  
I have been reading this for the past two (2) weeks, and it was nothing short of beautiful.

This play by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus is divided into 3: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers and Furies.

  
**The first act** concerns the conclusion of the famous trojan war whereby the two brothers of Atreus: Menelaus and King Agamemnon go to troy to wage war after Paris, the prince of Troy, steals Helena, Menelaus' father. The war was in part sanctioned by Zeus since Paris' act broke xenia (guest-friendship) i.e., the guest-law. And Zeus is invoked to guarantee that law. 

Whilst going to Troy, they faced a lot of hurdles including men dying and facing famine. The hurdles were castigated by Artemis who was angered by the waging of war on Troy. Artemis is against the bloodshed being the protector of the defenceless. Artemis blocks the fleet until the Greeks pay a horrific price demanded by her i.e., she demands Iphigenia's (daughter of Agamemnon) blood before she'll release the winds. To appease the goddess, the king sacrifices his daughter., and the Greeks are able to match forth towards troy and get victory.  


King Agamemnon returns home victorious from the Trojan War. His wife, Clytemnestra, learns of the sacrifice and decides to murder the King while he was bathing. She conspires the death of her king with, Aegisthus her lover and the next heir to the throne, the son of Theyssus whose sons were murdered by Agamemnon's father, Atreus.

**The second act** involves Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's son, Orestes, who had been banished as a child, returns home. He finds his sister mourning the death of his father, and Apollo orders him to kill his mother and her lover so as to avenge his father. And if he does not, he shall wonder Earth as a mad man. He does as ordered, and immediately afterwards, he flees from his hometown since his mother's spirit invoke the Furies to chase him. The furies are goddesses of vengeance who avenge people who kill their own blood relatives.

**The third act** **d**etails Orestes fleeing to Apollo's shrine at Delphi for protection. Apollo purifies him but can't make the Furies stop hunting him, so he sends Orestes on to Athens to stand trial before the goddess Athena. Athena creates the first homicide court, a jury of Athenian citizens (12 Athenian citizens) hears the case and hears both sides i.e., the furies and Orestes and Apollo. Remarkably, Apollo acts as Orestes' lawyer. 

After the hearing, the 12 citizens retreat to cast votes as to the guilty-ness of Orestes and the votes are tied.

Athena casts the deciding vote in favour of Apollo, and Orestes is acquitted.  She then persuades the furious Furies to accept a new, honoured role in Athens instead of continuing their ancient path of blood-vengeance. Essentially, the furies are granted a permanent, guaranteed honour comprising of an eternal cult, priesthood and sacrifices. That is, they are worshipped like the gods instead of being used as vengeance-ghosts for hire by the spirits of the dead.

My thoughts and observations on the above are as follows:

1. Purification only cleanses ritual pollution but does not settle the issue of guilt. Apollo protects Orestes by purifying his blood of the pollution caused by the murder of his mother. He even lulls the Furies to sleep so that Orestes could escape. However, his powers, despite being a god, are actually limited to just that. He is unable to absolve Orestes of his crime. It therefore seems that The Furies' right to pursue kin-killers is outside Apollo's authority to cancel by decree.  Apollo's solution was to send Orestes to Athens for an actual trial rather than pretend his own protection was a final answer.

  
2. A flaw exists in the rule of blood-kin murder. The furies' jurisdiction is over blood-kin murder and not between affinity-kin murder i.e., wife and husband murder.  A husband and wife are kin only by marriage (affinity), not blood. So, under the Furies' own rules, killing a husband simply doesn't qualify, no matter how serious the act. This is strange since Clytemnestra's ghost has to personally wake the sleeping Furies and remind them, she's been "dishonoured among the dead" with no one avenging her. 

Moreover, the Furies never avenged the murder of Iphigenia which should, by the kin-blood logic, put her squarely within Furies territory. By my own logic, then the reason for this was: (1) because Iphigenia's death was a religious sacrifice under compulsion by Artemis and not a private murder;

(2) Agamenon's humility and understanding of his treacherous act. Agamenon finds the act horrifying and does not celebrate his triumph over Trojans. 

  
3. **The Trojan War itself was unjustified**, in my own opinion, but that would not have saved the Atreus' blood-line from the Thesytes' curse. Act 1 includes a grim chorus that exhibits wordplay on Helen's name, calling her "ship-destroyer, man-destroyer, city-destroyer", thus building a sense of foreboding into the play itself. Menelaus decided to marry Helen despite the foreboding; the war was avoidable and fighting was as much about household honour and less than higher justice. Whereas Zeus does authorize the war as retribution for a guest-law violation (xenia), the war was fought for dynastic pride. 

  
Further, the chorus opening in Act 1, just after the return of Agamemnon, is lamentitious. The kingdom is filled with grumbles about urns of ash coming home for 'the sake of another man's wife'. There is bitterness among the people. The play's pace slows down, unlike the fast pace employed in Act 1; Aeschylus is not writing a hero's home-coming, rather it was a reckoning of the negative effects of the war on the kingdom and its legitimacy among the populace. 

  
4. The house of Atreus were pawns in the conflict between Zeus and Artemis. Zeus Xenios sanctions the war as retribution for Paris's violation of guest-friendship thus making the Greek's action have a divine backing. Artemis, separately, is angered and demands Iphigenia's blood before she'll release the winds. The gods literally set up a trap and it's the mortals who have to walk that gauntlet and bear all the consequences.

Orestes is the biggest casualty. He is exiled as a child through no fault of his own, then handed an impossible command by Apollo i.e., to avenge his father's death by killing his mother, then hunted by ancient chthonic powers for obeying it, unable to go home either way. The divine conflict is quite absurd and has negative effects on the people.

5. Old order was inherently biased against women. Clytemnestra's ghost has to personally appear and rouse the sleeping Furies to go after Orestes, reminding them of the libations she poured them and complaining that she is "dishonoured among the dead" because no one is avenging *her* murder. The fact that she has to make this appeal at all, that the Furies weren't already on the case, is itself a sign that the mythic order left her death outside the normal machinery of vengeance.

  
Additionally, Apollo's defence of Orestes at trial brings out the bias and makes it starker. Outrageously, he argues that the mother isn't even the "true" parent in the sense that it is the father who supplies the essential life (the seed) and the mother merely hosts and nurses it, like soil for a planted seed. And on the basis of that argument, killing a father is the "real" kin-crime, while a mother is almost incidental to the child's blood thus minimizing Oreste's actions.

Clytemnestra's reason for killing Agamemnon i.e., she was avenging her daughter, is diluted and watered down by her adulterous-ness. 

All in all, this was a wonderful read and gave lots of insight into the Olympian gods' law and order.









The house of Atreus being the Agamemnon, the Libation bearers, and the Furies book by Aeschylus