Politics and Greek Tragedy - UPDATE!!!
Posted September 22nd, 2011 at 03:49 PM by Clodius
A while ago, I blogged on the importance of recognising the political aspects of Greek tragedy, of not just viewing the plays as family melodramas but understanding the specific political circumstances each play addresses. I gave a few examples of how our understanding of individual Greek plays can be enriched by making connections between the text and contemporary political events. Well, I've just stumbled across another excellent example of this, an example I particularly like (not least because it helps to explain a minor detail in Aeschylus that has puzzled me for at least a decade), and since this is so closely related to the subject of an earlier blog post I thought I'd share it with you.
(Source acknowledgement time: I read this in "The Birth of Classical Europe" by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, a book I'm only part-way through, but so far it's been great!)
Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy premiered in 458 BCE, and is the only tragic trilogy to have survived completely intact from antiquity. It tells a familiar and violent story: the return of King Agamemnon from Troy, his murder at the hands of his faithless wife and her cowardly lover, and the wave of familial bloodshed this act unleashes on the next generation of the House of Atreus. This is all very grand and epic, but sometimes focusing on a tiny detail can be surprisingly rewarding, and there's one minor discrepancy that always used to confuse me. In Homer, Agamemnon is clearly identified as the King of Mycenae. In Aeschylus, he doesn't seem to be the King of Mycenae at all. His palace is situated in a completely different city, Argos, about ten miles south of Mycenae!
So how to explain this mystery? As is often the case, the answer lies in contemporary politics - and the little "trick" that Aeschylus plays here sheds some light on the way that Greeks used the mythical past to explain or justify the political present. In the mid-460s, a major earthquake struck Sparta, and in the aftermath of the quake the Messenian helots, Sparta's subject population of rural slave untermenschen, rose in revolt against their Spartiate masters. The resulting guerilla war was bitter and protracted and, in 462, Sparta asked Athens for military assistance. The Athenians obligingly sent a large army (the famous "bad blood" between Athens and Sparta had not yet begun), but the size of the Athenian relief force alarmed the Spartans, who were worried that Athens may change its mind and decide to side with the helot rebels. And so, without a word of explanation, the Spartans peremptorily instructed their new "allies" to march back home as soon as they arrived on Spartan soil! The men of Athens went back east in high dudgeon, and as a consequence of this affront they severed all ties with Sparta and declared themselves allies of one of Sparta's most inveterate and persistent regional enemies ... the city-state of Argos.
It's only in the light of this change of alliance that Aeschylus' decision to move his story from Mycenae to Argos truly makes sense. In the final play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, the matricide Orestes, hounded by the Furies, flees to Athens where he is tried by Athenian citizens in a homicide court. The jury vote to acquit Orestes, and persuade the Furies to leave him alone. In recognition of this, Aeschylus makes Orestes swear before the gods that there will be "everlasting friendship" between Athens and his native city of Argos. And so it is that Aeschylus transforms a very recent alliance, an alliance made in anger at a perceived Spartan insult, into a timeless agreement stretching right back to the Age of Heroes. How reassuring that must have been to the ever-conservative Athenian audience of the Oresteia trilogy! And the only price that has to be paid for this neat bit of retrospective myth-molesting is moving Agamemnon's hometown a little to the south, and slightly confusing Homerically-literate classics students in the 21st Century!
Thank you, Messeurs Price and Thonemann, all grist to my "political reading of Greek tragedy" mill!
(Source acknowledgement time: I read this in "The Birth of Classical Europe" by Simon Price and Peter Thonemann, a book I'm only part-way through, but so far it's been great!)
Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy premiered in 458 BCE, and is the only tragic trilogy to have survived completely intact from antiquity. It tells a familiar and violent story: the return of King Agamemnon from Troy, his murder at the hands of his faithless wife and her cowardly lover, and the wave of familial bloodshed this act unleashes on the next generation of the House of Atreus. This is all very grand and epic, but sometimes focusing on a tiny detail can be surprisingly rewarding, and there's one minor discrepancy that always used to confuse me. In Homer, Agamemnon is clearly identified as the King of Mycenae. In Aeschylus, he doesn't seem to be the King of Mycenae at all. His palace is situated in a completely different city, Argos, about ten miles south of Mycenae!
So how to explain this mystery? As is often the case, the answer lies in contemporary politics - and the little "trick" that Aeschylus plays here sheds some light on the way that Greeks used the mythical past to explain or justify the political present. In the mid-460s, a major earthquake struck Sparta, and in the aftermath of the quake the Messenian helots, Sparta's subject population of rural slave untermenschen, rose in revolt against their Spartiate masters. The resulting guerilla war was bitter and protracted and, in 462, Sparta asked Athens for military assistance. The Athenians obligingly sent a large army (the famous "bad blood" between Athens and Sparta had not yet begun), but the size of the Athenian relief force alarmed the Spartans, who were worried that Athens may change its mind and decide to side with the helot rebels. And so, without a word of explanation, the Spartans peremptorily instructed their new "allies" to march back home as soon as they arrived on Spartan soil! The men of Athens went back east in high dudgeon, and as a consequence of this affront they severed all ties with Sparta and declared themselves allies of one of Sparta's most inveterate and persistent regional enemies ... the city-state of Argos.
It's only in the light of this change of alliance that Aeschylus' decision to move his story from Mycenae to Argos truly makes sense. In the final play of the trilogy, the Eumenides, the matricide Orestes, hounded by the Furies, flees to Athens where he is tried by Athenian citizens in a homicide court. The jury vote to acquit Orestes, and persuade the Furies to leave him alone. In recognition of this, Aeschylus makes Orestes swear before the gods that there will be "everlasting friendship" between Athens and his native city of Argos. And so it is that Aeschylus transforms a very recent alliance, an alliance made in anger at a perceived Spartan insult, into a timeless agreement stretching right back to the Age of Heroes. How reassuring that must have been to the ever-conservative Athenian audience of the Oresteia trilogy! And the only price that has to be paid for this neat bit of retrospective myth-molesting is moving Agamemnon's hometown a little to the south, and slightly confusing Homerically-literate classics students in the 21st Century!
Thank you, Messeurs Price and Thonemann, all grist to my "political reading of Greek tragedy" mill!
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