Eumenides

Eumenides is the third and last play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedy that has survived. It takes up where Libation Bearers ends: Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra, and the Erinyes, the old goddesses who punish bloodshed within a family, are on his track. The play opens at Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi, where Orestes sits as a suppliant, and then moves to Athens, where Athena sets up a court of citizens to judge the case. The votes come out equal, and Orestes goes free by Athena’s earlier declaration (lines 734–753). The Erinyes threaten to poison the land, and Athena persuades them to accept a permanent home and honors in Athens instead (lines 778–1031).

Date and Historical Background

According to the ancient hypothesis (introduction) to Agamemnon, the trilogy was produced in the archonship of Philocles, that is 458 BC, and Aeschylus won the first prize with Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides and the satyr play Proteus, of which almost nothing survives. The text of the play itself says nothing about a festival or a year.

What the text does provide is a good deal of Athenian local color. Athena explains that she has come “from the Scamander,” where she had been taking possession of land that the Achaean leaders had given to the sons of Theseus as a special prize (lines 397–402). She calls the Areopagus the seat of the Amazons’ camp when they attacked the city out of hostility to Theseus, and the place where they sacrificed to Ares, from which the hill takes its name (lines 685–690). Orestes promises that Argos will never march against Athens (lines 762–777). Each of these passages places the myth in a specific landscape and links it to the city’s own institutions, and it is through such passages that the play speaks to an Athenian audience.

Characters and Setting

Characters

• The Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, who speaks the prologue
• Orestes, who has killed his mother Clytemnestra and comes as a suppliant
• Apollo, whose oracle ordered the killing and who now protects Orestes
• Hermes, addressed by Apollo (lines 89–93) to guide Orestes on his way; he has no lines
• The ghost of Clytemnestra, who wakes the Furies
• The Chorus of Erinyes (Furies), ancient goddesses of vengeance for blood shed within a family
• Athena, patron goddess of Athens, who founds the court
• The jurors, a herald and the escort of women, who appear in the court and procession scenes without speaking, except for the escorts’ closing song

Setting

The prologue is set in front of and inside Apollo’s temple at Delphi. From line 235 on, the scene is Athens: first before the image of Athena, where Orestes arrives, and then at the Areopagus, the hill of Ares, where the trial takes place (lines 566–753). The play ends on the way from the court toward the Furies’ new home beneath the city (lines 1003–1047).

Summary of Eumenides

Prologue

The Pythia opens with a prayer that honors the earlier holders of the oracle in order: Earth first, then Themis, then Phoebe, who gave the sanctuary to Phoebus as a birthday gift, and so to Apollo, who came to Delphi from Delos by way of Attica (lines 1–33). She then enters the shrine and comes out again on hands and knees, terrified (lines 34–63).

“Terrible to tell, terrible for the eyes to see,” she says (line 34), and she describes what she has found. At the navel stone sits a man defiled in the eyes of the gods, his hands dripping blood, holding a freshly drawn sword and an olive branch wrapped in white wool (lines 40–45). In front of him a band of women sleeps in the seats. She calls them not women but Gorgons, then rejects that comparison too, and says she has seen paintings of the Harpies carrying away Phineus’ meal, but these are wingless and black and wholly repulsive; they snore, and their eyes drip hateful moisture (lines 46–56). She leaves the rest to Apollo, who is a healer, a seer and a purifier of houses (lines 60–63).

The doors open, and Apollo is there with Orestes. He promises never to betray him, to stand by him near and far, and he points to the sleeping Furies, old girls with whom no god, man or beast ever mixes and who dwell in the darkness under the earth (lines 64–73). He tells Orestes to flee: they will drive him over land and sea, but he should go to the city of Pallas and clasp her ancient image, where Apollo will find judges and persuasive words to free him from his troubles, since, as Apollo says, it was he who persuaded Orestes to kill his mother (lines 74–84). Orestes asks him to remember, and Apollo calls on Hermes, his brother, to guide the suppliant (lines 85–93).

When they are gone, the ghost of Clytemnestra rises and tries to wake the sleeping Furies. She complains that she, who died by a matricide’s hand, is scorned among the other dead and that no god is angry on her behalf. She reminds them of her libations and night-time offerings, and says Orestes has escaped like a fawn that leaps from the middle of the nets (lines 94–116). The Furies stir in their sleep, groaning and muttering, while she urges them on, and at last they wake (lines 117–139).

First Parodos (First Entrance Song)

The Furies wake with cries that their quarry has fallen out of the nets and gone, and that sleep has made them lose the catch (lines 143–148). They turn on Apollo: the son of Zeus is a thief, a young god who has ridden down the old goddesses, honoring a suppliant who is godless and bitter to his parents, and stealing away a matricide though he is a god (lines 149–154). They go on to say that the oracle’s center is stained with blood (lines 162–177).

First Episode

Apollo comes out and drives them from his shrine with threats. He says he will shoot them with a winged serpent from his golden bow, so that they vomit the black foam of the blood they have sucked, and he tells them to go to places where there are beheadings, the putting out of eyes, stoning and impaling, a lion’s cave in which they would be at home, and not to pollute an oracle (lines 179–197). The Furies answer with a long exchange, short line against short line. They say it was Apollo who was the cause, because he told Orestes to kill his mother, and Apollo replies that the marriage bond between husband and wife is under the care of Zeus and Hera, and that a woman who kills her husband is no less guilty (lines 198–234). The Furies do not give up, and they set out after Orestes.

The scene now changes to Athens. Orestes arrives at the image of Athena and addresses the goddess, saying he has come on Apollo’s command, that his hands are no longer fresh with blood, that he has been worn down by contact with other houses and with the roads of mortals, and that he will wait there for the outcome of the trial (lines 235–243).

Second Parodos (Second Entrance Song)

The Furies enter in pursuit, tracking him by the smell of blood like hounds after a wounded fawn (lines 244–253). They sing that a mother’s blood, once spilled, cannot be got back from the ground, and that Orestes will pay for it out of his own living body: they will drink his blood, wither him and drag him down to Hades, where those who have wronged gods, guests or parents get what they deserve (lines 254–275).

Second Episode

Orestes answers that he has been taught by misfortune many rites of purification and knows when to speak and when to be silent. On this occasion, he says, he was ordered to speak by a wise teacher. The blood on his hand has grown dull and faded, and the stain of the matricide has been washed away at Apollo’s hearth by the sacrifice of a pig (lines 276–283). He then calls on Athena, with a pure mouth, to be his ally, and says that in return she will win Orestes, his land and the people of Argos as faithful allies for all time, without a spear being raised (lines 287–298). Wherever she is, he adds, she can hear.

The Furies reply with the “binding song” that they sing over their victim: a hymn of madness and frenzy, of mind-destroying distraction, which binds the mind and cannot be played on the lyre (lines 299–333). They sing that they were given this office by Fate when they were born, that no god may share in their power, that Zeus has refused to have anything to do with them as a hateful, blood-dripping tribe, and that they bring down heavy-footed ruin on those who spill the blood of kin, so that, falling, the person does not even know why (lines 334–380). They end by asking who among men does not feel awe and fear on hearing their law, which was fixed for them by the gods (lines 381–396).

Third Episode

Athena arrives from the Scamander, having heard the cry from afar, and is astonished to see the strange creatures (lines 397–414). She asks them and the stranger who they are. The Furies introduce themselves as the dark children of Night, called Curses in their houses beneath the earth (lines 415–417), and they explain their office. Orestes, in turn, says who he is, where he comes from and what has brought him there, and, when Athena questions him, he tells of his homecoming, the killing and Apollo’s part in it (lines 436–469).

Athena then tells them that the matter is too weighty for any mortal to judge, and that it is not lawful for her to decide a case of murder that attracts such sharp anger either. Orestes has come as a suppliant, clean and harmless, and she respects him, but the Furies have a destiny that cannot be easily dismissed, and if they fail to win, a poison from their hearts will fall upon the land as an unbearable plague (lines 470–481). Whichever way she turns, she says, is hard. She decides to select judges of homicide who will be bound by an oath, and to make that a lasting institution; she tells the parties to call their witnesses and the proofs on oath, and she will return after choosing the best of her citizens (lines 482–489). The number of the jurors is not given anywhere in the speech.

In the stasimon that follows, the Furies sing that if this matricide wins, there will be a revolution in the new laws, and parents will suffer at their children’s hands in time to come (lines 490–498). There is a time, they sing, when fear is good and ought to sit like a watchman over the mind, and it is useful to learn good sense under strain. They urge the Athenians to praise neither a life without a ruler nor one under a despot: god gives power to the middle way, and insolence is the child of impiety, while a sound mind brings the happiness that all men pray for (lines 517–565).

Fourth Episode

Athena has a herald proclaim to the people and sound the trumpet, so that, now that the court is assembled, everyone is silent and learns her ordinances (lines 566–573). Apollo arrives and says he has come as a witness, because Orestes is his suppliant and was purified at his hearth, and as an advocate who will speak for him, since he accepts the responsibility for the killing (lines 574–581).

The Furies question Orestes in short, quick lines. Did he kill his mother? He did, and does not deny it (line 588). How? With a sword, which he drew against her throat (line 592). Who persuaded him? The oracles of Apollo, who is a witness to it (lines 593–594). Why did he not drive her out while she lived? She was not related by blood to the man she had killed, he says, and the Furies shoot back that he himself is of his mother’s blood. Orestes turns to Apollo: let him say whether the killing was just (lines 604–613).

Apollo says that he spoke the command of Zeus, and that the death of a noble king, honored with Zeus-given scepters, at the hands of a woman is not like other deaths: she welcomed him home from the war kindly, then, as he stepped from the bath, wrapped him in a robe and struck him down as he was entangled in it (lines 614–639). The Furies point out that Zeus himself bound his old father Cronus, so how can he be said to honor a father’s death over a mother’s (lines 640–643). Apollo answers that fetters can be undone, but when the dust has drunk a dead man’s blood there is no rising again, and that his father Zeus has made no charm for that (lines 644–651).

He then gives the argument for which the scene is best remembered: the mother is not the parent of the child she is said to have borne, but the nurse of the newly sown seed, and the one who mounts is the parent, while she, as a stranger, keeps the sprout safe for another unless a god harms it (lines 657–661). As proof, he points to the judge herself, the daughter of Olympian Zeus, who was not nursed in the darkness of a womb, and whom no goddess could have borne (lines 662–666). He adds that he will make Athens and its army great, and that Orestes has been sent to the city so that he and his descendants may be faithful allies of Athena (lines 667–673).

Athena now speaks to the people of Attica. She announces that this court is to be the first to judge a case of spilled blood, that it will always exist for the army of Aigeus’ people, and she gives the history of the hill: the Amazons’ camp, the sacrifices to Ares and the name Areopagus (lines 681–690). In it, she says, the citizens’ reverence and their kindred fear will restrain wrongdoing by day and by night, as long as the citizens do not pollute their laws with bad streams, for one cannot find clear water to drink if it is fouled with mud. She advises them to honor neither anarchy nor despotism, and not to throw all that is fearful out of the city, for who among mortals, if he fears nothing, is just? Such a council, she says, is untouched by greed, reverent, quick to anger and a wakeful guard of the land over those who sleep (lines 691–706). The jurors are then told to rise, cast their ballots and decide, respecting their oath (lines 707–710).

While the pebbles are being gathered, the Furies and Apollo trade short threats, and the Furies warn that their anger will fall on the land if they lose (lines 711–733). Athena then says that it is her task to give the last judgment, and that she will add her vote to Orestes’. She has no mother who bore her, she says; she approves of the male in everything except marriage, with all her heart, and she is entirely her father’s child, so she will not give more weight to the death of a woman who killed her husband, the master of the house. Orestes wins even if the votes are equal (lines 734–741). As the ballots are emptied out, Orestes prays to Apollo, and the Furies call on Night, their mother, saying that this is either the end of life or the right to go on holding their honors (lines 744–747). Apollo urges the jurors to count carefully, since a single vote can raise up a house (lines 748–751). Athena then announces the result: the man has escaped the charge of bloodshed, for the count of the ballots is equal (lines 752–753).

Orestes thanks Athena, who has restored him to his house, and says that any Greek will now say the Argive has again a home in his father’s wealth, thanks to Pallas, Loxias and the third savior, Zeus (lines 754–761). He swears that, for all time, no leader of his land will ever bring a spear against this country. If anyone breaks the oath, he and the other dead will cause such misfortune with bad omens on their journeys that they will regret the effort, but to those who honor Athena’s city with a spear of alliance he will be gracious (lines 762–777).

The Furies, left behind, cry out against the younger gods who have ridden down the ancient laws and taken them out of their hands. Dishonored, they will let loose on the land the venom of their hearts, a drop that will bring lichen and barrenness and spread a blight that kills people (lines 778–792). Athena begs them not to take it so heavily: they have not been defeated, the verdict was an equal count and Zeus himself provided the clear testimony. She promises them seats and caves in this righteous land, with shining thrones by the hearths, and honors from the citizens (lines 793–807). The Furies repeat their song of grief and Athena keeps on, patient, until at last she makes her offer in full. She will put up with their anger, for they are older, though Zeus has given her good sense too; if they go to another land they will long for this one, and they will have a seat near the house of Erechtheus, with honors from processions of men and women such as no other mortals could offer them (lines 808–869). She asks only that they do not whet bloody spurs in the young or stir up civil war among her citizens, as if they had torn out the heart of fighting cocks, and that war come only from outside (lines 858–866). If they accept, she says, they will share in this most god-loved land (lines 867–869). She also tells them that she alone among the gods knows the keys of the house where Zeus’ thunderbolt is sealed, though she has no need of it (lines 826–829), and she promises them first fruits offered before births and marriages (lines 834–836). In the end she speaks of Persuasion as the force that has to do the work: if they respect the awe due to Persuasion, the charm and spell of her tongue, they should stay (lines 885–891).

Exodos (Exit Song)

The Furies at last give in. They will accept a home with Athena and not dishonor the city, which Zeus and Ares protect as the stronghold of the gods and the glory of the Greek deities (lines 916–920). They pray for good things on the land: that the fruits of the earth may blossom, that the people may have the blessings of life and that the sun may shine on all (lines 921–926). They also sing the wish that civil strife, hungry for evil, may never roar in this city, and that the dust may never drink the black blood of its citizens and, through anger, bring ruin in retaliation for blood, but that the citizens may give joy for joy with a common friendly mind and hate with one mind, which is the cure for many ills among men (lines 976–987). Athena, hearing them find the way of good speech, says that she sees great gain from these terrifying faces for her citizens (lines 988–991).

Athena thanks them and promises to send them down with the light of torches to their places beneath the earth, accompanied by the attendants who guard her image, with the women, girls and older women of Theseus’ city, dressed in robes dyed purple (lines 1021–1031). The play closes with the escort’s song, which tells the great, honor-loving childless children of Night to go to their home under a kindly escort, tells the citizens to keep holy silence and the torch to go before them. They are to receive honors and sacrifices, and Zeus the all-seeing and Fate have come down together (lines 1032–1047). The name Eumenides, “Kindly Ones,” which gives the play its title, is not spoken anywhere in the text; the Furies are called “revered ones” (lines 1041 and 383) and their change of heart is shown, not named.

A Brief Analysis

The play resolves the long chain of killings in the family of Atreus, which began long before the trilogy and runs through Agamemnon and Libation Bearers. The chain is not broken by another act of revenge but by a trial. The questions are put by the Furies, who stand for the older law that blood calls for blood, and by Apollo, who stands for the claims of the husband and father and of Zeus. Athena sets up a court that settles the matter by a vote, and then goes further, to the harder task of persuading the losing side to accept the verdict (lines 794–807, 881–891). The result is not a victory of one party over the other: the equal count (lines 752–753) leaves the Furies with a real grievance, and the final scene is spent on giving them an honored place so that they do not become a danger to the city.

Many readers have been struck by Apollo’s argument about the seed (lines 657–666) and by Athena’s vote (lines 734–741), because both rest on the denial that a mother is a parent. The play does not dispute the argument in the open, and the Furies answer it only by asking how Orestes can be free of the blood of his own mother (lines 606–608), but the equal votes suggest that it did not simply prevail. Athena herself says that the Furies have not been defeated (lines 795–796), and the poet leaves it to the audience to weigh the argument.

The play is also strongly attached to Athens. The court is placed on the Areopagus, and Athena says it is to last for all time (lines 681–710). Orestes promises Argos’ faithful friendship (lines 762–777), and the Furies, who move into a home near the house of Erechtheus, are promised first fruits and the honors of the whole people (lines 834–836, 856–857, 1021–1031). A few years before the production, Ephialtes had taken away most of the old privileges of the Areopagus (Pausanias 1.29.15), and Athens had broken with Sparta and made an alliance with Argos (Thucydides 1.102.4). The play names neither event. What the text itself says is that Athena warns her citizens against both anarchy and tyranny (lines 696–698; compare 526–528), and that the Furies pray in the exodos that civil strife may never darken the city (lines 976–987).

Finally, there is the change in the Furies themselves. In the first half they are terrifying and nearly monstrous: the Pythia compares them to Gorgons and Harpies, and they are black, wingless and snoring (lines 46–56). By the end they appear in processions with torches and purple robes and are given offerings in their own cave (lines 1021–1047). Athena’s argument is that the very fear they inspire is useful to the city, and the Furies themselves have sung that a certain fear should stay seated as a guardian of the heart (lines 517–525). The ending gives that fear a permanent home inside the law.

Eumenides Sources

The Greek text of Eumenides can be read on the Perseus Digital Library. The line numbers in this article follow it, and the quotations are translated from the Greek. The year, the prize and the satyr play come from the ancient hypothesis to Agamemnon; for the Athenian background see Pausanias 1.29.15 (Ephialtes and the Areopagus) and Thucydides 1.102.4 (the alliance with Argos).

See Also: Oresteia, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, The Erinnyes, Orestes, Clytemnestra, Athena, Apollo