Justice and Gender in the Oresteia

Gail Berkeley Sherman
October 10, 2005

I. How, and to what ends, does the trilogy bring justice and gender into relation?

1. Male vs. male competition, female murderer, matricide
2. Athena vs. Apollo; the law court
3. Athena's speech - Eumenides 681-710: Amazons; Scythians (cf. Herodotus, book 4: 1, 3, and 4); Pelops' descendants.

II. Gender symbolically relates the actions in the trilogy to civic issues in the Athenian polis at the time of the first staging of the Oresteia (458 BCE). Cf. Martin, 110-112.

III. An awareness of gender symbolism in the trilogy enables us to see the Oresteia as addressing both a specific historical issue (interactions between aristocratic and democratic factions in Athens), and the construction of justice (as vengeance, punishment for a crime, or the outcome of a rational, legal proceeding), and as a celebration of isonomia won at great cost in the relation of the self to the other.

1. Clytemnestra as murderer allows a symbolic refiguring of the curse of the house of Atreus.
2. Athena replaces Zeus in the Aeschylean reworking of the Hesiodic account of the divine establishment of order.
3. Gender as a signifying system works in this play through a system of analogous hierarchies: male - female; democrats – aristocrats; husband – wife; son – mother; Olympian deities- chthonic deities

Timeline

MYTHIC TIME

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

CONTEMPORARY TIME

462 /1        Ephialtes, Pericles reform Areopagus; Ephialtes murdered
458            Some Athenians ask Sparta to help 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-           Peloponnesian War
413-411     Oligarchic coup at Athens

1. 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.
   
2. “Orestes’ guilt and his innocence can never be disentangled, and neither can the Furies and the gods, the threads of the Fates and the grand design of Zeus. Their final binding-song connects us all, mortals and immortals in a vast moral network, not of retaliation as in the Agamemnon, bu or of recrimination as in The Libation Beareres, but of mutual responsibility. The chains of revenge are not so much broken as they are welded into the bonds of justice.
                      Fagles, 90
   
3. Despite – or because of – the ‘happy ending’,’ it is the violence and perversion of the Oresteia that we remember. The Oresteia represents threats against human beings which are a corollary of our fragile, mortal existence. Reading the Oresteia makes one afraid for one’s life.
                       Brian Vickers, Toward Greek Tragedy, 15.
   

Cited texts and suggestions for further reading:

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.

Fagles, Robert. Introductory Essay. The Oresteia. By Aeschylus. New York: Penguin, 1966. 13-97.

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

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

Loraux, Nicole. Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes. U of Princeton P, 1993.

Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Maureen B. Fant. Women's Life in Greece and Rome: A sourcebook in Translation 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.

Wolf, Christa.Cassandra: a novel and four essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck. New York: Farrar, Strau, Giroux, 1984.

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