‘Eumenides’: From Vengeance to Justice
A review of ‘Eumenides’, by Aeschylus; 458 BC.
In Agamemnon, the triumphant leader of the Achaean army returns home from Troy only to be killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, for sacrificing their daughter. In The Libation Bearers, her brother and their son, Orestes, is sent to kill his mother in revenge for that revenge-killing on the orders of the god Apollo. In Eumenides, the last play in the trilogy, Orestes is racked with guilt and harassed by the Furies. He turns to Apollo, who tells him to go to Athens to face trial under the eyes of Athena herself.
Orestes’s crime is complex. He has avenged his father by killing his mother, who killed his father because he killed their daughter. Apollo argues that Orestes acted under divine command, because he fulfilled the moral duty of a son. But the Furies aren’t convinced. They see blood guilt, and demand payment in the coin of suffering. There is a clash of principles here: private vengeance against divine justice. And it is this that drives the play forward.
He has avenged his father by killing his mother, who killed his father because he killed their daughter.
And then Athena intervenes. This is the hinge point in the play. In her wisdom, she institutes the first trial by jury, which marks a change from the primitive cycles of revenge that have led to Orestes guilt to structured legal judgement. The outcome of the trial is ambiguous. Orestes is acquitted, but the vote is tied. That leaves Athena to cast the final vote. Mercy, she says, can coexist with justice; and in that spirit she turns the Furies into the Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Ones’, who become protectors of Athens. Through this divine act, vengeance is absorbed into the civic order, and stability through law supplants blood-feuds and retaliation.
The Furies are the most interesting thing about Eumenides, for they embody rage and primal force. They speak in harsh, incantatory verse that pulses with threat: ‘We drive the murderer, we wear him down.’ Their transformation at the end is neither easy nor inevitable. It is the fruit of a concession that is earned through negotiation, not conquest. Set against their raw, elemental power is the reasoned authority of Athena — a striking symbolic depiction of the tensions that drive civilisation itself.
Language thus is important to Eumenides, for it illuminates temperament. The choral odes of the Furies, precursors to the witches of Macbeth, stand in contrast to the lofty words of Apollo and the measured, reasoned speech of Athena. There is a stylistic diversity here that underscores and accentuates the play’s thematic diversity, as the muscular underworld chants of the Furies give way to reasoned courtroom debate. Poetry, the realm of the Dionysian (or, if you like, McGilchrist’s left hemisphere) evolves into structured prose, reflecting the social evolution the play renders imaginatively.
The choral odes of the Furies, precursors to the witches of Macbeth, stand in contrast to the lofty words of Apollo.
Visual symbolism also plays a part. The Furies are wild-haired, terrifying beings that incarnate the guilt, shame, unchecked vengeance. Athena, in contrast, radiates calm authority, depicting the dawn of a new, more mature social order. The trial itself is staged as a public spectacle, as drama which, as it were, dramatises the central conflict between nature and culture, innovation and tradition, chaos and order, personal guilt and communal responsibility.
Aeschlyus reveals his wisdom in his refusal to resolve the moral conflict at the heart of Eumenides. Orestes is free, yes; but the Furies demand for retribution is not dismissed. It is merely structured, shaped, institutionalised, tamed. Reason is downstream of the passions, said David Hume: here, we see how at the level of society force and feeling are brought to order by the peculiar workings of human minds. Aeschylus imagines a world where civilisation exists always in a fragile compromise, a hard-won balance between reason and passion, instinct and law. It is a hopeful but sobering vision, pointing to the role of institutions in saving us from ourselves. Our darker impulses have gone nowhere.
