Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(50)

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And so they do. There is one more play to come in this trilogy: The Eumenides, which means ‘Kindly Ones’, a new name for the Erinyes, or Furies (following the theory that, if you give something a nicer name, it may behave less alarmingly). This final play poses and answers one simple question: was Orestes justified in killing his mother? The Furies, who pursue him relentlessly, think he has committed the unforgivable crime of matricide. But Apollo, and then also Athene, take Orestes’ side: he had a moral obligation to avenge his father and matricide was the necessary consequence of doing so. Whatever we might feel about the question, the play resolves the issue to its characters’ satisfaction: Orestes is acquitted thanks to divine intervention, and the Furies – grudgingly – allow him to continue his life unmolested.

But the play’s resolution does raise another question in our minds: why is Agamemnon’s life valued more highly – by everyone except Clytemnestra – than Iphigenia’s? Why was Agamemnon not pursued by the Furies for the unforgivable crime of killing his daughter? Why was it left to Clytemnestra to avenge her? Why do Electra and Orestes have so much more respect for the wishes of their dead, murderous father than for their living, murderous mother, and indeed their dead, blameless sister? Even if we agree with the conclusion that the trilogy reaches (which is that this cursed family must stop taking matters into their own hands and should instead air their grievances in a court and abide by the verdict – in this case supplied by a goddess), we are surely left thinking that Clytemnestra had a point, way back in the first play, when she asked the chorus why they were so upset by Agamemnon when they were so unconcerned about Iphigenia. It’s him you should have banished, she told them.25 It seems that Clytemnestra seals her own fate when she values her daughter’s life equally to the life of a king.

One final note: in Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Aulis, which tells the awful story of Iphigenia’s death, Clytemnestra mentions that she had a first husband, before Agamemnon. His name was Tantalus,26 and she tells us that Agamemnon killed him and married her himself. She appears to have had no say in the matter of marriage to her husband’s killer. And not just her husband. Because Agamemnon also took her baby, an infant which she was nursing when Agamemnon appeared. He wrenched the child from her breast by force and smashed it into the ground. In other words, in this play (and other, later sources will pick it up), Agamemnon kills two of Clytemnestra’s children, more than a decade apart.

And while many later authors will drop this element of her story, and focus on her adultery rather than her maternal rage, it is there for us to see in astonishing, dramatized clarity in fifth-century BCE tragedy, and especially in Aeschylus’ Oresteia. He probably did not invent this aspect of her motivation (it is in an ode by Pindar27 which was likely composed a few years before Aeschylus’ plays were written, although it is possible it was a few years later). So Clytemnestra is a byword in the ancient world, and ever since, for a bad wife, the worst wife even. But for wronged, silenced, unvalued daughters, she is something of a hero: a woman who refuses to be quiet when her child is killed, who disdains to accept things and move on, who will not make the best of what she has. She burns like the beacon she waits for at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. And if that means men think twice about drinking from a wine cup with her murderous rage depicted upon it, so be it. She would – at least in Aeschylus’ depiction – relish their fear.





Eurydice




THERE ARE FEW MORE ROMANTIC STORIES IN MYTH THAN THAT OF Eurydice and her husband Orpheus. It is a miniature saga of the pathos of youth cut short, of the intolerable pain of loss and of a love which survives even death. It is also unusual, because Eurydice doesn’t seem to exist in Orpheus’ story until the fifth century BCE, and he himself is not particularly well attested before that: he isn’t mentioned anywhere in Homer or Hesiod, for example.1 Let’s begin by looking at the best-known version of their story, before hunting round for its antecedents. In this instance, we must turn to the Romans. Specifically, to Virgil, who told the story in the Georgics, his poem about country living. It was completed by 29 BCE, after which Virgil would dedicate the last ten years of his life to the Aeneid, an epic poem about the fall of Troy and the onward adventures of one Trojan prince, Aeneas. The Georgics was composed in a form which is almost impossible to explain. It is ostensibly a guidebook on how to live in the country and be a farmer, but it is also filled with praise for the newly peaceful city of Rome: the terrible civil wars that had punctuated the first century BCE had finally come to an end with the beginning of the imperial system. The first emperor of Rome – Augustus – was patron and friend to Maecenas, who was in turn patron and friend to Virgil. In the Georgics, these twin themes of country and city are interspersed with wonderful, fantastical stories which accompany more practical advice on, say, growing arable crops and vines.

In Book Four, Virgil turns his attention to beekeeping. This is no doubt in part because bees were important in a world where honey was the sweetest thing people would eat. It is surely also because Virgil loved insects: bees and ants are a particular source of delight to him. So he begins by talking about the ideal hive, but soon gets sidetracked into the story of Aristaeus, a man who has lost his bees and wants to replace them. Aristaeus seeks out Proteus, the shape-shifting god, in the hope of getting advice to improve his fortunes. But Proteus has harsh words for Aristaeus, who has incurred the wrath of the gods for the terrible crime he committed.2 Proteus then tells the story of how Aristaeus had attacked Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus. She had run headlong from her assailant, across a river, desperate to escape him. Plenty of translations add in softening vocabulary – Eurydice is shunning Aristaeus’ embrace, for example – but this is not in the Latin. Eurydice is trying to avoid being raped. Because of this, while attempting to escape him, she does not see a snake hidden in the deep grass in front of her foot, this moritura puella3 – ‘girl about to die’.