“When you see me you, fail to recognize me
But when you glanced at this lock of hair
Or followed along the shape of my feet,
You took flight and imagined me there!”
Today we come to the second play of the Oresteia, the Libation-Bearers, which follows the death of Agamemnon some time later with the return of his son Orestes. Motifs from this play remained well-known enough that audiences of the later Elektras by Sophocles and Euripides could be relied upon to recall its moments of recognition and the tension between the expectations placed on Euripides and his hesitation when finally facing the deed.
Along with the rest of the trilogy, the Libation-Bearers earned first prize at the City Dionysia in 458 BCE. But what was it about these plays that charmed the judges and audiences? This play certainly does not present the heroic narrative one might expect from the Homeric Odyssey, where Orestes is repeated hailed as a returning avenger and a model for Telemachus. This Orestes reunites joyously with his sister and joins her in a shared song of lament that takes up the central portion of the play. When the time to act arrives, pushed on by Apollo’s prophecies, Orestes hesitates before taking his mother’s life. And then he is cursed by the furies, pushing him into the exile resolved in the Eumenides.
The story of Agamemnon and Orestes hinges on the balance of justice and vengeance. The horrible logic of the later faces up to the demands of the former and comes up short. In the distance between the two, humankind continues to suffer.
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 387-394
“May I sing a song of victory
Over a slaughtered man
And a woman as she dies—
Why should I hide
The kind of plan floating in my mind?
Before my heart’s prow
A driving anger blows,
Hatred’s rage.”
Chorus – Carlos Bellato, Tamieka Chavis, and Sara Valentine
Slave – Sara Valentine
Special Guests: Anna Uhlig and Oliver Taplin
Special Director: Liz Fisher
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 585-95
“The earth feeds many things,
Terrible griefs of fear,
And the folds of the sea
Are full with similar monsters.
Lights burning between
Sky and earth cause harm
To creatures on wing and on foot.
You might even mention the wind-borne rage of hurricanes.
But who can speak of the arrogant
Mind of a man or the all-daring
Lusts in a woman’s thoughts,
The joined paths of mortal ruin?”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Associate Director: Liz Fisher Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Dramaturg: Emma Pauly Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 434-438
“You speak of complete dishonor!
She will payback the dishonoring of my father
With willing gods
With my willing hands.
When I have cut her out, may I die too.”
October 28 Libation Bearers, Aeschylus; translation by O. Taplin
November 4 Eumenides, Aeschylus
with Ellen McLaughlin (Barnard College) and Andrew Simpson (Catholic Univeristy of America); translation by O. Taplin
November 11 Medea, Euripides
with Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford)
Pieter Lastman – De offerstrijd tussen Orestes en Pylades
Aeschylus, Libation-Bearers 548-550
“It is right—because she raised a terrible monster—
For her to die violently. Once transformed into a snake,
I kill her. That’s what this dream is telling us.”
“Citizens, this elder pride of Argives,
I will feel not shame at revealing
my spousal love to you. In time, human fear
turns to dust. I will tell you of my own
miserable live, not something I learned from others,
all that time when this man was below the city of Troy.”
This week we turn to the first play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Agamemnon. How famous is the story of Orestes and his father? So famous that it is the story Zeus contemplates at the beginning of the Homeric Odyssey as he looks down in frustration on the man who murdered Agamemnon. Atreus’ son, Agamemnon, appears in the middle of the epic (book 11) and at its end, complaining at each point bitterly about his disloyal wife, Klytemnestra, and praising the vengeance meted out by his son Orestes.
The story of the family of Agamemnon, however, extends before the Trojan War and then after until the death of Achilles’ son Neoptolemos. it starts back with Tantalos and Pelops in Asia Minor before it moves to the Peloponnese through sacrilegious meals, infanticide and fraternal war, all themes highlighted in the main cause of Klytemnestra’s rage, the killing of their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis.
If this story sounds familiar, it is because it is! In this series, we have heard variations of this tale from Sophocles and Euripides, contemplating both its beginnings and its ends. Indeed, ancient audiences would have been as familiar with the story as Zeus at the beginning of the Odyssey, shaking their heads and wondering how this version will play out.
This play begins with Agamemnon’s return home, but focuses on Klytemnestra’s anger and her power. It features some of the most challenging and memorable choral odes extant from the ancient world. It has a raving, yet lucid Kassandra. And at the core of the play, a murderous king’s bloody return home.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 914-917
“Child of Leda, guardian of my home,
“You have spoken aptly to my absence,
Since you have gone on at length. But proper praise
Ought to be a prize won from different sources.”
Agamemnon/Aegisthus – Tim Delap
Watchman/Cassandra – Evelyn Miler
Clytemnestra – Eunice Roberts
Chorus – Carlos Bellato and Tamieka Chavis
Special Guests: Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin
Special Director: Toph Marshall
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 684-696
“Whoever pronounced a name
So thoroughly true?
Wasn’t it someone we’d not see
Guiding the tongue with luck
From a foreknowledge of fate?
Who named the spear-bride,
Struggled-over woman
Helen?
For, appropriately,
That ship-killer [hele-nas], man-killer [hel-andros]
City-killer [hele-ptolis], sailed
From her fine-spun, curtains
On the breath of great Zephyr
and many-manned bands
Of shield-bearers followed
The vanished journey struck
By the oars to the banks
Of leafy Simois
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Associate Director: Liz Fisher Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Dramaturg: Emma Pauly Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen 176-183
“[Zeus] puts mortals on
The journey of comprehension.
And made this the powerful law:
We learn by suffering.
Pain-recalling trouble trickles
Through the heart in sleep—
And wisdom comes just so
To the unwilling.
The gods seated on their sacred seats
Bestow a hard grace I think.”
If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves, and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions far flung and unanswered, Aeschylus makes these little dramas (the Agamemnon has 1663 lines; Lear about 2600) tremendous by stretching every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors, by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for instance–
ὀμμάτων δ’ ἐν ἀχηνίαις
ἔρρει πᾶσ’ ᾿Αφροδίτα.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.
Aeschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running use of metaphor he will amplify and give us, not the thing itself, but the reverberation and reflection which, taken into his mind, the thing has made; close enough to the original to illustrate it, remote enough to heighten, enlarge, and make splendid.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 37-39
“This house itself, if it found a voice,
Would be able to speak most clearly. I am talking
Willingly to those who know and forget for those who know nothing.”
“He said a lot of other nice things about women too That they don’t betray people or sue them That they don’t overthrow democracy, and many other good things too.”
This weekend in the spirit of everything horrifying and electoral, we bring you a break from the normal routine: tragedy on Wednesdays, but comedy tonight! Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen (Ekklesiazusai) was performed in 391 BCE in critique of the Athenian government. It has everything a good Old Comedy should: surprisingly ribald sex jokes and a run of flatulence and defecation humor any grown-up toddler could love.
Despite the less-than-elevated content of the play, this comedy is not for the young or the light-hearted. The basic premise–that women take over the state to run it better than the men–weaponizes misogyny to criticize the running of the state. So, Aristophanes uses the worst ridicule of women to highlight the absurdity and danger of Athenian politics. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but Aristophanes is going to crush them.
This performance will bring the majority of the play to the virtual stage with tricks, gags, and a slight softening of the play’s more hateful tendencies. Come for the fart-jokes but stay for the political resonance as we all hope desperately for something to change
2020 is starting to make me think that maybe strange women lying in ponds distributing swords may be worth a try for a more stable form of government
Praxagora – Vivien Carter First Women/Mrs Lush – Jessica Toltzis Second Women/ Mrs Generous – Tamieka Chavis Third Women/ Mrs Happy – Ursula Early Belpyrus – Paul Westwood Neighbour – Kyle Stockburger Chremes – Paul O’Mahony Maid – Noree Victoria Chorus – Lanah Koelle
Special Guest, Francisco Barrenechea
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen 173-179
“My share of this country is equal to yours. I am worn down and annoyed By how this state’s affairs are going. I watch as we always choose scoundrels As leaders. Even if one turns out good for a day Then he’s downright corrupt for another ten. Then we trust another? He makes our suffering worse.
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Associate Director: Liz Fisher Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Dramaturg: Emma Pauly Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen 473-475
“There’s some ancient saying of our founding fathers: However many foolish and stupid things we plan, Everything will turn out better to our advantage anyway.”
October 21 Agamemnon, Aeschylus with Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford); translation by O. Taplin
October 28 Libation Bearers, Aeschylus; translation by O. Taplin
November 4 Eumenides, Aeschylus with Ellen McLaughlin (Barnard College) and Andrew Simpson (Catholic Univeristy of America); translation by O. Taplin
Aristophanes, Assemblywomen 590-592
“I suggest that everyone should share everything in common And to live equally: this man won’t be rich, that one won’t be poor, No more one man farming a massive field while another has too little for a grave”
Last week, we turned to the most tragic of epics (according to Aristotle, at least), Homer’s Iliad.
This week we remain in Trojan War material but return to tragedy with the Rhesus, traditionally attributed to Euripides. This play covers the same basic events of Iliad 10 where Diomedes and Odysseus go out to spy on the Trojans at night and end up slaughtering the Thracian king Rhesus and his men to steal his horses. Euripides’ play give us a little more from both sides: we see a somewhat more monstrous Hektor, get to hear from Rhesus himself and are invited to see the slaughter as a calamity worthy of attention on its own.
In performing the play. we are less interested in whether or not it is genuinely Euripides–and its authenticity has been doubted for some time because of its contents and its style–than we are in how and why this play may have appealed to ancient audiences and what it has to tell us about the reception of Trojan War figures on the Athenian stage. We see Odysseus in many different plays, but having Hektor and his allies in a performance is a rare thing indeed. This play also invites us to think about the fixity of scenes from the Iliad we possess and the complex relationship between performative genres and audience expectations.
Euripides’ Rhesus 182
“It is right to cast your life in the dice game of fate For things that are worthy.”
“…I love to speak the truth All the time and I am never a duplicitous man. Long, long ago it would have been right for you to come And share our pain…”
“Ajax doesn’t seem to me to be any lesser than him Nor does Tydeus’ son. But that Odysseus, He is the most twisted crook, a man bold enough to be arrogant, One who has outraged this land most of all.”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Associate Director: Liz Fisher Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Dramaturg: Emma Pauly Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Euripides, Rhesus 756-57
“In addition to our suffering, this has been handled With the greatest shame. This doubles the pain.”
Saturday, October 17 Assemblywomen, Aristophanes with Francisco Barrenechea (University of Maryland, College Park)
October 21 Agamemnon, Aeschylus with Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford); translation by O. Taplin
October 28 Libation Bearers, Aeschylus; translation by O. Taplin
November 4 Eumenides, Aeschylus with Ellen McLaughlin (Barnard College) and Andrew Simpson (Catholic Univeristy of America); translation by O. Taplin
Euripides, Rhesus 938-942
“Athena, you deserve the blame for this. Odysseus and the son of Tydeus didn’t do it Don’t imagine you sneaked by me. Still, my sister Muses and I honor your city Most of all….”
This week, we turn to the most tragic of epics (according to Aristotle, at least), Homer’s Iliad
As everyone knows, the Iliad begins with the rage of Achilles. As many of us forget, it ends not with the Trojan Horse or the death of Achilles, but instead with the burial of horse-taming Hektor. I think it is probably dangerous to ask a Homerist to tell you about the Iliad, because so often we don’t know where to start, whether it should be in thinking about its relationship with the Odyssey or about what it means to say the word “Homer”. True Story: many years ago, while patronizing a drinking establishment in Queens, my wife asked me to tell her what the Iliad was about. After about 45 minutes, she asked how much more there was to it. I had not even finished book 1 yet…
Ancient performers of the epics didn’t have these challenges because audiences grew up hearing stories about most of the events and characters they would be singing about and because the performance contexts didn’t expect them to tell the whole story. We don’t know a lot about the actual performance contexts and practices of Homeric poetry in the ancient world (see the work of José Gonzalez on rhapsodes, Casey Dué’s work on multiformity, Egbert Bakker’s From Formula to Poetics or any of Gregory Nagy’s Poetry as Performanceor Plato’s Rhapsogy and Homer’s Music), but it seems likely that the stories were performed in episodes at various occasions and at times in monumental performances at festivals. How these performances were prepared is another issue: some think they were memorized from a script, others think they were composed in performance. I tend towards the latter belief with the acknowledgement that even when something is composed in performance, there are various degress of fixity from one performance to another and one singer to another…
And, here again, I have started to trail off. Often people talk about performance of song within Homer to start us thinking about epic performance (the songs of Demodokos and Phemios in the Odyssey; Achilles singing to his lyre in the Iliad) but there’s some evidence outside the poems too. One passage comes from Plato’s Ion:
Plato, Ion 535d-e
Ion: Now this proof is super clear to me, Socrates! I’ll tell you without hiding anything: whenever I say something pitiable, my eyes fill with tears. Whenever I say something frightening, my hair stands straight up in fear and my heart leaps!
Socrates: What is this then, Ion? Should we say that a person is in their right mind when they are all dressed up in decorated finery and gold crowns at the sacrifices or the banquests and then, even though they haven’t lost anything, they are afraid still even though they stand among twenty thousand friendly people and there is no one attacking him or doing him wrong?
Ion: Well, by Zeus, not at all, Socrates, TBH.
Socrates: So you understand that you rhapsodes produce the same effects on most of your audiences?
Ion: Oh, yes I do! For I look down on them from the stage at each moment to see them crying and making terrible expressions, awestruck by what is said. I need to pay special attention to them since if I make them cry, then I get to laugh when I receive their money. But if I make them laugh, then I’ll cry over the money I’ve lost!”
Note in this passage that Plato’s Socrates assumes that Ion is faithfull performing a ‘text’ ascribed to Homer and that they both identify as salient features of the performance the context (“sacrifices” and “festivals”) the emotional affect (crying and carrying on, channeling the emotive content of the scenes) and the impact on the audience (making them cry too) all while emphasizing the material benefit accruing to a rhapsode who pleases his audiences.
When I think about Homeric performance, I think a lot about how little we know about the audiences and their responses and how crucial this was to the shape of the poems we have. I too often forget that the performers were an important part of this process in shaping the reception through their use of intonation, voice, gesture, and tune. So, in our readings from the Iliad today, I will be thinking about the parts, and not the whole, and how performance creates a new text of its own.
We’ve selected some passages today for performance from different parts of the epic to give an idea of the power of the whole and to provide a range of characters for our actors. We will get some of the debate in book 1, some family scenes in Troy, and a whole range of lament and regret. What more could one ask for a Wednesday?
“But, you great shamepot, we follow you so that you feel joy, As we collect honor for Menelaos and you, dog-face, From the Trojans—you don’t shudder at this, you don’t care.”
Selected Passages (Using the Stanley Lombardo translation with permission from Hackett)
Iliad 1 Agamemnon and Achilles’ argument
Iliad 6 Hector and Andromache
Iliad 19 Agamemnon and Achilles reconcile – may be cut for time
Iliad 22 Andromache’s first lament for Hector
Iliad 24 Achilles and Priam
Iliad 24 Priam, Hecuba, Andromache and Helen laments for Hector
Iliad 1.224–228 [Achilles Addressing Agamemnon]
“Wine-sod! Dog-eyes! You have the heart of a deer! You never suffer to arm yourself to enter battle with the army Nor to set an ambush with the best of the Achaeans. That seems like death itself to you!”
“After a while, Diomedes good-at-the warcry, addressed them: “I will fight with you first because you are being foolish, son of Atreus, Which is right, Lord, in the assembly. So don’t get angry at all.”
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Associate Director: Liz Fisher Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Dramaturg: Emma Pauly Executive Producer: Lanah Koelle (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Poster Artist: John Koelle Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies)
Iliad 21.461-465
“Then lord Apollo the far-shooter answered, “Earthshaker, you would not think that I would be prudent If indeed I fought with you over mortals, Wretched men who are like the leaves now flourish Until they grow full, eat the fruit of fields, And then they diminish until they die…”
October 14 Rhesus, Euripides with Mary Ebbott (College of the Holy Cross)
Saturday, October 17 Assemblywomen, Aristophanes with Francisco Barrenechea (University of Maryland, College Park)
October 21 Agamemnon, Aeschylus with Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford)
Iliad 24.503-6
“Achilles, respect the gods and take pity, Once you think of your own father. I am even more pitiable, Since I endure what no other mortal person ever has, To reach my hands to the lips of the man who slaughtered my child.”
“You, child, will also either follow me Where you will toil completing the wretched works Of a cruel master or some Achaean will grab you And throw you from the wall to your evil destruction Because he still feels anger at Hektor killing his brother Or father or son, since many a man of the Achaeans dined On the endless earth under Hektor’s hands.”
“After heaping up the mound [sêma] they returned. Then Once they were well gathered they shared a fine feast In the halls of the god-nourished king, Priam. Thus they were completing the burial of horse-taming Hektor.”
