Human responsibility and divine necessity in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: on Agamemnon’s dilemma (Ag. 205-227), «Proceedings of the 8th Athens Postgraduate Conference of the Faculty of Philology» volume C - Classics, Athens (2017) 274-288. (original) (raw)
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“The gods . . . so ordained that fate should stand against fate to check any person’s excess” (1025-1027): Applying Aristotle’s Ethical and Political Theory to the Characters in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. New York, New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2011.
Paideia: Educating for Wisdom in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy A Reading of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon through the Categories of Aristotle This play is set in Athens at the time when Agamemnon and the Greeks are returning home from ten years of war. When the war first began, the goddess Artemis demanded that Agamemnon kill his oldest daughter, Iphigenia, before she would allow the winds to blow and the Greeks could get to Troy. Clytemnestra, Queen of Athens, has vowed revenge. First she allows Agamemnon’s rival for the throne, to live with her. Now she is plotting to kill him, taking vengeance for the death of their daughter. Toward the end of Aeschylus’ play, the Chorus reflects on the actions of the characters, both rulers and ruled, and articulates in poetic language Aristotle’s doctrine of the Golden Mean, “Fate stands against Fate,/ to check any man’s excesses.” This book argues that throughout the play the members of the Chorus consistently exercise practical wisdom as Aristotle describes it in his Nicomachean Ethics. In the choices they make and the actions they take in relation to both citizens and rulers alike, they give good advice and exhibit the character-traits and choices necessary for Greece to pick up the pieces after the war and return to the democratic way of shared leadership the Greeks prided themselves on having. Their wisdom is exhibited partially by what they do and partially through a contrast with the choices and reasoning of the other characters. The other characters claim to know the will of Zeus, God of Justice. The members of the Chorus begin the play admitting they do not know how to call upon Zeus and what justice demands they should do. Their recognition of their ignorance and their desire to understand the meaning of the events around them gives them the ability to examine themselves and others. They recognize the corruption of judgment in others: the Herald, who blindly worships his King, Agamemnon, who thinks he is more powerful and wise than he is, Clytemnestra, who uses flawed arguments to defend the murder of her husband, and Aegisthus, whose takeover is clearly drive by his own ambition rather than the well-being of the Athenians. The Chorus members exhibit rational temperance, rational courage, rational anger, liberality, the capacity to forgive and move forward, rational judgment about their proper place as advisors to Agamemnon, they refuse to overreact and take revenge when they are wronged, they are high-minded and serious people, concerned deeply with the proper ordering of their society, they accept the position as subjects of unjust rulers in order to preserve order during the takeover of Athens by Aegisthus, praying for the return of Agamemnon, when Agamemnon is killed they vow to overthrow the unjust order, through resistance and the return of Orestes, the rightful heir to the thrown, they do not act impulsively but, even in the critical moments, they make sure they have the facts before acting, they avoid pride and are not motivated by money, power, or social status, and toward the end of the play, they are willing to admit that Cassandra, a Trojan, a woman, a slave, and Agamemnon’s concubine, possesses divine wisdom is has achieved a level of dignity and nobility rare among any human being, including Greeks. The play is trying to teach audiences how to live an excellent human life by proving models of the best life and all the ways we can “miss the mark,” leading to destruction.
CRISIS AND PHILOSOPHY: AESCHYLUS AND EURIPIDES ON ORESTES’ CRIMES
Abstract Since the XIX century, a pleiad of philosophers and historians support the idea that Greek philosophy, usually reported to have started with the presocratics, lays its basis in a previous moment: the Greek myths – systematized by Homer and Hesiod – and the Greek arts, in particular the lyric and tragedy literature. According to this, it is important to retrieve philosophical elements even before the presocratics to understand the genesis of specific concepts in Philosophy of Law. Besides, assuming that the Western’s core values are inherited from Ancient Greece, it is essential to recuperate the basis of our own justice idea, through the Greek myths and tragedy literature. As a case study, this paper aims on the comparison of two key-works, each one representing a phase of the Greek tragedy: The Orestea, by Aeschylus, and Orestes, by Euripides. Both contain the same story, telling how the Greeks understood the necessity of solving their conflicts not by blood revenge, but through a political way, and also the political drama. Although, in Aeschylus’s one, men still leashed by their fate, while the gods play a major role, in order to punish human pride (hybris). In a different way, on Euripides’s work men face their own loneliness, in a world fulfilled with gods, each one demanding divergent actions. That represents a necessary moment to the flourishing freedom and human subjectivity, and, once the exterior divinity is unable to resolve human problems, men will need to discover their interior divinity: that is how the Philosophy emerges.
Agamemnon at Aulis: On the Right and Wrong Sorts of Imaginative Identification
Topoi
Williams’ discussion of dilemmas in his classic paper “Ethical consistency” famously focuses on an example that has not bothered commentators on and respondents to Williams as much as it should have bothered them: the example of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ play. In this paper I try to pick apart what Williams wants to say from what is really going on in the text that he unfortunately chooses for his example. I compare with Williams’ discussion of Agamemnon four other commentators on this crucial passage in Aeschylus’ play: Plato, Socrates, Aristotle—and Bernard Williams’ Greats tutor Eduard Fraenkel, whose epochal Corpus Christi seminars on the play Williams attended (along with Iris Murdoch, Hugh Lloyd Jones, and other rising stars of the time). I shall argue that these commentators led Williams astray. They are surprisingly prone to the same flaws of rationalism, impersonality, and moralism in making sense of Aeschylus’ extraordinarily subtle and brilliant depiction of Agamemnon; and ...
A fundamental shift in man's thinking was taking place in ancient Greece in the time of Aeschylus, when new ideas concerning the nature of justice were beginning to take hold. The Athenians had been tinkering with legal codes and a justice system since at least the seventh century B. C. E., and by the time Aeschylus wrote The Orestia trilogy two centuries later, the function of the Areopagus in meting out man-made justice had been well-established (Davis et al. 801). Aeschylus partially wrote The Orestia as a response to the threat he saw being posed to the Areopagus, but " [d]espite its emphasis on the contrast between vengeance and justice, The Orestia actually transcends its ostensible theme and may be seen as a work heralding the birth of enlightened civilization out of chaos and darkness " (Davis et al. 801). The Orestia deals with major themes and problems which must have been very difficult for the ancients to grapple with, such as the notions of free will and divine fate, man-made justice and divine justice, and whether value sprung from the passions associated with females and the older chthonic gods or from reason, which had begun to be associated with the newer Olympians and masculinity. The point of this paper will be to zero in on this last transition and assess the attempt made in The Orestia at reconciling reason with the passions into a new, synthesized perspective on the nature of justice, as well as the implications of this new perspective on the formation of man's identity and conscience. The Orestia centers around the accursed House of Atreus, which already points to a vicious cycle of sin and revenge which seems endless. In keeping with the history of this blood-soaked family,