Chapter 5 - Heroes in the Oresteia

Summary

This chapter presents the first detailed study of afterlife heroic power in the Oresteia. Aeschylus only uses the word “hero” (hērōs) once in his plays, for the anonymous powerful ancestors who send and receive the expedition to Troy in the Agamemnon. But in the Choephoroi, Agamemnon is prayed to as powerful at his tomb, and in the Eumenides, Orestes predicts his own heroic power from beyond the grave. The Oresteia famously relocates these two mythical heroes to Argos to associate them with that city’s treaty with Athens. This chapter demonstrates that the representation of father and son after death reverses expectations not only from the world external to the play, but also from their living actions within the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes an ethically whitewashed ancestor figure; conversely, Orestes, who killed his mother, becomes a political hero. These radical afterlife transformations are a major part of the Oresteia’s “poetics of the beyond.”

Introduction: Traditional Hero Cult

The word “hero” (ἥρως, hērōs) is only found once in the extant plays of Aeschylus, in the mouth of the Herald of the Agamemnon (Ag. 516).¹ Although used in the context of the Trojan War, the word has already changed meaning from Homer’s use of it as a synonym for “lord.”² By Aeschylus’ time, it signifies a technical term for a class of semidivine figures who were worshipped alongside the gods as lesser forces.³ Many are thought to have been nameless local powers that became associated with named figures from mythology. There is also evidence for the hero cult of living figures since the archaic period and in the fifth century.⁴ The Herald introduces the term, but this use is not the only example of heroes and heroization in the trilogy. The Oresteia makes unmistakable references to the power of both Agamemnon and Orestes after death. This kind of metamorphosis radically alters their dramatic functions, ethical arc, and political importance. Both Agamemnon and Orestes were worshipped as heroes in other Greek cities, and Orestes had roles in Athenian religion and folklore, facts that suggest potential effects on Athenian audiences. The role of heroes in the Oresteia, however, has not been the topic of focused study.⁵

The contemporary religious conception of heroes requires further specification as background for understanding the dynamics in the trilogy. A hero must be carefully differentiated on the one hand from a god and on the other from ghosts and independent demons.⁶ Evidence strongly suggests that heroes are always thought to have once been human beings, now exercising supernatural powers around a locale, often specified as their grave.⁷ This accounts for their chthonic aspects. A volcanic metaphor may be appropriate for understanding the cult site: Heroes have a fixed place in the upper world, which at any time may erupt with underworld pyrotechnics. They may be beneficent or malevolent, similarly to Greek divine powers in general, but especially chthonic ones. They are often associated with snakes in ritual art.⁸ Much like gods and daimones in Greek worship, they are a diverse group. They may be named or unnamed, male or female.

In the lived experience of Athenians and other Greeks, heroes played a vivid and pervasive role. Shrines littered the ancient landscape; civic, family, and pseudokinship groups organized rituals to honor them. Heroes could relate to individuals, with power over childbirth, healing, or marriage; watch over a group, such as slaves or sailors; or protect whole cities.⁹ There are stories of heroes fighting alongside the Greeks at Marathon. At Salamis, the Greek armies prayed to the local heroes to aid them in just such a way.¹⁰ However, between the eighth and fourth centuries bce, they never serve as a template for thinking about the afterlife for regular humans.¹¹ Instead, named heroes connected worshippers with local or Panhellenic myths. The majority were offspring of gods, glorious fighters, founders of cities, or egregious transgressors.

The divinity of Greek heroes is not predicated on right action; Oedipus, Helen, and others received cult worship despite deeds that would appear to ethically disqualify them from praise or desire for imitation.¹² The very fact that they overstepped the limits of humanity in life seems to be the reason for their enhanced power after death. The potential political use of these powerful dead is evident in multiple stories about cities claiming and reburying the bones of heroes, whether of those associated with them or with their enemies.¹³ Thus, beyond their quotidian religious aspects, heroes have a connection with the past through myth and perceived political effects. These qualities, along with their ethical ambiguity, are also major themes in the Oresteia’s representations of its hero characters.

Both Agamemnon and Orestes were mythical figures with central roles in the Panhellenic songs of Homer, Stesichorus, Simonides, and Pindar.¹⁴ Evidence points to two Laconian hero shrines with claims to being Agamemnon’s grave, although whether they were identified with him before the Oresteia is disputed.¹⁵ The inclusion of Orestes in an aetiological story for the Athenian Choes ritual appears to be part of an earlier tradition of his impurity, which Aeschylus might be rejecting when Orestes insists on his ritual purity by the time he arrives in Athens.¹⁶ Athenian religion had several other stories concerning Orestes as a harmful spirit.¹⁷ These facts suggest a preliminary set of questions: What are the dynamics of the Oresteia’s transformations of previously staged human characters into afterlife figures with semidivine powers? How do the afterlife fates of Orestes and Agamemnon relate to the characteristics of the heroes that the Herald mentions, and of heroes in Greek culture more generally? What are the implications of their transformation within the play?

A wide spectrum of heroic characteristics and powers occurs in the Oresteia’s examples. Following the treatment in Chapter 4 of the kommos scene, this chapter examines how the depictions of Agamemnon as king, father, and afterlife power in the Choephoroi relate to Agamemnon’s living character in the previous play. It then turns to Orestes’ death and afterlife, which involve issues of matricide, the nature of his power over Argos, and his place in the Athenocentric ending of the trilogy. We will see how the memory of their survivors and the references to their postmortem power alter the evaluation of these two characters’ life and death, their personality and purview. The manner in which the Oresteia pits ancestor worship and hero cult against each other gives specific insights into its approaches to individual and political values.

The Anonymous Heroes and the Trojan War

Little may be gleaned, ostensibly, from the Herald’s fleeting mention of “heroes” in the Agamemnon. Unnamed, their functions are merely implied in passing, and they are never heard from again. Unsurprisingly to careful readers of the trilogy, this ancillary mention in the first play echoes with variations in the following ones. The Herald’s invocation of heroes sets a baseline by which to measure the characterization of Agamemnon and Orestes as powerful undead acting in the world.

At first glance, the only context for the heroes of Argos is their connection with the expedition to the Trojan War (Ag. 513–17):

                 τούς τ’ ἀγωνίους θεοὺς

πάντας προσαυδῶ τόν τ’ ἐμὸν τιμάορον

Ἑρμῆν, φίλον κήρυκα, κηρύκων σέβας,

ἥρως τε τοὺς πέμψαντας, εὐμενεῖς πάλιν

στρατὸν δέχεσθαι τὸν λελειμμένον δορός.

           I address all the assembled gods

and the protector of my own office, Hermes, dear Herald,

revered by heralds, and the heroes who sent forth,

may they receive back, with kind intention, the army,

the remnant of the spear.

The Herald addresses the heroes as part of a larger arc of divine forces, from the land itself to the Olympians. The divinities include Zeus who watches over the land (509) and brings justice or vengeance (525–6). Next comes Pythian Apollo, who oversees disease and its cure (509–13), then the assembled gods.¹⁸ Finally comes his own tutelary divinity, Hermes the Herald (515).¹⁹ In this case, mention of the heroes seems only connected with the army (στρατόν, straton, 517).²⁰ The positive aspect of their power involves blessing the departing expedition and receiving it back with “kindly intention” (εὐμενεῖς, eumeneis, 516).

The prayer, however, follows directly on the negative aspects of the invoked divinities. The Herald mentions vengeful Zeus and harmful Apollo, as well as Hermes (whose chthonic aspect is evident several times in the trilogy, Chapter 1). The prayer thus has an apotropaic aspect, warding against the malice of divinities, among which are the heroes.²¹ It is tempting to see in the term εὐμενεῖς (eumeneis) a prefiguration of the title for the Eumenides (“the Kindly Spirits,” Εὐμενίδες). There is no mention, however, of the name Εὐμενίδες (Eumenides) within the Oresteia, only a synonym in Athena’s description of the Erinyes (εὔφρονας, euphronas, Eum. 992).²² Instead, Orestes does become a hero with connections to the Argive army and uses the language of kind intention with the same root (εὐμενέστεροι, eumenesteroi, Eum. 774). Both blessings and hostility are associated with heroes as chthonic powers in Greek culture, which the Herald’s prayer highlights and the rest of the trilogy picks up on.

These heroes are local, not traveling with the army, as is evident from the language of sending forth the expedition and receiving it back.²³ In this respect, it is significant that they are not here connected with domestic flourishing: The Herald makes no mention of festivals, cultic honors, or blessings conferred.²⁴ This contrasts with the transformed Erinyes at the end of the Oresteia, who are promised exactly these, as honors due to local divinities. The Herald also does not connect the unnamed heroes to any specific generation previously, such as the mythical heroes that preceded the Trojan War. Anonymity is a feature of some Greek hero cult sites, which not uncommonly contain dedications marked only “to the hero.”²⁵ Yet this usage contradicts the afterlife continuation of Agamemnon and Orestes, so deeply tied to myth.

I suggest that the indefinite reference to heroes in a military context and the lack of any emphasis on glory have two specific effects later in the trilogy. First, they downplay the natural notion that the living conqueror, Agamemnon, will join these “descendants of Atreus before the house” (Cho. 322).²⁶ His glory was already a problematic theme in the Herald’s speech (Chapter 1). Once Agamemnon is murdered and buried without public rites, the vagueness of the reference to heroes allows for significant questions concerning his exact postmortem fate. Secondly, in calling for the heroes to be kindly to the expedition, the Herald sets up the afterlife of Orestes, whose main purview in his hero speech is the military policy of Argos and whose language echoes this passage. Thus, complex familial and civic associations and the ambiguities of these potent undead are introduced into the trilogy with the first, nearly unmarked mention of humans with supernatural powers after death.

Agamemnon’s Power from the Grave

From the praise of Agamemnon in life and at his tomb, and the fact that he was widely known as a civic-military hero, there is an expectation that he will become a powerful postmortem figure. Yet that is far from the outcome of the kommos. To best understand the actual status of Agamemnon in the rest of the trilogy, it is vital to pick apart the intricately interwoven references to his power, to his relationships with family and the city, and to the rituals promised at his tomb. Building on the previous chapter’s focus on Agamemnon’s mourners, the picture of him in Hades, and his failed raising, this analysis focuses on the possibility of his hero cult.

The influence of dead Agamemnon on the living world becomes evident in his children’s appeals to aid from supernatural beings. Most pertinent is the language of “power,” exemplified by the only four uses of kratos in the Choephoroi, each addressed by Agamemnon’s children either to him or to a divinity:

(1)

Ἑρμῆ χθόνιε, πατρῷ᾽ ἐποπτεύων κράτη,

σωτὴρ γενοῦ μοι ξύμμαχός τ᾽ αἰτουμένῳ· (Cho. 1–2)

Or. Chthonic Hermes, watching over paternal power (kratē),

be a savior and ally to me asking.

(2)

μόνον Κράτος τε καὶ Δίκη σὺν τῷ τρίτῳ

πάντων μεγίστῳ Ζηνὶ συγγένοιτό μοι. (Cho. 244–5)

El. Only let Power (Kratos), and Justice, with the third,

Greatest of All, Zeus, be with me.

(3)

πάτερ τρόποισιν οὐ τυραννικοῖς θανών,

αἰτουμένῳ μοι δὸς κράτος τῶν σῶν δόμων. (Cho. 479–80)

Or. Father, who died in a nontyrannical way,

give the power (kratos) of your house to me asking.

(4)

ὦ Περσέφασσα, δὸς δέ γ’ εὔμορφον κράτος. (Cho. 490)

El. Oh Persephone, give [us his] beautiful power (kratos).

Each of these examples of asking for kratos is a prayer, or nearly one. The children require divine aid, since they have lost any living friend who might be a helper (376–7), have been forbidden an army, and have been shut off from other human help by the requirement for secrecy (556–9). What form, then, might this abstraction, “power,” take? The referents are not quite the same. Quotations (1) and (2) solicit the aid of divinities themselves: Hermes, Power (Kratos), Justice, and Zeus.²⁷ By contrast, the phrasing in (3) seeks from Agamemnon the “power of your house” (480), which indicates the desire that he transfer to the children authority over domestic and political affairs. This authority accords with the gist of quotation (2), which invokes a deified kratos, together with similarly deified justice and Zeus in his dominant aspect, “Greatest of All,” as qualities necessary for ruling.²⁸ The main notion in quotations (2) and (3), then, is of an ancestor at the tomb being asked to bless his descendants for the rule of the house and, by the very use of the word “power,” the state.

The term kratos is of a different order in quotations (1) and (4). Calling on Chthonic Hermes or Persephone conceptualizes Agamemnon’s kratos as that of an underworld spirit who could supernaturally aid his children. This power can be thought of as manifesting in his physical return, a possibility examined in Chapter 4. Alternately, it could be the continuing power of the king in the underworld, who sends his influence up. In the next section, we examine the dynamics of the latter alternative more thoroughly, together with the mentions of cultivation and worship, as possible indications of Agamemnon becoming a hero. This would account for the connection of kratos in quotations (1), (2), and (4) to divinities, both Olympian and chthonic, and in (3) to the house. Yet how do the characters conceive of Agamemnon’s power? Does he maintain his political influence over Argos? Considering how Agamemnon has been represented both in the Oresteia and in Panhellenic cult, the answers are counterintuitive.

Agamemnon as Political versus Domestic Figure

Since both civic heroes and familial ancestors were worshipped at tombs, it must be specified what type of future sacrifices and eternal honors are offered to Agamemnon at his grave. Along with the above-mentioned mythic, cultural, and political background for the figure of Agamemnon, the specific vocabulary of kratos implies that he is a potent figure with influence approaching that of a divinity. One would therefore expect his continuing role after death to be an influential one, related to his kingly power. Supporting that assumption, in the portrayal of living Agamemnon, political concerns definitively predominate over familial ones. Before he arrives on stage, the Chorus sing of his sacrificing his daughter for the army’s sake (Ag. 104–249).²⁹ Upon his return from war, Agamemnon tramples his family in a number of ways: He brings back a concubine for his wife to take care of and shows no affection for Clytemnestra, regard for Orestes, or defense of his actions toward Iphigeneia.³⁰ The Trojan War and the rulership of Argos define him far more than his family.³¹

In light of this characterization of Agamemnon when alive, it is almost a shock that precisely the political aspect dwindles most in references to him following his death. Although the mourners in the Choephoroi affirm that Agamemnon’s dishonored burial does not befit a king, their requests for his power deemphasize his political ties and link him much more closely to the “house.” That Agamemnon’s children address him as “father” rather than “king” ought to come as no surprise.³² Despite the fact that the ruling house is naturally associated with control over the city, it is evident that the mourners emphasize the domestic.³³ Exemplary is Electra’s prayer to Zeus in which she is concerned for the withering of the ruling stock (ἀρχικός … πυθμήν, 260) and the raising of the house from a small to a great one (ἀπὸ σμικροῦ … μέγαν δόμον, 262–3). The choral passage that follows creates a subtle opposition between regaining the “paternal hearth” (ἑστίας πατρός, 264) and the political power that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are currently exercising (τοὺς κρατοῦντας, tous kratountas, 267). Orestes reinforces the emphasis on lineage later when he asks Agamemnon not to wipe out the seed of Pelops, in order for Agamemnon himself to continue existing (503–4, cf. 236). Throughout the kommos, the mourners repeatedly connect Agamemnon with the hearth, the household, and continuity through children but barely mention the citizens or the state.

The emphasis on the domestic severs the former king from political influence in Argos after his death. In the Agamemnon and Choephoroi, Clytemnestra’s actions are clearly tactical moves to this effect. She tells the Elders that the burial is not their concern (οὐ σὲ προσήκει τὸ μέλημ᾽, Ag. 1551) and is not for those outside the household (τῶν ἐξ οἴκων, 1554). Clytemnestra thus separates the city from Agamemnon and Agamemnon from the city. Electra in the kommos refers to this act to condemn her mother and – solely in this passage – highlight the politically shameful fate of her father (Cho. 429–33):

ἰὼ ἰὼ δαΐα

πάντολμε μᾶτερ, δαΐαις ἐν ἐκφοραῖς

ἄνευ πολιτᾶν ἄνακτ’

ἄνευ δὲ πενθημάτων

ἔτλας ἀνοίμωκτον ἄνδρα θάψαι.

Woe, woe, hostile,

all-daring mother, in hostile funeral,

a king without the citizens,

without lamentations and unmourned

you dared to bury the man.

Clytemnestra has attempted not only to preemptively block Agamemnon’s ability to rise from the dead by mutilation (Cho. 439) but also to deny him the honor due to a king after death by preventing the customary funeral rites. In the kommos, even as the children and Slave Women more properly mourn Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s political hold continues to affect the form in which the rites are finally performed: There are still no citizens present. Throughout, the lamentation is a household affair.

This schism between Agamemnon’s political character when living and the domestic character given to him after death is evident in Orestes’ approach to vengeance as well. Immediately before the kommos, Orestes describes his motivations as divine, personal, financial, and political (269–304). Most relevant is that he distinguishes “my great grief for my father” (300) from the motivation of freeing the citizens (πολίτας, politas) from subjugation (302–4). Thus Orestes’ action diverges into two different themes, only one of which he and Electra return to. When praying to Agamemnon, Orestes specifically refers to kratos over only the house (δὸς κράτος τῶν σῶν δόμων, 480). He even attributes the glorious conquest at Troy to the citizens (302–3), thus eliminating the separation between king and people, between Agamemnon’s individual decision for war and citizen anger at him. Since Orestes must accomplish his plot, by command of the oracle, nearly alone (556–9), he neither involves a foreign army nor rouses the citizens. Orestes himself must rescue the citizenry; yet he never requests any help related to the city from his father in the kommos.

Once Orestes has murdered his mother and Aegisthus, he declares them to have been double tyrants (διπλῆν τυραννίδα, diplēn turannida), father-killers, and ravagers of the house (Cho. 973–4). Each accusation divides the familial murder from the simultaneous act of the coup d’état, for each is easily categorized as belonging to either the domestic or the political sphere. The Eumenides contains a subtle actualization of the separation: Orestes claims that Clytemnestra committed two polluted acts in killing Agamemnon (δυοῖν … μιασμάτοιν, duoin … miasmatoin, Eum. 600). One might expect a neat separation between the domestic and political aspects of the act, ascribing to Clytemnestra the murder of both her husband and the king. The meaning is not self-evident, though, for the Erinyes ask for clarification (601). In his answer, Orestes defies expectations by specifying that Clytemnestra killed her husband and his own father (πατέρ᾽ ἐμόν, pater’ emon, 602), thus doubly emphasizing the domestic at the expense of the political. The discussion continues to focus on mothers and fathers until Apollo takes over; it is up to the god to impress on the judges, at great length, the fact that Clytemnestra killed a powerful king (625–39). Therefore, while the ideational ties between Agamemnon’s domestic and political character always exist, the mourners and Orestes himself continually minimize the relationship of the dead Agamemnon to the state. For a figure universally known as “the great king” from poetry, and one promised eternal glory for conquering Troy in the Agamemnon, this shift is deeply significant.

From Dishonored Tomb to Ancestor Cult

The subtle terminological differentiations that mark Agamemnon’s loss of political power after death set up the matter of his postmortem rites. Agamemnon’s tomb burgeons in the opening scene of the Choephoroi from a place of almost unholy dishonor to a site of worship. Yet what kind of worship? This is a matter that has not been discussed enough in considering Agamemnon’s arc within the Oresteia as a whole.³⁴ It demonstrates a sweeping transformation of Agamemnon’s afterlife status and spheres of influence.

At the play’s start, the tomb is a symbol of corrupted ritual, which denotes Clytemnestra’s unchallenged domestic and political authority.³⁵ The mourners’ struggle against this situation begins with deliberation over ritual. Electra seeks advice as to how best to dispose of Clytemnestra’s libation (Cho. 84–105): Should she pray on behalf of a “loving wife,” ask for repayment in kind against Clytemnestra, or even regard the spot as a permanently dishonored one (ἀτίμως, atimōs, 94 [96])? Following these alternatives, references to the tomb itself begin to assume the vocabulary of cult. Even before the first mourning ritual the Chorus indicate the path forward (106):

αἰδουμένη σοι βωμὸν ὣς τύμβον πατρός

Respecting your father’s tomb as if it were an altar

The Slave Women specify that their “respecting” or “being in religious awe” (αἰδουμένη, aidoumenē) does not mark Agamemnon’s tomb as an altar, but precisely the opposite: They are acting as if (ὥς, hōs) it were one.³⁶ They indicate that it is not a holy site, at least not yet. Electra picks up on their reverence concerning the tomb in verse 108 (cf. 200), and both parties pray to the gods, not least to bring back an avenger (124a [165]–163). When these prayers are ostensibly answered by Orestes’ appearance (212–13), the tomb becomes far more of an altar. Together the mourners supplicate the gods in the kommos, sometimes conjoining Agamemnon to them as a supernatural power. Through the introduction of the term “altar” and the implied efficacy of prayers uttered there, the spectators are privy to an incipient cult.

What kind of cult this is becomes evident shortly thereafter. Just as Electra’s prayer to Zeus links the god’s worship to raising the house of Agamemnon again (Cho. 260–3), so the children ply their dead father with sacrifices to gain his help. Mixed in with the other themes of the kommos is the restoration of his dishonored tomb to its rightful status among the family resting places. The prayers to Agamemnon, with a reference to “the descendants of Atreus before the house” (322) rather than the anonymous heroes of the Herald (Ag. 516), turn his tomb into a place of ancestor cult. They thus help redeem Agamemnon’s dishonor through lineage rather than military valor or civic honor. This is specified most clearly in Orestes’ and Electra’s promises of rituals to Agamemnon (Cho. 483–8):

Ορ. οὕτω γὰρ ἄν σοι δαῖτες ἔννομοι βροτῶν

κτιζοίατ’· εἰ δὲ μή, παρ’ εὐδείπνοις ἔσῃ

ἄτιμος ἐμπύροισι κνισωτοῖς χθονός.

Ηλ. κἀγὼ χοάς σοι τῆς ἐμῆς παγκληρίας

οἴσω πατρῴων ἐκ δόμων γαμηλίους,

πάντων δὲ πρῶτον τόνδε πρεσβεύσω τάφον.

Or. For this way the customary feasts of mortals

could be established for you; but if not, you will be

dishonored among those feasting well

on the smoking burnt sacrifices of the earth.

El. And I will bring wedding drink offerings

to you from the full inheritance from my father’s house;

and I will honor this tomb first of all things.³⁷

Orestes and Electra offer only family cult, with weddings and sacrifices for the dead at the tomb.³⁸ They negate Agamemnon’s possible future dishonor (ἔσῃ ἄτιμος, esē atimos, 484–5) with future honor (πρεσβεύσω, presbeusō, 488). Since this passage falls between the last two requests for Agamemnon’s kratos (480, 490), the omission here of any political reference is particularly significant. The children do not offer Agamemnon civic festivals, nor do they mention any others coming to worship him, whether Argive citizens or outsiders. The children’s promises of specifically family rituals in verses 483–8 delimit the future sphere of influence of the deceased Agamemnon. These elisions correspond with never claiming that Agamemnon would offer supernatural protection of Argos. His cultivation, and therefore afterlife potency, is reduced to the domestic.

Throughout the rest of the Oresteia, Agamemnon’s supernatural influence is similarly up for interpretation. As shown in Chapter 4, since Agamemnon fails to rise, the one form in which his power might seem to manifest itself is the dream of Clytemnestra.³⁹ Orestes interprets the snake-dream as an omen and immediately offers prayers to the Earth and the tomb of Agamemnon for its fulfillment (Cho. 540–1). This implies that the dream is a manifestation of Agamemnon’s chthonic power, a connection that may be greatly strengthened by the close symbolic association of snakes with heroes.⁴⁰ Yet there is no continuation of this theme; the causal connection between Agamemnon and the dream remains in the realm of inference. In the rest of the Choephoroi, the tension and triumph rest on Orestes acting nearly alone. Supernatural aid, including that of Agamemnon’s spirit, is limited to implications, prayers, oracles, and the interpretation of dreams.

The reduction of Agamemnon’s afterlife potency in the kommos and the rest of the Choephoroi extends into the Eumenides. Agamemnon’s power goes unmentioned, except for one anomalous line. When Orestes seeks protection against the Erinyes’ cross-examination and savage threats, he declares that his father’s spirit will assist him (Eum. 598):

ἀρωγὰς δ᾽ ἐκ τάφου πέμψει πατήρ.

My father will send help from the grave.⁴¹

By this point in the trilogy, the prayers for success seem to have been fulfilled by Orestes having accomplished his plot. Moreover, Clytemnestra herself has already risen from the underworld at the start of the Eumenides, spurring the Erinyes to action and demonstrating the sinister potency of the dead. Yet Agamemnon’s help never manifests in the Eumenides. There are several interpretations available within the play for this puzzling truancy. One is given in the Erinyes’s response: They immediately dispute the possibility that any dead would succor Orestes, because he killed his mother (Eum. 599). Despite their status as chthonic divinities, their reasoning should not be taken as definitive. They offer tendentious interpretations throughout the Eumenides, and other divinities contradict and eventually defeat them. The second possibility stems from the similarity of this entreaty to the kommos where Agamemnon is so often beseeched to aid; subsequent to that scene, Agamemnon’s impact on the world is stunted, not only in words but also in action.

Through the mourners’ domestic vocabulary as well as Agamemnon’s failure to directly manifest, he becomes, by the end, an ancestor figure. This is clear from the cult offered to him and from his curtailed influence in the remainder of the trilogy. The inverted fate of the hubristic conqueror and child-killer tells us much about the trilogy’s rewriting of character after death on the ethical and political fronts, as well as the possibilities it opens up for the next generation.

Revaluing Agamemnon’s Life and Death

Distancing Agamemnon after death from political influence in Argos and from supernatural power more generally leads to several counterintuitive consequences, all having to do with the assessment of his life. Once he is dead, the narrative and value of Agamemnon’s life are out of his control. However, the Oresteia shows that they are still subject to contestation in the living world, as well as in the underworld: Clytemnestra’s judgment on him is opposed by the actions and memorialization of his children. Yet, as we saw, the children rewrite Agamemnon differently than he would, focusing on his familial role. To better understand the postmortem transvaluation of Agamemnon, it is necessary to first briefly revisit statements concerning the value of life made by or about him before his death. Then one must examine how his legacy interacts with these standards and the ethical and political representations of his character. This comparison gives a better perspective on the specific patterns through which he is reconceptualized after death.

In the Agamemnon, the paradigm announced for judging the life of a king only concerns the glory of his deeds. When announcing the return of the expedition, the Herald ties Agamemnon’s worth to his destruction of Troy (Ag. 529–32):

τοιόνδε Τροίαι περιβαλὼν ζευκτήριον

ἄναξ Ἀτρείδης πρέσβυς εὐδαίμων ἀνὴρ

ἥκει· τίεσθαι δ’ ἀξιώτατος βροτῶν

τῶν νῦν·

Throwing such a yoke on Troy

the king, the elder son of Atreus, a blessed man,

has arrived. He is the worthiest to be honored of mortals

living now.

The values of epic glory are paramount in the Herald’s speech. Victory in a massive campaign and the destruction of a city are the criteria of being both “blessed” (εὐδαίμων, eudaimōn, 530) and worthy of honor (τίεσθαι … ἀξιώτατος, tiesthai … axiōtatos, 531). Clytemnestra, in the tapestry scene, takes to a sacrilegious extreme this “honoring” of Agamemnon. To the unctuous strewing of divine offerings under his feet Agamemnon responds by cautioning that he is not to be praised excessively while living, especially not as a god (Ag. 916–27).⁴² He goes on to deny that he can be labeled fortunate, insisting that only after the ending of life can one know its value (927–9):

καὶ τὸ μὴ κακῶς φρονεῖν

θεοῦ μέγιστον δῶρον. ὀλβίσαι δὲ χρὴ

βίον τελευτήσαντ’ ἐν εὐεστοῖ φίλῃ.

And not to think badly

is the greatest gift of god. It is necessary to deem a man blessed

who has ended his life in welcome prosperity.

Type of death affects reputation; appraisal of a human must account for the whole of life. Agamemnon’s sentiment is seen as a traditional Greek value by commentators.⁴³ Its immediate dramatic effect, however, is deep irony, since he is ingloriously butchered so soon after its utterance. His life’s end in a bloody tub, his mutilated burial, and the queen gloating that these are the just rewards for his own actions all destroy any notion of his ending his life “in welcome prosperity.” The reversal of everything he stood for in life would be permanent under the criteria Agamemnon himself laid out. In the trilogy, though, the poetics of the beyond offers possibilities of redemption for which the endpoint of life does not account.

The struggle over Agamemnon’s postmortem reputation has a broader scope than the problem of his military glory. At stake is whether Agamemnon is even honored as a person. In one of the last lines of the kommos, Orestes cautions that Agamemnon will remain dishonored in the future unless the proper chain of events occurs. Agamemnon’s afterlife, memory, and cultic honors are out of his control. Everything depends on his children, whose task it is to avenge him, restore his reputation, and perpetuate rituals on his behalf. There is no further mention of the citizens glorifying Agamemnon. The reliance on his children’s actions compels further scrutiny concerning Agamemnon’s negative relationship to his own family.

The Oresteia never represents any interaction between Electra or Orestes and their living father. Both children, however, maintain their focus on Agamemnon as an unproblematic father figure. Such a transformation involves a dubious set of linguistic substitutions, as the main anxiety concerns his murder of his own daughter, their sister. The polluting act that leads to his own murder serves as an obstacle to Agamemnon’s ethical desert for familial honors above and glorious kingship below. Clytemnestra has already reconnected Iphigeneia with Agamemnon in the afterlife, imagining the daughter hugging and kissing her father. Clytemnestra explicitly declares that Agamemnon’s child-murder destroys the possibility of heroic status in the afterlife (“let him not boast gloriously in Hades,” Ag. 1525–9, 1555–9). Yet nowhere do the children ever consider Iphigeneia’s afterlife, nor that she could problematize her father’s fate.

Instead, Electra, in a shocking reversal, suppresses the act of filicide (Cho. 235–42). Describing the deed, Electra uses the evocative oxymoron “the sister ruthlessly sacrificed” (τῆς τυθείσης νηλεῶς ὁμοσπόρου, Cho. 242).⁴⁴ The ethical effect of her grammar is immense; her seemingly unmarked use of the passive voice (τυθείσης, tutheisēs) with no agent obfuscates Agamemnon’s responsibility for the unholy sacrifice.⁴⁵ In the first play of the trilogy, the Chorus and Clytemnestra both harp on Agamemnon’s culpability. Electra’s use of “ruthless” in the Choephoroi demonstrates that her evaluation of the act has not changed, but she has altogether erased the actor.

In this same stanza, Electra repeatedly uses the terms “father” and “paternal” (235, 237, 240) without qualification. She thus continues to gloss over Agamemnon’s crime against his family and his own continuity.⁴⁶ Going further, Electra explicitly replaces her sister with Orestes (238–43). Since Electra is the only living female child and has been representing the household in Orestes’ absence, her ouster of Iphigeneia is a potent erasure of the dead. From the surviving children’s perspective, it annuls their mother’s justification for murder and camouflages their father’s crime.⁴⁷ This move to clear Agamemnon contradicts the treatment of ethical transgressions in almost any afterlife reference in the rest of the trilogy.

In fact, the next reference to Agamemnon’s afterlife implies the disquiet of his spirit. Clytemnestra’s Ghost places Agamemnon in the underworld as the implied referent of “those I killed,” who hound her soul (Eum. 96–7, Chapter 6). This reference to his spirit conflicts with the pacific image of the great king on his throne in the underworld. Moreover, if she is to be believed, Clytemnestra’s story implies that she is suffering in some way for her murders above.⁴⁸ Such an afterlife punishment for those who transgress greatly is a repeated theme of each of the choruses of the Oresteia, especially the Erinyes, who themselves hand the shedder of kindred blood to the judgment of Hades.⁴⁹ Why, then, would Agamemnon not suffer in the same way? Do his children somehow free him from punishment for familial murder? The implication of the kommos is that ritual action and vengeance will change Agamemnon’s state below. Yet there is no follow-up. The last mention of Agamemnon, Orestes’ request for his help, is scoffed at by the Erinyes (Eum. 598). Agamemnon never directly manifests his power and is never cleared of wrongdoing. His ethical crimes remain an unresolved problem, since they lead to Orestes’ further kin-killing, regardless of the valorization of the father–king–hero.

The effect of Agamemnon’s murder of his child and heavily criticized war deeds does not withstand the intense rewriting of Agamemnon’s legacy in his mourning scene.⁵⁰ Such a new, blank-slate characterization of Agamemnon liberates his children and the Chorus to categorically condemn Clytemnestra for his murder. If Agamemnon is clean of blood, the vengeance against Clytemnestra is free of the ethical complication of her act.⁵¹ The laundering of Agamemnon’s reputation remains effective for the duration of the trilogy. Not even Clytemnestra, in her self-defense, disinters the family crime of Agamemnon, only charging him with sexual faults of his own (μάτας, Cho. 918).⁵² The children win the fight over his legacy; they turn Agamemnon into a morally unproblematic ancestor worthy of worship.

Thus, after Agamemnon’s death, there is both a struggle over his reputation and an overall revaluation of his living status. Clytemnestra does everything she can to his corpse, reputation, and living children to undercut the kingly glory Agamemnon explicitly sought in life. Her complete dishonoring requires a struggle to return some honor to him, which takes up fully half of the Choephoroi. Moreover, for Agamemnon as father not to be polluted as their mother is, his children must erase his transgressive deeds. They never, in fact, restore kingly honors to Agamemnon. They consider this absent father figure only on a familial level.

The reduction of Agamemnon’s honors resonates greatly with religious and political notions about him. Within the Oresteia, unlike in contemporary religion, Agamemnon never receives wider cultivation. Despite all the possibilities for an aetiology of a hero cult that his kratos, ties with divinities, the previous mention of heroes, and Orestes’ later heroic powers suggest, Agamemnon at his tomb only gains funerary rites in the restrictive sense of familial devotion. Although the reference to him as a king below seems to maintain his politically honored status, the language and context suggest it is only a potential outcome. Beyond the implied ascription of Clytemnestra’s dream to Agamemnon, there is no evidence after the kommos of his continuing supernatural power in the living world. In the Eumenides, it is explicitly denied. Thus, references to Agamemnon after his death defy all previously stated criteria for the evaluation of his worth, including that of ending life well, of earning glory from kingship and war, and even of being condemned for destroying his own family. From the moment of his demise, there is a struggle over rewriting not only his legacy but also the structure of his postmortem existence. Instead of the glow of glory or the civic honor of hero cult, by the end of the trilogy Agamemnon’s possible afterlives merely smolder. They give off nothing but the vaporous outlines of his life.

Orestes: Suicide, Tyrannicide, Hero

Only one living character in the Oresteia deliberately confronts their own afterlife: Orestes prophetically declares his postmortem transformation into a semidivine figure (Eum. 762–77). The supernatural powers he claims correspond to the attributes of a hero figure, although he does not call himself one. Through him, Aeschylus forges links between a mythic character and two poleis, Argos and Athens, in both mythical and historical time. In the process, Aeschylus geographically dislodges the contemporary historical claims on the power of Orestes the hero. To get the full range of the ethical and political effects of his transformation, we first examine earlier statements concerning Orestes’ own death in the trilogy. These lead to an analysis of his heroic status. The final sections contrast Orestes’ and Agamemnon’s afterlives, demonstrate interactions with contemporary cultic ideas, and establish the significance of Orestes’ heroism for the mythical Athens of the trilogy.

Orestes’ Deaths

Orestes describes three different types of death for himself. Each declaration creates a relationship to human death that provides both the foundation and contrast for his last pronouncement, that of heroic immortality. The first instance comes as a wish to die. Midway through the Choephoroi, Orestes yokes his end to the act of matricide (Cho. 438):

ἔπειτ᾽ ἐγὼ νοσφίσας ὀλοίμαν.⁵³

When I have removed [her from life], may I perish!

In expressing the wish to end his own life once he has taken Clytemnestra’s, Orestes melds two themes. First, he implies that the deed is so great that it will fully deplete his very existence;⁵⁴ secondly, he implies a promised sacrifice of himself in order to accomplish the killing.⁵⁵ Each resonates differently with related statements from other characters and with the dynamics of death as closure.

The first theme is closely linked with other “wishes for death” in the Oresteia, especially the exclamations of the Herald, the Chorus of Elders, and Aegisthus in the Agamemnon.⁵⁶ These characters never act on their ostensible wishes, marking the statements as instances of a rhetorical trope – with varying significations. The Chorus of Elders declare that they are ready to die in action, yet their vociferousness merely heightens the irony of their impotence (Ag. 1362–5, 1652). The Herald and Aegisthus, on the other hand, seem to be declaring a readiness to let go of life itself as a way of marking the immensity of their just-completed effort. Ostensibly, Orestes’ sentiment is closely related to the latter two declarations, especially that of Aegisthus, who plotted the murder of kin. Having given his backstory and described his role in the plot, Aegisthus closes his speech with the sentiment that now he could happily end his life (Ag. 1610–11):

οὕτω καλὸν δὴ καὶ τὸ κατθανεῖν ἐμοί,

ἰδόντα τοῦτον τῆς Δίκης ἐν ἕρκεσιν.

Even dying is therefore noble for me,

having seen this man in the nets of Justice.

Aegisthus rhetorically conjoins his death to the accomplishment of his life’s task, the avenging of his dead siblings and what he sees as the usurpation of the state (Ag. 1577–1609). The sight of justice accomplished provides him a sense of closure to life. This is analogous to the logic of the Herald’s remarks at the accomplishment of his nostos (Ag. 539). Yet Aegisthus is not, in actuality, ready to die or even to disappear into the life of a private citizen. In response to the Chorus’s threat of armed uprising and civic turmoil, he avows that he will maintain his and Clytemnestra’s rule by force (Ag. 1637–42). Instead of dying happy, Aegisthus continues to contend for life and power.

Like Aegisthus, Orestes defends his murders, does not end his life thereafter, and assumes rulership over Argos. Unlike Aegisthus and the Herald, though, Orestes announces his willingness to die before the act is accomplished. He is thus dissimilar to the Chorus of Elders as well, since they twice proclaim their willingness to die in resistance to tyranny yet fail to launch their undertaking. Moreover, Orestes continually wrestles with the horror of his deed; thereafter, he suffers what can be seen as internal psychological repercussions.⁵⁷ This is in contrast to Aegisthus, who never critically scrutinizes the ethics of his action, is clearly self-satisfied at his vengeance, and openly proclaims that he will maintain control of Argos through violence. These distinctions help put Orestes’ “wish for death” in context. For the characters of the Agamemnon, the expression of such a wish is generally a mark of a desire for peace (the Herald), of truncated action (the Chorus), or of unrepentant violence (Aegisthus). In Orestes’ speech, it marks the ethically repulsive deed demanded of him.⁵⁸

The other undertone of Orestes’ first declaration about his death is as a pledge of his own life. The optative of wish (ὀλοίμαν, oloiman, “may I perish!”) implies a link to prayers to the divine for fulfillment with a future sacrifice.⁵⁹ In this case, it is a self-sacrifice.⁶⁰ This corresponds with other instances of the corrupted sacrifice motif, especially that of the Erinyes threatening to sacrifice Orestes after his act.⁶¹ The problematic ethical nature of the matricide shows itself in that it potentially demands a life in return. Whereas Orestes is not explicitly offering himself to the gods, this moment resonates with his later afterlife status. At that point, too, his death transcends individual concerns and involves both a promise and a threat of further violence.

The second example of Orestes depicting his own death is part of the plot to enter the palace. Deceptively bearing the news of his own demise symbolically removes Orestes from the realm of the living as a necessary step for his return to his rightful place.⁶² It also foreshadows his transformation into a hero; in both instances, Orestes unnaturally stands apart from the end of his life. A proleptic echo of his future power is found in the culmination of the plot, in the enigmatic cry that “the dead are killing the living” (Cho. 886). It is a knot whose threads interweave many themes in the trilogy, but whose local significance Clytemnestra untangles instantaneously: It refers to Orestes, back from the dead, against whom she arms. The irony of this moment only intensifies at the start of the Eumenides, when the dead character who continues exercising violent effects on life is Clytemnestra herself. The deaths of Orestes’ parents and his own fabricated demise each includes at least the possibility of a bloody return. These anticipate Orestes’ power from beyond the grave.

The third instance of Orestes speaking of his own death as a type of closure comes as he awaits the verdict of the jurors. He marks this as the moment of consequence for himself with a seemingly unambiguous dichotomy of life and death (Eum. 746):

νῦν ἀγχόνης μοι τέρματ᾽, ἢ φάος βλέπειν.

Now it is the end of a noose for me, or to see the light.

The emphasis of the statement is on finality, including the linguistic play with the “end” (τέρματ᾽, termat’ ) of a noose. Yet a significant elision complicates this disjunctive statement: Does a guilty verdict mean Orestes is still subject to the blood-sucking death that the Erinyes threaten, or will the new, civic law execute the murderer? Orestes’ meaning is clarified by a consequential cultural detail: Greek law never contained any provision for hanging.⁶³ With his words, therefore, Orestes testifies that, regardless of whether he is subject to death under the old law or the new law, he will hang himself.⁶⁴ Were he to be found guilty, Orestes would be unable to control his death’s meaning in the way he did for Agamemnon through promises of honors, sacrifices, and familial continuity. There would be no heir to the house. Instead, Orestes would close the circle of vengeance with his noose.

Orestes’ three mentions of his death are oriented toward ending; he never indicates the possibility of an afterlife.⁶⁵ They are focused, instead, on either the plot to kill Clytemnestra or its consequences. Their poetics maximizes the psychic pressure on Orestes, and consequently on audiences: the pathos of his pretended death, the frisson of his dead-man-walking vengeance, and the stakes of his murder trial. None would work as well rhetorically, dramatically, or as plot points were there simultaneous mentions of the continuity of Orestes’ influence beyond death. The cycle of vengeance ends in a twist, however: The new law does not claim Orestes’ life; rather, it requires his afterlife.

Orestes the Civic-Military Hero

After the trial, Orestes’ language becomes confident and god-driven. He claims powers beyond human abilities, begins to fulfill promises, returns to rule Argos, and establishes an eternal alliance with Athens. Of all the examples of the afterlife in the trilogy, Orestes’ ethical transformation is most clearly manifest, and his powers are the most imbricated with politics, both within and without the drama.

The trilogy radically rewrites Orestes’ character after the trial through his relationship to death. Specifically, he no longer needs either to pledge his life or to fear his end. Orestes frames his immediate relief in Olympian terms: He thanks his divine benefactors Apollo, Athena, and Zeus for restoring his rule over the house in Argos (Eum. 754–61). Tellingly, he does not propitiate the chthonic powers that he and Electra had invoked for vengeance from the very start (e.g. Cho. 1–2, 490, 540), or Agamemnon’s spirit, to whom he often appealed (including at Eum. 598). Although these chthonic forces are spurned, the power of the dead is far from forgotten. Orestes abruptly turns to his own future potency from the grave in his final speech (Eum. 762–77):

ἐγὼ δὲ χώρᾳ τῇδε καὶ τῷ σῷ στρατῷ

τὸ λοιπὸν εἰς ἅπαντα πλειστήρη χρόνον

ὁρκωμοτήσας νῦν ἄπειμι πρὸς δόμους,

μή τοί τιν’ ἄνδρα δεῦρο πρυμνήτην χθονὸς

ἐλθόντ’ ἐποίσειν εὖ κεκασμένον δόρυ.

αὐτοὶ γὰρ ἡμεῖς ὄντες ἐν τάφοις τότε

τοῖς τἀμὰ παρβαίνουσι νῦν ὁρκώματα

†ἀμηχάνοισι πράξομεν† δυσπραξίαις,

ὁδοὺς ἀθύμους καὶ παρόρνιθας πόρους

τιθέντες, ὡς αὐτοῖσι μεταμέλῃ πόνος·

ὀρθουμένων δὲ καὶ πόλιν τὴν Παλλάδος

τιμῶσιν ἀεὶ τήνδε συμμάχῳ δορὶ

αὐτοῖς ἂν ἡμεῖς εἶμεν εὐμενέστεροι.

καὶ χαῖρε καὶ σὺ καὶ πολισσοῦχος λεώς·

πάλαισμ’ ἄφυκτον τοῖς ἐναντίοις ἔχοις,

σωτήριόν τε καὶ δορὸς νικηφόρον.

I now depart towards my home

having sworn an oath to this land and to your people

for the whole fullness of future time

that no helmsman of my land coming here

will bring against you a well-equipped army.

For we ourselves being in our tomb then,

against those who transgress my present oath

will bring inescapable misfortunes,

making their marches spiritless and their paths ill-omened

so that they regret their undertaking.

But if it is rightly maintained, and

they always honor this city of Pallas with an allied army

we would be kindlier to them.

So farewell both you and your city-dwelling people.

May you have an inescapable wrestling trick against your enemies,

one that saves and brings victory for the army.

Orestes’ promise to act from beyond the grave runs counter to his previous approaches to the end of his life. The tomb is connected to his power; it is somewhere he can simultaneously “be in” (ὄντες ἐν τάφοις, ontes en taphois, 767) and yet act from. That is, “being in the tomb” is not being dead but now means being a hero at his shrine. Although he does not specify where it would be located, he speaks of acting against those on the way to Athens (δεῦρο, 765; ὁδοὺς, πόρους, 770).⁶⁶ More generally, Orestes describes the punishments or beneficence he would mete out as only directly affecting the people of Argos. Each of these aspects accords in general with Greek notions of hero cult.

Yet numerous peculiarities distinguish this heroization from previous allusions to heroes or cult in the Oresteia. First, it is neither divine fiat nor worship given by others but Orestes’ own prophecy that effects his transformation.⁶⁷ Orestes’ words constitute a double speech-act: He swears an oath (ὁρκωμοτήσας, 764) and claims he will enforce it “for all time” (εἰς ἅπαντα πλειστήρη χρόνον, eis hapanta pleistērē khronon, 763). This is an astonishing declaration from the mouth of a human character, not least because there are two Olympians on stage with him. It accords with the previous promise of alliance between Argos and Athens, in which Orestes has already broached the language of the future, and even eternity (ἐς τὸ πᾶν, es to pan, Eum. 291). Orestes is also echoing Apollo’s words to Athena (669–74), promising Argos as an ally “for all time” (ἐς τὸ πᾶν χρόνου, es to pan khronou, 670; αἰανῶς, aianōs, 672). Crucially, however, neither of the previous mentions of the alliance with Athens contained any hint of Orestes’ heroization. In the first, Orestes merely names his Argive people (τὸν Ἀργεῖον λεών, ton Argeion leōn, 290) as the allies, whereas Apollo specifically refers to Orestes’ descendants (τοὺς ἔπειτα, tous epeita, 672). With the new information in the hero speech that Orestes himself will enforce the oath, he takes control of his own postmortem existence. Orestes’ use of future-oriented language, reserved in the trilogy for divinities and prophets, seems to give him agency over his own destiny and to exemplify his superhuman powers.⁶⁸ The form of his declaration already marks its efficacy.

The language of the hero speech implies supernatural powers. Orestes evinces the ability to directly intervene in human affairs, as opposed to the Ghost of Clytemnestra, who must act through the intermediary Erinyes. This is evident in his claims that he will affect the thumos (as “spirit” or “courage”) of men and the omens given to them (ἀθύμους, athumous; παρόρνιθας 770). Ideationally tied to the language of divine forces as well is his promise to be more kindly (εὐμενέστεροι, eumenesteroi, Eum. 774) to those who keep his oath. It echoes the Herald’s prayer to the heroes to be kindly to the returning army (εὐμενεῖς, eumeneis, Ag. 516). The promise also serves to reconnect Orestes to the Erinyes, but only to their transformed version, whom Athena asserts will be kind-minded to Athens (εὔφρονας, euphronas, Eum. 992). Thus, Orestes’ language of transformation not only means he will continue in the afterlife but also asserts specifically superhuman powers over the living.

Orestes has committed a crime for which he barely escapes madness, demonic punishment, and a guilty verdict in court, yet he emerges as a civic hero. The issue of Orestes’ release therefore has a political dimension to it. This even relates to his release from pollution. In response to Orestes’ claims, the Erinyes deny that human purification could ever cleanse him. It is, in fact, the civic trial that is responsible for the final purification.⁶⁹ Gone is Orestes’ matricide; there is no mention of further expiation. One of the most unusual features of Orestes’ heroization is that there was another afterlife in store for him, replete with retribution for his crime. Immediately before his first promise of an alliance to Athens, Orestes was threatened with underworld punishment in Hades, despite all human cleansing and Apollo’s protection (Eum. 267–75, Chapter 7). This is labeled the common lot of any mortal (τις … βροτῶν, 269) who violates sacred relationships. Yet for Orestes, the civic trial and resultant heroic afterlife replace underworld retribution for ethical transgressions.

Instead of suffering continual punishment, Orestes the hero becomes a pillar for the Athenian military future. The Athenian dimension to the oath provides insights into the specifics of his heroization. For Orestes’ transformation from person to hero also enacts a momentous reversal of his domestic and political relations. In a countermovement to Agamemnon’s arc, which reduced a conqueror in life to a family cult figure, Orestes’ hero speech refers to the household only before his death (Eum. 754–61). He is concerned with what humans, specifically other Greeks, will say (τις Ἑλλήνων ἐρεῖ, 756), relates himself positively to Argos after long exile (Ἀργεῖος ἁνὴρ αὖθις, 757), and emphasizes enjoying the goods of the paternal house (ἔν τε χρήμασιν οἰκεῖ πατρῴοις, 757–8). Once the speech reaches Orestes’ heroic powers, though, its contents upend his living relationships to the household and the city.

The hero speech contains a dominant military theme, which Orestes has never displayed in life. As a young man returning nearly alone to his home country, he was explicitly barred from bringing an army by Apollo’s prophecy (Cho. 556–9). This frees him from the stain of waging war against his homeland, the act that haunts Polynices, both living and dead. But it is also symbolic of Orestes’ lack of the Homeric glory that defined his father’s deeds. By contrast, Orestes’ hero speech is crammed with martial vocabulary. He calls the “people” of Athena her stratos (τῷ σῷ στρατῷ, tō sō stratō, Eum. 762), a term that was used exclusively for a military expedition in the Agamemnon, including in the Herald’s hero prayer (στρατόν, straton, Ag. 517).⁷⁰ Further, Orestes uses the synecdoche doru, “shaft/spear,” for “army” three times in eleven lines of this hero speech (Eum. 766, 773, 777), which again echoes the Herald (δορός, doros, Ag. 517). This is by no means an unmarked usage. The Herald’s mention of the spear was in the context of the decimation of his companions in war. Orestes himself emphatically declared that Athena would win his and Argos’ allegiance without the spear (ἄνευ δορός, aneu doros, Eum. 289). Both of these earlier uses focus on the destructiveness of warfare. This is far from the case in Orestes’ hero speech, which ends by equating salvation with victory in war (δορὸς νικηφόρον, doros nikēphoron, Eum. 777). Athena and the Erinyes will pick up on precisely these militaristic notions, with similar vocabulary, in the final portion of the trilogy.

The transformation of Orestes triggers a vast political shift. Argos, so prominent a few lines earlier, sinks from preeminence as soon as Orestes mentions his afterlife. His supernatural powers manifest only in respect to the oath and civic alliance. Moreover, Orestes’ abilities manifest clearly as threats, but he only gives vague hints of possible rewards (Eum. 772–4). Yet this duality signals more than simple Greek concern about the ambivalence of divine powers, especially chthonic ones. Orestes literally threatens his own people (Eum. 768–71) but promises their military prowess for the exclusive benefit of Athens (Eum. 772–7). Although both the previous plays take place in Argos, which is now free, aiding Athens in warfare will determine the prosperity of Argos now and “forever.”⁷¹

The heroization of Orestes contains a further, subtle thematic link to Athens. For the city did have a cult to two aristocrats known as the “tyrannicides.”⁷² The language of tyranny may seem unmarked at times in the Oresteia.⁷³ Yet there are certainly links to the negative overtones tyranny would have had in contemporary Athens.⁷⁴ Orestes, for instance, never calls himself a tyrant. He boasts of killing the double tyrants (τυραννίδα, Cho. 973). The Chorus of the Choephoroi describe this same act as liberating Argos (ἠλευθερώσας πᾶσαν Ἀργείων πόλιν, 1046) through cutting the heads off the two snakes (δρακόντοιν, 1047). The deliverance from tyrants, with its understated connection to Athenian democratic folklore, may color the political aspects of Orestes’ actions. He may come off to some members of the audience as being a political liberator by virtue of being a tyrant-killer. The reverse is true as well: Orestes’ trial in Athens justifies his act of kin-killing as a political one. In this view, Orestes the hero and ally supersedes Orestes the mother-murderer.⁷⁵ Yet both of those positive aspects have to operate at a remove from Athens. The fact that Orestes is due to resume his monarchical inheritance demonstrates his “otherness” from this aspect of Athenian political thought.⁷⁶ He will be a king in another state. The powerful connection promised to Athens is thus focused on the time after Orestes the human being has died.

Summations/Connections

A politico-religious struggle over cult is clearly in progress both within the Oresteia and, as a number of scholars have suggested, in contemporary Greek history. The move by Athens to incorporate the cults of other cities from around the Greek world, even the festival of Dionysus itself, is congruent with Athenian political ambitions, already evident during the period in which the Oresteia was written.⁷⁷ Whereas gods could have numerous worship sites, hero cults were generally restricted to one or a few locales, even for such widely known figures as Agamemnon. The local and human aspects of hero cult enabled it to take on a political significance in the struggle between poleis, although one of indeterminable value. There is external evidence, for instance, that a connection to Agamemnon was central to Laconian claims of preeminence over the Peloponnese.⁷⁸ In addition, Herodotus’ story about the Spartan requisition of Orestes’ bones for reburial demonstrates that there was political value – whether internal, external, or both – to associating with these named figures as protective heroes.⁷⁹ The Oresteia treats the afterlives of Agamemnon and Orestes much differently, however, from the historical and cultic evidence mentioned. Thus, Agamemnon’s and Orestes’ movement from stage-character to afterlife object of cult must be examined on the terms of the trilogy, to which other interpretations, such as the interaction with the politics of contemporary Athens, must be subordinated.

The three instances in the Oresteia of cult to the dead are distinct in their patterns. In the Agamemnon, the heroes are anonymous, colorless ancestors supplicated for kindness on behalf of the army; in the Choephoroi, ancestor cult is promised to Agamemnon with an emphasis on the continuity of the house; and in the Eumenides, Orestes foresees himself as the supernatural guardian of a military alliance for Athens, without any mention of cult. Examining the purview of Agamemnon and Orestes after death uncovers the striking, and little-discussed, transformation. The trilogy radically dislocates their living ethos and their relation to political themes. The two transitions from living characters to heroic figures demonstrate an erasure of ethical consequences, seemingly contrary to all the vengeance-driven statements within the play.⁸⁰ Although Agamemnon was murdered and Orestes nearly killed, there is no repercussion past the threshold of death for their crimes against kin. The unfathomable horrors of family murder give way to afterlife heroism.

The mechanisms of clearing away living transgressions differ for each character. The children’s memorializing of Agamemnon ends the conflict over his glorious reputation. Clytemnestra had already subverted it with the stage-managed sacrilege upon his return, his murder in a tub, the gloating over his death, the distancing of citizens from his funeral, and the mutilation of his corpse. Since he has children who rewrite his memory and return his burial rites, both Agamemnon’s crimes and his dishonorable death seem to evaporate. The contest over his afterlife status, however, is one without sure knowledge. Clytemnestra, the Slave Women, and Agamemnon’s children all lack divinely supported insight. The children’s mentions of honors are therefore not focused on the underworld. They do not address the claims of Clytemnestra about his reunion there with Iphigeneia nor the Slave Women’s depiction of him as a great king below. Instead, the children treat Agamemnon as a figure of domestic cult. In a generally unrecognized move, they thus minimize both his effect on the rest of the trilogy and his militaristic glory – the latter of which depends on a specific type of memorialization. Agamemnon’s whitewashing is part of ending the foul familial legacy, allows an ethically simpler vengeance for Orestes (since Clytemnestra is less justified in her own killings), and permits familial praise. The substitution of father figure for glorious warlord has far-reaching political consequences: The Trojan War is minimized in the political discourse of the rest of the trilogy, and the great conqueror gives up his power to protect his state.

This transformation of Agamemnon after death thus opens political space for Orestes to grow into. Just as there was no glory in Agamemnon’s dying at the hands of his wife, Orestes claims no glory for killing his mother. Likewise, he participates in no military expeditions to put him on par with his father.⁸¹ Finally, the subtle implications of tyrannicide in its Athenian meaning in the Choephoroi are not marked in the Eumenides as a political accomplishment. Orestes thus comes off as decidedly unwarlike and unpolitical until the end of his life. Yet it is the reduction of Agamemnon’s political potency in the afterlife that lets Orestes take up the position of Argive civic-military hero.

A ritually purified, forensically cleansed Orestes transitions the political focus of the trilogy from Agamemnon’s epic glory to Athenian militarism. Orestes can only become a civic hero due to his acquittal in Athens and after multiple promises of help to the Athenians. His personal arc means that he owes favors to a foreign city, and his hero speech therefore diminishes Argos in favor of Athens. One might ask, would a powerful conqueror like Agamemnon allow such a subordination? Orestes’ metamorphosis funnels into the trilogy’s Athenocentric ending.

Heroization marks the final consummation of Orestes’ prophecies, a theme associated with Orestes from his first arrival on stage. Yet there is a break. Once Orestes becomes a hero, his acts and words are impossible to interpret psychologically. These types of analytical tools assume human paradigms, desires, and limits. As Orestes receives his own release and fulfillment, he leaves the stage. His departure marks the end of the individual, human portion of the trilogy, which then concerns itself with purely divine and political themes.

Following out the afterlife of characters in the Oresteia demonstrates that they may continue to be rewritten, even multiple times. Some, like Agamemnon and the war dead, are reconceptualized by the living, others, like Orestes and Clytemnestra (Chapter 6), speak for themselves. The poetic power of these afterlife transmutations warps the framework of human life and death, upends easy ethical ideas, reverses the themes displayed by characters while living, and radically alters the politics of the trilogy. In the case of Orestes’ trial, justification of his acquittal through supernatural benefits to Athens draws attention to a double aspect of his heroization. On the one hand, it is grounded in Athenian desires for divinely supported, continual victory. On the other, it raises questions concerning that desire by linking it to inhuman acts, suspect reasoning, and the bellicose themes that had been deeply undercut earlier in the trilogy. The treatment of heroes is thus another crucial component of the Oresteia’s self-aware challenge to ethical norms and political desires, just at the moment it seems to embrace them.