Troy was trapped and killed by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, who subsequently assumed the throne (3.248ff., 303ff., 4.512ff.). His son Orestes, growing up in exile, returns some years later to avenge his father. Both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra are punished by death, though Homer is clearly concerned to play down the fact of matricide, which he does not actually narrate: the closest he comes to an explicit statement of Orestes’ responsibility is in a reference to the young man organizing the funeral of ‘his hateful mother and the weakling Aegisthus’ (3.310). The burial of the usurpers has just taken place when Menelaus, after years of wandering at sea, returns to the Peloponnese with Helen (the point at which Euripides’ play begins). In Homer, the gods on Olympus endorse the justice of Aegisthus’ punishment (1.29ff.), and the heroic deeds of Orestes are held up as an example to Odysseus’ son Telemachus (1.298ff.). It seems clear that the story as Homer presents it has no place for any negative consequences for Orestes, who inherits Agamemnon’s throne.
Later versions were very different. Poets who treated the legend at full length, rather than only incidentally as in Homer, were clearly anxious to increase the emotional intensity and to heighten the moral complexity. In part this was achieved by providing a justification for Clytemnestra for hating her husband: did he not sacrifice their daughter Iphigenia at the start of the war? (Homer had ignored this story: see p. 169). Pindar in a well-known passage refers to this motive: though still glorifying Orestes’ deed, he poses the dilemma about Clytemnestra: was it adulterous lust that drove her to her crime, or grief and anger at the death of her child (Pythian Odes, 11.15ff.)? Agamemnon could be represented in less than admirable terms: already in the Iliad he comments that he prefers his concubine Chryseis to his wife Clytemnestra, and in the Odyssey it is evident even from the brief references that he brought back Cassandra as a trophy of war (Clytemnestra kills her too). Still more important was the psychological and emotional potential of the matricide: this is a high point in all the dramas dealing with Orestes’ return, and even in this play, where the deed is over, the moment at which Clytemnestra bared her breast and begged her son for mercy is repeatedly referred to.
Once the act of matricide became the heart of the tale, the question arose: what are the consequences? We do not know precisely when the poets introduced the motif of Orestes being pursued by his mother’s Furies, monstrous supernatural spirits of vengeance, but it was already well established long before the tragedians took it up. The lyric poet Stesichorus (early sixth century BC) composed a poem of some length (two ‘books’) on Orestes, from which we have a few fragments. In that work Apollo gave Orestes a bow with which he was to defend himself against the Furies: this idea is recalled in the madness-scene of Euripides’ play (267ff. and note 15). The Furies pursue and persecute Orestes from land to land; whether he found refuge and purification in Stesichorus’ version, whether he was tried and acquitted in Athens in versions prior to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, are controversial questions.
At all events, Aeschylus’ great trilogy is the most important treatment of the Orestes myth, and the greatest single influence on Euripides’ Orestes. It was exactly fifty years old (458 BC), already a well-established classic. Euripides had frequently echoed and exploited it in earlier dramas (including the Electra and the Iphigenia among the Taurians); Aristophanes’ references in the Frogs suggest it was reasonably well known. In the second play of Aeschylus’ trilogy Orestes had returned to Argos with his friend Pylades, met Electra, called upon the ghost of his dead father to aid him in his mission, and killed Aegisthus through a deception. He then faces the harder task of killing his mother: their confrontation on stage is a high point. In the final scene the chorus rejoice that the rightful heir has returned and the kingdom is freed from a tyrannical yoke. Orestes is more sombre, convinced of the justice of his cause but also seeking to justify it. At the end of the play he begins to lose control of his mind, and sees the Furies rushing at him (it is generally agreed that they were invisible to the audience). In panic and despair, he runs off stage; his exile and wanderings have begun.
In the third play, Eumenides, Orestes finds refuge at Delphi with Apollo, who guarantees him protection. In this play, by a bold stroke, the Furies form the chorus, and are visibly present onstage, conversing with and angrily threatening men and gods. The bulk of the play is occupied by Orestes’ trial at Athens, judged by a jury of Athenian citizens; this provides an aetiology or ‘charter myth’ for the Athenians’ homicide court, known as the Areopagus (Athena lays down its duties in the play itself). Though Apollo is present to speak in Orestes’ defence, the role of Athena, Athens’ patron deity, is more important: she oversees the court and ensures that both sides are treated with dignity. Orestes is tried and eventually acquitted; it is clear that he is to return to his kingdom free of guilt and suffering. The Furies are placated by Athena, who guarantees them a place in Athens, as guardians of morality. The salvation of Orestes is due to an Athenian court of mortal men, not the actions of the god Apollo: Athens trumps Delphi, in a remarkable demonstration of the patriotic aspect of Attic tragedy. How much of the action in the third play is Aeschylus’ own invention is a matter of dispute.
The two Electra-plays by Sophocles and Euripides deal chiefly with the events leading up to the matricide, and only briefly with the aftermath (indeed, in Sophocles’ play there appears to be no aftermath, the dramatist having reverted to the Homeric-Pindaric tradition). It is in the Orestes that Euripides treats at full length the sufferings of Orestes after the deed is done. Even from the brief summary of earlier versions given above, we can see that he has taken up and developed some points, dropped others, and invented a number of novel elements of his own. This of course was how the tragedians always worked: but in this case the new compound is a remarkably powerful and original concoction.
The main differences in the Orestes (most of which seem likely to be Euripidean contributions) are as follows. First, instead of journeying immediately into exile, Orestes remains in Argos, sick and hallucinating, in a weakened condition which at first seems close to death. Second, whereas in Aeschylus the chorus resented the rule of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra and acclaimed Orestes’ deed, in Euripides’ play the Argive population is repelled by his matricide and he is in danger of being condemned to death. Third, whereas in Aeschylus he was tried and acquitted in an Athenian court, in Euripides he is tried and condemned by the Argive assembly; and where Aeschylus’ court seemed to embody the principles of justice and even-handedness, the speakers in the assembly are biased or suborned or self-interested: there can be no prospect of a just decision being reached in this body. Euripides also introduces added complications: as in earlier plays, he asks how these events might have affected others involved, such as Menelaus and Helen, or Clytemnestra’s father, Tyndareus (a new figure on the tragic stage). Menelaus turns out to be no help, Tyndareus positively hostile: Orestes is isolated. Finally and most important, although Apollo commanded Orestes to undertake his mission, he seems now to have deserted him. While in Aeschylus we see the god comforting Orestes, sending him under escort to Athens, defying the Furies and appearing in the young man’s defence, in Euripides characters repeatedly ask what Apollo can have been thinking of to order such a crime, and Orestes in particular stresses that the god has done nothing to help him in his time of need (28, 163–5, 416–20, etc.). The play might almost be entitled ‘Waiting for Apollo’.
In the absence of the god, the human characters are thrown on their own resources. Orestes’ attempt to defend himself to Tyndareus merely succeeds in infuriating the old man further; his efforts to enlist Menelaus’ aid are a failure; his self-defence in the assembly proves futile. In the scene in which Orestes, Pylades and Electra review their situation, all seems black, and a shared suicide pact the only way out. It is at this point that Euripides begins to turn the plot in a completely new direction. Encouraged by Pylades, Orestes resolves on revenge against Menelaus and Helen; Electra contributes the chilling suggestion that they use Hermione as a hostage. From persecuted victims the trio turn into avenging marauders. The conspirators seem fired by a sinister enthusiasm for their task: although the Furies are no longer terrorizing Orestes, there is a kind of madness, that of desperation, which is infecting all three of them.
The plot-sequence can be compared with other plays of Euripides which focus on acts of revenge, especially Medea and Hecabe. There too the main character begins as a victim, winning much of the audience’s sympathy, and in the end becomes a vicious avenger. We must beware of oversimplification: Orestes in the first half of this play may be pitiable but he is no innocent; and in none of these cases does the protagonist lose our sympathy entirely, but there is a clear shift, often focused on a key point in the action (here, the moment at which Pylades makes his proposal, 1097ff.). Before this point, the audience has been encouraged to sympathize with Orestes and his companions; from this point on, the plot becomes more startling, even bizarre, the characterization more negative, and the audience response more complex and contradictory.
In Medea and Hecabe the avenger executes her plans successfully: Medea kills her children, Hecabe blinds Polymestor and kills his children. In this play the conspiracy is a débâcle: the attempt to murder Helen is frustrated, for reasons at first opaque to both the actors and the audience; the best that Orestes can do is bully and humiliate a terrified Phrygian slave. The final confrontation of Menelaus and Orestes is a crowded and highly dramatic scene: Menelaus and his supporters surrounding the palace, while Orestes, Pylades, Hermione and probably Electra are on the roof, with Orestes holding a sword at Hermione’s throat. There are threats to hurl down masonry on the attackers’ heads; torches are lit, and Orestes prepares to burn the palace to the ground. From earlier thoughts of suicide he has moved to a grander scheme of general self-destruction and slaughter (‘I shall never tire of killing evil women!’, 1590). Both the house of Atreus and the mythical tradition seem about to disintegrate, when at long last Apollo intervenes.
Horace in the Art of Poetry said that tragedians should not introduce a god unless the ‘knot’ of the plot was so difficult to unravel that divine intervention was the only possible solution. This case is a paradigm example, but also serves to illustrate some of the difficulties modern audiences have with this convention. The epiphany of a god is a magificent theatrical moment; the contrast between divine knowledge and power and human confusion is obviously effective; and the ‘plot’ of the myth, which had seemed to be going wildly off course, is magisterially directed back (more or less) to its familiar track (though some points are quirkily different: Helen is to be a deity – prematurely; Orestes is to be tried in Athens – but by gods, not by men; Neoptolemus is to die, without ever marrying Hermione). The difficulty is that the imposition of this outcome seems almost arbitrary – so much that is different, or heading toward a different goal, has happened on the human level that Apollo’s edict has a paradoxical, even a bizarre effect (particularly when Orestes is told to marry Hermione, ‘at whose throat you are presently holding your sword’). We are not told why Apollo chose not to appear before. We can hardly acquit Euripides of some mischief here; he pushes the deus ex machina convention to its absolute extreme, with the result that the final outcome seems to bear very little relation to the preceding action or the motivations and passions which brought it about. Certainly the gods have the power to do this, or whatever else they please; what such acts suggest about the relation between gods and men, or the degree to which either side understands the other, is one of the most difficult issues in the interpretation of Euripides. (Cf. General Introduction, pp. xxviii–xxxv.)
Early readers already found the Orestes a contradictory work: the ancient summary includes the comment: ‘This is one of the dramas which is most successful on the stage, but its ethics are awful; apart from Pylades everybody is bad.’ (The exception is a curious one; like Aristotle’s comment that Menelaus in this play is ‘unnecessarily bad in character’, it suggests that the audience paid particular attention to the demands of loyalty and friendship, to the question who does or does not help Orestes in his hour of need.) In modern times interpretations have been diverse. Some see the play as a drama of intense suffering leading to moral corruption, with wide implications concerning the moral and political bankruptcy of contemporary Athens (parallels with Thucydides’ History are frequently invoked, especially the historian’s famous analysis of the psychology of internal political conflict, 3.82–3). Others prefer to emphasize the bold dramatic technique, the exciting twists and turns in the plot, the sharp epigrams and clever ripostes in the dialogue, the multiple allusions to earlier drama, or the colourful costume and exotic music of the Phrygian’s scene: in this play Euripides’ innovative tendencies reach their zenith. A combination of these approaches seem desirable: to emphasize that Euripides is first and foremost a dramatist does not preclude allowing that he may have had something to say – though as always with a writer of this stature, our paraphrases and critical formulae do scant justice to the intellectual and emotional challenge of this extraordinary work.