The thing that I really want to
concentrate on in looking at the Agamemnon and throughout the Oresteia is the theme
of justice. It has entered into our treatment in the
Agamemnon. We talked about this problem that is
bouncing back and forth inside of Agamemnon's family tree in the house of
Atreus. How are we suppose to deal with this
problem of justice? We have prior past generations that have
committed horrible crimes that require revenge, but that revenge itself spurs
further retribution. So, we got a, a kind of curse or evil
that's stuck inside the family tree. The way to get it out is not obvious.
It's very hard to figure out how that is going to happen.
To get at this, we need to start to unpack some Greek concepts circling around the
idea of justice. This becomes especially apparent when we
compare how Homer treated the story or Orestes with how Aeschylus treats the
story of Orestes. Remember, Homer pulled this out for his
own uses as a way to help nudge Telemachus into action.
Saying, listen, even when things are really tough and you have to take revenge
against your own mother. And Orestes,
In this case, it's time for action. So, Homer focuses on that aspect of the
story. Very different with Aeschylus.
Instead, what we have is, gosh, look at this awful thing that's happening to this
family. The story that courses around Orestes in
the Agamemnon as the first installment, We're not going to be reading the Libation
Bearers for our part of the class. Although, I recommend that you read it on
your own as you have time. And then, we're going to read the final
installment the Eumenides or the Furies. In all these three plays, ideas of justice
are what's at the center. So, Orestes is faced with this incredibly
difficult problem. To try to right the wrongs that are in his
family. But then, how's he going to do it without
perpetuating the cycle of revenge that's built into this set of events.
The problem of justice here is a knotty one.
It's a very difficult one. It's famously difficult.
How are we going to unravel the problem in the house of Atreus of without committing
more crimes that's going to provoke even more retribution.
It is incumbent upon Orestes to kill his father's murderer.
That would be widely understood in antiquity.
If someone murders your father, Gosh,
Heaven forbid, it's up to you! You need to be the one that executes
justice to take care of the murderer. If family members just decided not to do
that, well, it would not only be, you know, a little, a little sad, but it would
be a great source of shame for the family. It,
And gosh if someone did that your family, you'd have to take action.
Orestes is forced in a position now of taking revenge against his father's
murder. But now, what happens when the act of
revenge is itself going to be crime against the family?
Orestes has to kill his own mother now to, to try avenge the murder of his father.
This is where things start to get especially, specially ugly.
How are we going to wash this curse out? How we can get rid of it?
Now, justice has a couple of different ways that we might think about. The
balance is often times tossed out as being sort of core here, we've got an extra
wrinkle tossed in. As on the one side of the scale of justice, we've got our gavel
in, indicating regular old courtroom justice.
On the other side, we've got the gun and again taking justice into your own hands.
So, where exactly are we going to find justice in this scheme?
Would it be in a building like this. Notice it's Romanesque architecture based
on Greek presidents. Would it be in a building like this?
Well, for the Greeks were kind of looking at a time when such a thing might be
possible, such a thing might actually start to happen.
We'll see when we get to the humanities that our story is actually going to move
toward a concept of justice that is going to be recog, more recognizable from the
modern frame than the one we've been talking about up till' now.
In order to get a grip on what we've been. Talking about in this story,
We need to anchor ourself in a really important ancient concept.
That is the concept of miasma. I put it here in very small print for
dramatic effect because it is an outsized and hugely important concept in this
story. Miasma is a Greek term that means a kind
of cloud of pollution. It's a cloud of pollution.
And a miasma would hover around a corpse. Someone that was killed, someone who had a
violent episode of death that visited upon them,
Their corpse would be surrounded by this cloud of nasty, toxic stuff.
Now, if someone who was, you know, engaged in that killing, they would have this
miasma stuck on them. They would be impure.
The guilt would stick to them like a stain and it would be very clear who it was that
committed the crime. The, the stick of this nastiness gets
stuck onto them. And now, because they have that nastiness on them, they are
indeed guilty. They're subject to retribution and
punishment. It just so happens that it could take
place that, someone else, who has nothing to do with the murder just happens by that
corpse and comes in contact with the cloud of miasma that surrounds it and they get
stained by it, Well, that person who had got that part of
a stain on them would now become subject to retribution and subject to revenge.
Even though they hadn't done anything. The Greeks imagined that this revenge was
triggered by these kind of elemental forces,
Physicalist with physical manifestations built into the environment around us.
For the cases of murder, those forces would lead toward retribution that was
clearly built into the actions that the person himself, him or herself had taken.
But, for someone who just happened across it and guiltlessly ran into a polluted
corpse, well now, revenge would also be visited upon them and they would suffer
greatly. And it wouldn't be clear what kind of
actions they had done to provoke this. one asks oneself in this particular with this
concept, as a core, what, How, how just is that?
How, how much does this count as justice? Well the, the concept of miasma doesn't
actually equate to ideas of justice. But what is does is give us a background
to try to think about how they imagine justice might take place.
The theory that surrounds miasma gives us a window into how people make explanations
when bad things start happening to good people.
When bad things start happening to good people.
Those of us who think that, well, you get those just desserts, those who commit
crimes get punished for those crimes. We imagine ourselves thinking, yeah. Well,
if they're getting punished, there's probably good reason.
They probably committed a crime. And now bad things are going to happen to
them. The Greeks, on the other hand, have a very
different, sort of central notion here. If someone's getting punished, what does
that mean? It means that they have pollution.
It means that they have pollution. That's what happened to them.
Now, that pollution always raises the possibility that, yeah, they were engaged
in some nasty action, and therefore were polluted, because they touched a corpse.
But it also raises the possibility that someone, through no fault of their own,
just happened by there got polluted and so they're getting revenge against them even
though they didn't deserve it. So, the Greek concept of miasma builds in
just retribution as well as retribution that doesn't quite seem so just.
It's part and parcel of how they understand all of revenge to be happening.
It's connected to this nasty pollution that gets visited upon people.
Now, all the things that get connected with miasma, evil, guilt, stain,
pollution, similarly, also toxicness, drugs that might kill you, in other words,
some kind of awfulness that could be visited upon you, inability to wash out a
stain. Attempts at purification that don't get worked out.
All these are coursing around themes that are anchored to this Greek idea of miasma.
In fact, Agamemnon is working with a sense of justice that's built around ideas of
revenge, miasma built into the blood, and all these things connected together
through this concept. Now, what happens as Aeschylus is doing
this, He's portraying for us, as the Greeks that
we are, witnessing this in the classical period.
An idea of justice that would have been anchored in ancient mythic times.
When Aeschylus is writing this, there are other ideas of justice that are starting
to come around that aren't necessarily just based on personal familial revenge
anchored around this concept of miasma and floating guilt that might be connected
someone who deserves it and someone who doesn't.
Here in the, the concept over here, we've got connection to blood, right?
The, the blood of the corpse causes this awful stench around it, and that stench
can get rubbed off on other people, It has a sort of elemental, tactile feel
to it. That, that is the marker of when just
desserts are visited upon someone whether they're just or unjust is whether they
have this pollution against them. So, pollution here is anchored to a notion
of blood. Blood just as we're talking about with blood ties within families,
we've got an idea of a connection between people that can be supportive on some,
some senses, when family can be that way can also be quite nasty.
And when the blood itself becomes polluted and diseased, then inside the family, a
kind of polluted miasma of disease is being sent down from generation to
generation. Just as they share blood, they're also
going to share this pollution. Now, within this system, it gets very hard
to figure out how in the world someone could solve the problem of bringing
justice to the family of Atreus. How in the world are we going to get this
curse out when it's built into our own blood?
We're going to see that Aeschylus is going to present for us a completely different
idea of justice that's going to be based on some brand new concepts that are
emerging in the classical period. It's going to help us solve what in mythic
times, you and I, classical Greeks remember, these mythic times way back
before us, what in mythic times was a very hard thing to solve.
It's a knotty problem in the family of the house of Atreus.
Our own classical time, the modern Greek classical time that we know, is going to
have a solution for us as we move forward into Aeschylus's theories a play called
Humanities.