In the humanities we see the aftermath of
Orestes' action, Taking out his mother and her lover and
trying to bring justice to his family by the old order of things.
We remember in Homer how differently the story was u,h portrayed remember it was
Homer, Homer held up Orestes as example of a young man that takes action even when
its difficult. Well, sure he does that and but the focus
that Aeschylus gives on the story something quite a bit different.
Its not as though we can rush to a race Orestes and say we should all be like
that. Instead I think, watching Aeshcylus' play,
We think to ourselves, my goodness, What an awful savage situation to be in.
Look here, poor Orestes, at the very beginning of the play as we meet him,
hugging the omphalos. He's just stuck there at Delphi trying to
attach himself to it to make sure that he has some kind of protection, that hugging
of the omphalos is in connection with what we saw earlier in Homer's story, that
getting hold of someone's knees, the contact that was involved there was
thought to be protective. And in the getting a hold of the knees it
was something where, Someone actually owed you, now,
hospitality as a suppliant in their, in their, in their, in their eyes.
And with Orestes getting hold of the omphalos he now has protection.
He's, he's, the Furies are unable to get at him.
You can see them in our depiction here, wonderfully on this vase.
They are just laying around on the ground, they don't have enough to do.
They can't get to him, because he's got himself in safe, safe, in a safe position,
having making contact with that stone, the omphalos.
Recall where that came from, you know, from Hesiod, the story.
This is supposedly in, in, in the tradition the actual stone that Cronus
swallowed instead of Zeus. It was the supplemental stone at the end
it gets regurgitated up by Cronus and, and dropped right there in Delphi.
So you can go to Delphi, and the stone, I showed you a slide earlier is actually
still there. At least that's what the locals claim.
This is the very same stone that was there in antiquity. That's what they claim and
they claim also that Cronos had swallowed it.
Who knows? [[COUGH]] So Orestes we meet at the
beginning of the play hugging the omphalos.
The ghost of Clytemnestra is haunting him. We've got Apollo and Athena hovering
around, trying to keep an eye on the situation, trying to figure out what
they're going to do next. In other words we have a very top people
in the universe are, have eye on this situation and are trying to solve things.
The Furies and Apollo begin with a debate over justice,
What counts as justice. The two of them have different ideas about
it. There's a long interlude by the Furies as
they slither around and give us their own strong, vociferous statements about how
justice works according to blood. Then, all of a sudden, the scene switches
to Athens and we have straight, pretty straightforward court case.
Athena comes in and addresses the furies, The court case starts.
We've got witnesses who come up, we got cross examination.
We have some statements by Aeschylus that are helping us, understand how the court
case is suppose to unfold or kind of directions as to who goes first on how and
how were going to count the votes and all these things.
After the court case we've got witnesses cross-examination and then the jury
decides, but they're deadlocked so Athena has to come in and solve the deadlock.
She then decides in favors of Orestes. The Furies at that point are upset because the
court case is not decided in their favor and they threaten to scorch the earth,
But the Olympians smartly figure out a way to give the Furies their, their due.
They create a place of honor underneath the court, in the ground underneath it,
And the play ends with a procession in honor of the Furies as they're marched
into their new home,, under the Athenian Acropolis.
At stake in this play is a set of ideas about justice.
Two systems are being placed next to each other.
The older order system of justice and a new one that you and I as Athenians and
classical Athenians watching this play. You and I are rightly proud of a new
system of justice that we see emerging in our own democratic society.
This is something that Aeschylus brings in to his play itself.
Ideas of justice that are just emergent around the time he's writing this play are
written into the play, as a kind of a character, built into the story.
Remember this old order of justice, based on concepts like miasma,
We talked about earlier, Contact with evil blood makes evil rub off
on you. If you have contact with that evil blood,
the Furies come to get you. The strengths of this system are, that
it's very clear, justice is going to be done, according to ties of blood,
And if someone does have blood on their hands, then they're going to get punished.
There's no way to kind of weasel you're way out of it or talk you're way out of
it. Aeschylus talks about this with respect to
the, this contact. It is a system that's based on contagion, contact, and blood.
This is what makes this old system work. And, it is thoroughly associated by
Aeschylus with these Chthonic deities. You'll see I put the term up here.
It's not, an obvious English word, But trust me, those of you who are going
to cocktail parties, That where the language that's being
spoken happens to be in English. Just toss this word out.
It makes you sound, You'll sound very literate.
Chtonic theaters, deities are those that are attached to the earth and we mentioned
in our last video of Hesiod and the older order.
Chthonic deities refers to all of those older order gods,
Including the Earth herself. The pre-Zeus, pre-Olympian layers of
divine powers are, are stuck in there. Throughout the play, Aeschylus lines up
this older order of justice with these Chthonic divinities.
He talks about them consistently as being involved in it, being pulled out to
enforce it. When Orestes and Electra are trying to figure out what to do in a
libation bearer, as we mentioned in the last lecture,
They appealed to these Chthonic divinities.
The Furies themselves are representative of this older order of divinities.
And when they speak, they consistently place the kind of justice that they're
after, which is based on contagion and contact, and blood, against the Olympian
order or the different orders of justice that are going to show up in this newer
world. So the old order and the old system of
justice made as a counterpart to Olympian justice.
This happens in lines 149 and 50, lines 162 to 67, 365, other places too, where
the older order of things that the, the Chthonic gods lined up with the idea of
justice built into contact, contagion of blood, and all of that opposed to what the
Olympians are up to. I thought I'd bring out just one line
here, the Fury speaking lines 731 to 733 in our translations we're used in for the
class. Since you, a young god, would ride down my
elder age, I must stay here and listen to how the trial goes,
Being yet uncertain to loose my anger on the state.
That's the statement of an old established divinity to a new young one,
The Olympians, Trying to say that what you all decide
here is going to have an effect on me, But it's a, it's a system that this
person, the Furies, speaking as a collective, are not quite ready to say
they belong to or that belongs to them at all, some new structure.
The, story, as we see it unfold, recall what happens after the,
After the Furies have the court case decided against them.
Remember what, what happens to them, Just as in the case of Hesiod,
When the Olympian gods overthrow the old order, and Zeus pushes them all under the
Earth and closes them up down there. So, also at the end of Aeschylus'
Oresteia. The older gods, here the Furies, are
actually going to be interred, Put under the earth, and put into now a
temple, where we're going to give them honor and worship.
This is slightly different than Hesiod locking them down in a jail,
But it is, a fine, Aeschylus finding a place, in the new order for the old order
gods to have a role. Um.,
The old system of, Fury, of justice enforced by the Furies, had no way of
dealing with the problems that were showing up in, or, Agamemnon's family.
The House of the Atreus was just stuck according to this older system of justice.
It had a, it consistently was, you know, putting on the family irreconcilable
obligations. Orestes is the figure that is focused on
in this trilogy. He was, it had to, by, by, by, by, by what
was counted as being just by the laws of justice. He had to avenge his father.
That was necessary for him. But at the same time, in order to avenge
his father, He had to kill his mother.
These, these are awful obligations and, and he knows, as well as anyone does that
this is a terrible act. The old system of justice havehad no way
of getting out of this cycle and of, retributive justice back and forth.
Instead, what we have, is, a system that just closes in on itself,
By the old order of justice, Atreus' house is doomed.
Now there's something different that's going to happen in this second half of the
play, When we turn to the, when we turn to the
trial set in Athens overseen by the Olympian,
Olympian deities we are going to open up a discussion of a new kind of justice that
is possible. and Aeshcylus is very cleverly, I think, portraying events and
cultural forms that you and I as classical Athenians,
Let's all pretend that we are classical Athenians for a second.
You and I as classical Athenians have seen these forms of justice emerging, even in
our own lifetimes, and now we say to ourselves, my goodness, well, this history
that we are living is playing a role in the solving of mythic difficulties.
A crime that was so troublesome, so difficult for ancient ideas of justice to
take care of is going to get solved by a contemporary institution of classical
Athens. In the next segment, we'll start talking
about how that idea of justice, the new idea of justice, centered on classical
Athens, comes into Aeschylus' play to solve an otherwise absolutely insoluble
problem.