Eumenides

Eumenides is the last part of the tragic trilogy known as the Oresteia. The Oresteia was first performed in 458 BCE, when it won first prize at the festival of Dionysus, an annual event in ancient Athens featuring a theatrical competition. The Oresteia—made up of the tragedies Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides—is the only complete trilogy to survive from ancient Greece (though the satyr play Proteus, meant to be performed after the three tragedies has unfortunately been lost). It is also a connected cycle, with each play building on a single mythical theme. In the Oresteia, the myth taken up by Aeschylus is the chain of events leading up to and following Agamemnon’s death. The play cycle begins with the murder of Agamemnon at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus (the subject of Agamemnon), the subsequent revenge carried out by Agamemnon’s son Orestes, who murders Clytemnestra and Aegisthus with the support of his sister Electra (the subject of Libation Bearers), and, finally, Orestes’s pursuit by the Furies and his eventual acquittal at the Areopagus court in Athens (the subject of Eumenides). The Oresteia, completed toward the end of Aeschylus’s highly successful career, attests to the playwright’s penchant for connected trilogies (significantly, the other two great Athenian tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, almost never produced connected trilogies).

The myth of the murder of Agamemnon and Orestes’s revenge was an old one, and there are references to it as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, which dates to around the eighth century BCE. But Apollo’s role in encouraging Orestes’s revenge and the Furies’ subsequent pursuit of Orestes seem to be later additions. In Eumenides, Aeschylus drew in part on earlier poets (including Stesichorus and Semonides), but also innovated considerably, as he did also in the first two plays of the Oresteia. The idea that the court of the Areopagus originated with Orestes’s trial was probably a relatively new one (in more popular tradition, the court originated when the god Ares was tried there for the murder of Halirrhothius—this is why the site was called Areopagus, which means “Hill of Ares”). Aeschylus’s identification of the Furies with the goddesses known as the Semnai Theai—whose cult in Athens is established at the end of the play—was probably also an innovation. In transforming into the Semnai Theai or “Holy Goddesses” (themselves sometimes identified with the Eumenides, or “Kindly Ones”), the Furies metamorphose from goddesses of retribution to goddesses of justice in a broader and more productive sense. This transformation closes the cycle of violence and retribution that has characterized the first two plays of the Oresteia.