QUESTIONS - The ORESTEIA: Agamemnon, The Eumenides

(We will not discuss the second play of the trilogy, The Libations Bearers, and you are not responsible for it. I shall, however, refer to it on occasion to make the bridge between the other two.)

AGAMEMNON

1. Compare Homer’s accounts of Agamemnon’s homecoming (the Odyssey, bks 1 (by the poet/narrator), bk 4 (by Menelaus), bk 11 (by Agamemnon himself in Hades) with Aeschuylus’s dramatization.
   
   
2. Note the dominant images that recur in both plays, though differently and for different effect: nets and webs; light (beacons, torches); the hounds
   
   
3. Clytaemnestra: how does she justify her murder? How would you characterize this woman? How is she both a reprise and a negation of Penelope?
   
   
4. What is the role of Cassandra? How does she bring the Homeric world into the Oresteian scene? Why is she so important in this play?
   
   
5. Focus on the actual moment of Agamemnon’s arrival home (pp. 59 -65): what criticisms does Agamemnon make of Clytaemnestra?
   
   
6. What is the role of the Chorus?

THE EUMENIDES

1. Who are the Furies (Erinyes) and what is their role? How do they talk? What kind of language? What form of justice do they represent (cf. esp pp. 146-148, ll. 307-20). How does Athena transform them and why? What power does she grant them and what will their new role by by the end of the play? (NB Eumenides means "kindly ones"). See esp. pp. 160 & 168.
   
   
2. How does this play constitute a "homecoming" for the Furies?
   
   
3. The trial: pp. 151 ff: What are the issues? What are the arguments? How is the decision made? Are all the arguments equally valid? Note particularly Apollo’s conception of motherhood (p. 158). What explanation is given of Athene’s decision? What does that decision say about the place of women in the "new" Athens of the jury trial? What happens to Clytaemnestra’s vengeance? To Iphegenia? How is Clytaemnestra presented here? Where is Zeus in all this? What is his relationship to the Furies?
   
   
4. What happens to the house of Atreus?
   
   
5. What is Athena’s role in the Eumenides? What is her conception of justice and how is it different from the justice displayed so far and represented by the Furies? (p.150). What does she establish and what is the significance of her vote (p. 161)? Given that she is the patron goddess of Athens, what are the religious/political implications of this play and of this "resolution" to the trilogy? What polarities are resolved? What ambiguities remain?
   
   
6. What is the role of the Chorus? Its language? Images? etc.
   
   
7. How and to what extent is the Oresteia a "grand parable of progress"? or a step in the "civilising process"? What does it say about "civilization" (Western) and its institutions?