Justice and Gender in the Oresteia 

Hum 110

Gail Berkeley Sherman

October 11, 2004

 

I.  How does the trilogy bring justice and gender into relation?

     A.  Clytemnestra takes on male (citizen) characteristics in carrying out dike as vengeance

     B.   Electra sees the possiblity of another kind of justice(LB, 122; p. 182).

     C.   The imagery of Athena's speech underscores the gendered nature of mythic events on the Areopagus (Eum. 681-710: Theseus and the Amazons, the barbarian Scythians (cf. Herodotus, book 4: 1, 3,4) and the civilized descendants of Pelops.

 

II.        How does gender symbolically relate to civic issues in the Athenian polis at the time of the first staging of the Oresteia ?

         A. Clytemnestra represents problems related to language and peitho, persuasion.

     B.The trilogy is first staged in the aftermath of the democratic reform of the Areopagus, Ephialtes' murder, the attempted overthrow of the Athenian democracy with aid of Sparta.

     C.  The conflicting claims on the citizen of the oikos and the polis are represented by female and male characters.

     D.   Women, as symbols of oikos-relations, are associated with aristocratic (familial) rather than democratic (political) values.

     E.   Athena, like Clytemnestra, represents language and peitho.

 

III. An awareness of gender shapes our reading of the Oresteia by demonstrating that its construction of varied notions of justice (as vengeance; as punishment for a crime; as a rational, legal proceeding) is bound up with its exploration of democratic ideology.

     A.  Clytemnestra as the murderer in Aeschylus's telling of the myth serves to intensify the trilogy's emphasis on the struggle between masculine and feminine, son and mother, oikos and polis identities.

     B.  Athena replaces Clytemnestra as the dominant female figure in order to refigure questions of justice in terms suitable to the democratic polis.

     C.  In the Aeschylean reworking of mythic material also found in Hesiod's account of the divine establishment of order, Athena practically replaces Zeus.

D. Athena is able to displace Apollo, and to persuade the Furies to support polis institutions because she cannot be contained by the gendered polarizations that structure the two earlier plays.

            1.          Athena as motherless daughter is a corrective counterpart to the"fatherless daughters of [the female]Night"

            2.          Athena is a motherless but maternal, virgin, androgynous daughterly warrior goddess, born of the supreme divine father as a result of his incorporation of the female Metis (cunning intelligence).

 

IV. "A god is a problem" (Steve Wasserstrom): Athena represents the problem of justice in the relation of the self to the other.

 

 

Timeline

mythic time

c. 1200 B.C. E. Fall of Troy, Agamemnon's return home

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historic time

594-3 Solon's archonship in Athens

508 Cleisthenes reforms the Athenian constitution

490-479 Persian Wars

484-430 approximate dates of Herodotus' birth and death

462 /1 Ephialtes, Pericles reform Areopagus; Ephialtes murdered contemporary

458  Some Athenians ask Sparta for help to overthrow Athenian democracy;  Oresteia produced

454 Delian League Treasury moved from Delphi to Athens

450 - Pericles' building program: Acropolis

c. 450-420 Herodotus composes Histories

443- Pericles dominant leader in Athens

431- Pelopponesian War

413-411 Oligarchic coup at Athens

 

A. In 462 Ephialtes and Pericles introduced reforms that reduced the power of the traditionally aristocratic. . .Council of the Areopagus. They wanted to confine it to its 'original' function as a court to try cases of homicide, curbing its allegedly 'usurped' political functions. The reforms were passed; but Ephialtes was mysteriously murdered. About the same time, war broke out between Athens and some allies of Sparta, and in 458 some disaffected Athenians invited the Spartans to invade Attica to overthrow the Athenian democracy The Oresteia was produced in this tense situation, in 458. The first two plays . . .make no overt political comments; but they prepare for the political themes of the third play.

 

Clytemnestra and Orestes are avengers vindicating divine justice, but they are also human agents, moved by intelligible human motives. . . .In the Agamemnon the Chorus reject a[n]. . .attempt by Clytemnestra to shift responsibility from herself to some supernatural spirit avenging the crimes of Agamemnon's ancestors; but they do not deny supernatural influence, and they regard it all as the work of Zeus. Just as Herodotus does not intend 'the divine' to replace human decisions and responsibility, Aeschylus insists both on human responsibility and on divine causation.

 

 Terence Irwin,  Classical Thought, 44-47; cf. World of Athens, p.23.

 

B. There is no first Athenian woman: there is not, and never has been, a real female Athenian. The political process does not recognize a "citizeness," the language has no word for a woman from Athens. . . .Athena is the goddess without a mother, who refuses marriage and maternity for herself but presides over the vitality of those institutions in the city. Athena, at her miraculous birth, is summoned to watch over two other unusual nativities: the birth of Pandora, a trap in the form of a young girl, and the birth of Erichthonios, a child of civic soil. Athena is the Parthenos [virgin] who remains parthenos, a figure impossible for the human world, but among the gods, her role represents security itself for the andres [men]: the security of the hero, whose exploits Athena attends, the security of the citizen, whose polis she protects, the security of the male, comforted in his fantasy of a world without women by the idea that his goddess was not born from a woman's body - she who "was not nourished in the darkness of the womb" (Eum. 665). She represents the security of the male for all time; he knows he can continue to dream on without anxiety, since, in the active reality of civic cult, the Warrior Goddess keeps watch over the security of Athens.

 

Nicole Loraux, Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes, 10-11.

 

Further bibliography:

 

Berggren, Ann. "Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought." Arethusa 16 (l983): 69-99.

 

 duBois, Page.  Centaurs and Amazons. U of Michigan P, 1990.

 

Foley, Helene P. "The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama." Reflections of Women in Antiquity. N.Y., l981.

 

Goldhill, Simon. Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

 

Just, Roger. Women in Athenian Law and Life. Routledge, 1989.

 

Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Maureen B. Fant. Women's Life in Greece and Rome. . . . Baltimore, l982.

 

Pomeroy, Sarah. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. N.Y., l975.

 

Slater, Philip E. "The Greek Family in History and Myth." Arethusa 7 (l974).

 

Vickers, Brian.  Toward Greek Tragedy. London, l973.

 

Zeitlin, Froma. "The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia."  Arethusa 11 (l978): 149-184.