Eumenides

As the fourth episode begins, the setting of the play changes yet again: The audience or reader is now north of the Acropolis on the Areopagus, or the “Hill of Ares,” where different kinds of cases, including murder cases, were tried when Aeschylus wrote. The powers of the council of the Areopagus increased over the Archaic Period, before being largely disenfranchised in 462/461 BCE following the reforms of the politician Ephialtes. It is within this cultural and historical context that the trial of Aeschylus’s Eumenides—performed in 458 BCE—should be understood.

The fourth episode of Eumenides can be read as an advertisement for the importance of the Areopagus, whose powers are demarcated by Athena, the patron goddess of Athens herself. This is a good example of etiology, that is, a myth that describes the origins of historical institutions or practices. Such etiological myths can be found in many Attic tragedies (and other kinds of Greek literature as well), which is a good indication of how the ancient Greeks regarded the continuity between the historical present and the remote mythical past. To Aeschylus’s Athenian audience, Orestes’s trial on the Areopagus connected the events of the play to their own world in a very concrete way.

In Orestes’s trial, the theme of Old Versus New Gods comes to a head. To the Furies, Orestes’s actions speak for themselves: Orestes has spilled kindred blood by killing his mother and must therefore continue to be punished. In arguing that a child is biologically related only to their father, however, Apollo disproves the Furies and wins the day. Orestes is acquitted, ending the cycle of violence and retaliation that characterized the first two plays of the Oresteia: At last, justice has been carried out (and it is the city of Athens that has seen to this).

But much more than Orestes’s acquittal is on the line here. First, there is another etiology connecting the mythical events of the play to the contemporary present, for as Orestes takes his leave, he expresses his gratitude to Athens by promising eternal friendship between his city—Argos—and the city of Athens. This promise explicitly assigns a mythical origin to a treaty the Athenians had recently signed with Argos at the time the play was first performed in 458 BCE. Moreover, Apollo’s successful argument about the biological definition of paternity legally establishes the superiority of the new patriarchal gods (ruled by the father Zeus) over the old matriarchal gods (ruled by mother figures such as Gaia and Night), speaking to the theme of Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy. The Furies, naturally, do not easily accept this paradigm shift, but they are eventually coaxed into assuming new cult honors in Athens under the guidance of Athena, who is uniquely placed to reconcile the old gods and the new. For though Athena is female, she was born directly from her father Zeus: She has one foot in both worlds. Athena’s effective effort launches another etiology, for as the Furies accept their new honors at Athens (becoming the Eumenides of the play’s title, or “Kindly Ones”), they assume the place and function given in historical Athens to the Semnai Theai, or “Holy Goddesses,” which were worshiped in connection with the prosperity and justice of Athens. As the Furies are escorted to the temple of these goddesses in the exodus of Aeschylus’s play, they move—almost literally—from the world of myth to the contemporary Athens of the fifth century BCE.