The Complete Aeschylus, Volume I: The Oresteia by Aeschylus
25. Lebeck, Oresteia (see footnote 8), 1–2.
26. These images are a subset of a larger group associated with rites of sacrifice, central to the trilogy’s insistent figuration of murder as a ritual act. The definitive treatment is Zeitlin (see footnote 9), 463–508. The discussion here draws on material published in Peter Burian, “Zeus Sotêr Tritos and Some Triads in Aeschylus’ Oresteia,” American Journal of Philology 107 (1986), 332–42, to which the reader is referred for further details.
27. John Herington, Aeschylus, New Haven, 1986,123–24. For the myth of the mating of Heaven and Earth, cf. this beautiful fragment from Aeschylus’ lost Danaids, spoken by Aphrodite: (Fragment 44 Radt [TrGF]; translation quoted from Peter Burian, Aeschylus: The Suppliants [Princeton, 1991], xxi.)
Holy heaven longs to pierce the land,
and longing for marriage seizes earth. Rain,
falling from the liquid sky, impregnates earth,
and she, to benefit mankind, gives birth
to grass for the herds and to grain, Demeter’s gift
of life. From the showers of this wedding flow
the seasons when trees bear their flowers and fruits.
Of all these things I also am the cause.
28. Telos and its compounds are used in the Oresteia with a frequency and complexity akin to that of dikê-words. There is a good, though partial, discussion in Lebeck, Oresteia (see footnote 8), 68–73; see further Zeitlin, “Corrupted Sacrifice” (see footnote 9), esp. 464–67 and 475–80. Another irony latent in Agamemnon, 1637–38 / 1432–33, and elsewhere in the trilogy where telos is used in connection with death and the destruction of the family, is that telos is commonly used to refer to the consummation of a marriage rite, and thus to marriage in general. Hera, as the presiding goddess of marriage is often given the epithet teleia, and she appears in this guise (“Hera, the fulfiller”) at Eumenides 238 / 124. Apollo is there accusing the Erinyes of “spitting on” marriage vows, but Athena will at last persuade them to accept sacrifices on behalf of “the fulfillment [telos] of the marriage rite” (Eumenides 973 / 835).
29. See Diskin Clay, “Aeschylus’ Trigeron Mythos,” Hermes 97 (1969), 1–9.
30. For a systematic treatment of the metaphor of wrestling in the Oresteia, see Michael Poliakoff, “The Third Fall in the Oresteia,” American Journal of Philology 101 (1980), 251–59.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
ON THE TRANSLATION
Agamemnon
Libation Bearers
Eumenides
NOTES
Agamemnon
Libation Bearers
Eumenides
GLOSSARY
FOR FURTHER READING
Aeschylus, The Complete Aeschylus, Volume I: The Oresteia