Afterlives in the Oresteia

Preoccupation with one’s lot after death has been suggested as the starting point of all philosophical thinking and is one of the central concerns of world religions. It is evident in the quotation above from the Zohar, as it is in innumerable other religious texts.Footnote ² In Ancient Greece, mystery cults promised a better afterlife – but antiquity’s profound silence has segregated them from the mainstream of Greek religion. Unlike the scriptures and commentaries of numerous other religions, the only openly circulating Ancient Greek texts outspoken about the afterlife are philosophical and literary. Among them, the one with perhaps the greatest disparity between its overt concern with what lies beyond death and the lack of scholarly attention to the theme is Aeschylus’ Oresteia.Footnote ³ In scene after scene, and in the work as a whole, afterlife conceptions transform both individual values and the structures within which humanity operates. I am not claiming that focusing on the afterlife radically transforms our understanding of the Oresteia. In analyzing this understudied theme, I merely attempt to estrange and thus reevaluate some of the trilogy’s most often discussed ethical and political dilemmas.Footnote ⁴

Plurality and ambiguity enrich the Oresteia’s representations of human afterlives. Foremost, these techniques demonstrate a literary field of meaning, in interaction with, but not bound by, religious ideas. One can unpack crucial differences between religious and literary treatments by contrasting the two quotations above. Each passage depicts the figure who personifies the highest kingship in its culture facing an uncertain afterlife. The first exemplifies how definitive religious answers can be. The Zohar fills in a gap from the absence of a positive individual afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. It presents David’s anxiety about his “end” after a tumultuous earthly reign, yet it mollifies him with assurance from the highest authority, directly quoting the divine through a passage from the Psalms.

By contrast, the Choephoroi passage is sung by the Chorus of Slave Women, who have no stated connection to the divine. Moreover, its content is highly incongruous with its setting: Agamemnon’s wife has slaughtered him, dismembered him, and interred him without proper funeral rites. Agamemnon’s disgraced end is not alleviated by this serene picture of the powerful ruler beloved in the afterlife by “the dear ones who nobly died over there,” that is, his friends who died gloriously in combat at Troy. Without a definitive promise, this choral song only increases the tension between Agamemnon’s manner of death and his imagined afterlife.

In the Oresteia, epistemic uncertainty complicates nearly every mention of the afterlife. The translation of the first sentence of the Choephoroi passage above lacks a main verb, reflecting its absence in the Greek. Are the Chorus singing of a factual situation in which Agamemnon is honored in the afterlife (“you are dear”) despite his ignominious death and dishonored funeral? Or are they wishing for the honor that is currently lacking (“you would be dear”) and thus declaring it may still occur? Such ambiguity is partially a product of the Oresteia’s multivalent web of themes and terms couched in dense poetry, whose permutations have been analyzed on a variety of fronts. This study uncovers a further, little-examined set of linguistic, thematic, and philosophical issues that arise specifically from potential afterlives. The trilogy’s use of this imagined plurality is part of its poetics of the beyond.

Taking the epistemic uncertainty so prevalent in the Oresteia one step further, most of the characters who depict the beyond make no religious or prophetic claim to knowledge. Their descriptions are regularly marked as their own projection onto the unknown. The views of human characters are ambiguous when taken alone, contradictory compared with their previous statements, at odds with those of others, or belied entirely by the manifestation of an underworld figure. For instance, several characters at the start of the trilogy express views of death as oblivion, an absolute end to consciousness. In contrast to this are, at first, the hints of continuity in ambiguous statements by these same characters. As the trilogy progresses, numerous scenes feature afterlife continuity prominently. These include a vision of the self in the underworld, a staged attempt at raising from the dead, ghostly returns from the underworld, the transformation of staged characters into afterlife beings, and even references to judgment by Hades. Sometimes an assortment of these possibilities is expressed by or about the same character. In the Choephoroi scene of mourning, the Chorus describe several other ways of thinking about Agamemnon, including as an agitated, undead avenger. The afterlife, moreover, is not only left to human surmise. In the Eumenides, the Ghost of Clytemnestra speaks of her existence in the underworld and the chthonic Erinyes reveal the ethical punishment of the dead.

Understanding how possible afterlives transmute both individual arcs and political structures in the Oresteia leads to new perspectives on key points and affects the reading of the whole. Characters draw radically disparate conclusions from their contemplation of the beyond; affirmation or denial of the afterlife affects how they face the possibility of death, a theme that the Herald, Cassandra, and the Agamemnon’s Chorus all address. Other characters ground vengeance, and even political coups, on one or several versions of existence after death. These appeals are conspicuous in the mourning for Agamemnon, in the claims of Clytemnestra’s Ghost, and in Orestes’ transformation into an undead hero. Many see the finale of the Oresteia as akin to religious revelation, promising to resolve all the problems of humanity. Yet, this book will argue, the counterrevelation of ethical punishment in the underworld presents a wide-ranging contrast to the vision of justice and the state at the end of the trilogy.

Several introductory sections follow, as a guide to the book and its key terms. The first provides necessary background on Ancient Greek religious and literary ideas about the afterlife. The second section offers some common methods for analyzing ethics in literature that several of the chapters will challenge. This section also gives a working definition of tragic poetics for contextualizing ethical analysis in a genre of stylized characters and extreme situations. The third section surveys the relevant political background for the structures and themes in the Oresteia. The last section introduces the main concerns of each chapter to preview the arc of the whole book.

Material Background and Literary Precedent

The concept of an “afterlife” is a flexible one in the Greek tradition.Footnote ⁵ Generally, it refers to the continuity of a human being after biological death, with the retention of some group of recognizable features. Yet the mechanisms, forms, and meanings of such a continuity are multifarious. Western religions inherited from the Greco-Roman tradition a specific subset of ideas concerning an ethically determined afterlife, with the promise of reward as well as punishment.Footnote ⁶ These have led to a tendency in earlier scholarship to condemn or disregard the far more prevalent Greek views that had little or nothing to do with the judgment of ethical actions. On the other hand, the vast array of Eastern ideas about the afterlife, many of which bear similarities to Greek ones, were not widely discussed by the Greeks themselves, nor is direct influence from the East easily found.Footnote ⁷ Between these two factors, studies of Greek religion have sometimes had trouble dealing with its flexibility and diversity on its own terms.Footnote ⁸ Within the Oresteia, many of the culturally available notions concerning life after death make consequential appearances. Moreover, there are several ideas hardly found in previous Greek texts or mainstream religious practices. What was culturally standard in 458 bce and what might have stood out? A necessarily oversimplified, brief discussion of contemporary Archaic and Classical Greek cultural and literary treatments of afterlives follows, to help contextualize the occurrences of these ideas in the Oresteia. Each chapter will return to and expand on relevant ideas in this overview.

From the earliest times, Ancient Greek care for the dead focused on honorable memorialization and rites with social importance. Rituals could be sophisticated affairs in which lament channeled grief and brought groups together, burial goods symbolized honor, and markers at the grave focused memory.Footnote ⁹ There was clearly political tension in democratic Athens surrounding the lavishness of aristocratic funerals, since they were repeatedly legislated against.Footnote ¹⁰ Further emphasis on the state’s role in burial seems to be influenced by Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms. Starting in the early part of the fifth century, the Athenian war dead were buried in the dēmosion sēma (“public tomb”) outside the city walls of Athens, breaking with general Greek practice of burial on the battle site.Footnote ¹¹ The new location – away from previous aristocratic tombs – the broad architecture, and the associations with symbolically significant tombs all signaled the difference of democratic values.Footnote ¹² The funeral was at state expense, first with a chance for individual offerings and then with processions of caskets by tribe, with one casket for those whose bones were not recovered. Funeral speeches were given to the citizen body. The most famous one, Pericles’ funeral oration, as reported in Thucydides, does not focus on the afterlife at all, but on the perspectives of the living citizens on Athens, how their ancestors increased its power, and how the fallen have preserved it (2.35–46).Footnote ¹³ This is a speech in part about subsuming familial memories of the dead to social memory. It emphatically states that the act of facing death bravely and the consummation of dying for the polis erases any harms these individuals did in their private lives (2.42).

We also have evidence from Thucydides of cult for the dead of Plataea (3.58.4) and late evidence for a cult for the dead of Marathon, as protectors of Athens.Footnote ¹⁴ Although they did not end tyranny in Athens, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the aristocrats who attacked the tyrannical family, were referred to as the Tyrannicides; uniquely, they were awarded statues in the Agora and received democratically tinged cultic worship.Footnote ¹⁵ These are some of the ways the material and ritual commemoration of the Athenian dead reinforced political ideas about the democracy at the time of the Oresteia.

The following chapters address analogous aspects of the trilogy, as death and burial rites are loci of discord throughout. I argue that close attention to all aspects of speech regarding the dead, burial, and afterlife return shows that they diverge substantially from internal expectations, which are conditioned by civic and individual practices as well as by literary precedent. The return from the Trojan War involves public discourse over its casualties (Chapters 1 and 2). This includes civic disaffection at their loss and halting, restrictive discourse about their afterlife and share of glory. The Oresteia’s corrupted burial rituals and emphasis on the mourning of Agamemnon (the kommos) are familiar ground.Footnote ¹⁶ The contest over the burial of Agamemnon is intertwined with the rivalry for control over the royal house and the attempt to restore rites proper to a father and king (Chapter 4). The question remains open of whether it is not vengeance rather than ritual that restores honor, an issue in the afterlife of Clytemnestra as well (Chapter 6). On the political front, both Agamemnon’s and Orestes’ afterlives include continuing civic protection (Chapter 5). I will argue that death in war and rhetoric over burial from the start of the trilogy provide a framework for a meaningful rereading of the picture of Athens at its end (Chapter 7).

As is well known, Archaic and Classical Greek culture often distinguished between body and soul: the former decayed, and the latter would go elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁷ Literature and artistic representations depict some portion of the person continuing after death in the grave, in the realm of Hades, or in both. One of the most influential texts, Odyssey 11, contains a different set of elements in tension. The notion that a partly physical body could continue in Hades alternates with something close to an immaterial soul existing there.Footnote ¹⁸ Although this study will use the term “ghost” in English for consistency, a wide range of terms, each with its own undertones, refers to the soul after death. The most flexible and wide ranging is psukhē, from the word for breath. Others, such as eidōlon (“image”), skia (“shade”), opsis (“vision”), and onar (“dream”), all refer to the vestige of the person as visual, without their former substance.Footnote ¹⁹ Archaic literature tends to depict the dead soul less as a full subject than as the remainder of a person, lamenting its lost life, aroused only by contact with the living. Such is the main tendency of the Iliad and the Odyssey, with references to death and the realm of Hades as dark, gloomy, shadowy, and invisible.Footnote ²⁰ The presumed etymology of Hades (Ἅιδης) in many Greek texts is from ἀ-ἰδεῖν, a-idein, “not to see.”Footnote ²¹ This notion of life as light and death as darkness is structurally embedded in Greek culture and recurs with variations throughout the Oresteia, as do many of the Archaic afterlife terms and ideas.

Even in the Homeric shadow realm, however, the theme of continuation beyond death invites poetic transformations of value. Instead of souls unable to interact with each other or with the living, both Homeric epics return dead souls into the narrative to reverse some of the positions they held in life. Thus, when comparing antecedents in literature, this study refers to the scenes of Patroclus’ return as a ghost (Il. 23.62–107), Odysseus’ stories of visiting the realm of Hades (Od. 11), and the (likely written somewhat later) scene of souls interacting with each other in the afterlife (Od. 24.1–204). Aeschylus’ Ghost of Darius from the Persians and the numerous references to Hades in his Suppliants provide the other major comparanda.Footnote ²²

Absent any scene in tragedy that takes place in the underworld, scholars routinely understand phrases that refer to acting in Hades as simply metaphors for being dead.Footnote ²³ Yet meaningful actions and interactions in the realm of the dead are mentioned by several characters in the Oresteia, from allusions by Cassandra (Chapter 3) and the Slave Women (Chapter 4) to the risen Ghost of Clytemnestra’s claim that those she killed are shaming her (Chapter 6). Even the shorter references and allusions, the following chapters will show, are deeply imbricated with the trilogy’s themes and should be interpreted both literally and metaphorically. Each underworld reference echoes some aspects of the Homeric underworld but often differs in pivotal details.

When the dead were thought to be agitated by a lack of care, such as remaining unburied, they were said to reappear, demanding in a dream or through an intermediary some ritual or action to return them to rest.Footnote ²⁴ In Athens, for which we have the best evidence in the Classical era, several annual civic festivals were concerned with honoring the dead, explicitly as prophylaxis against the anger of spirits who could affect life.Footnote ²⁵ In Homer, too, there are numerous threats from the dead and dying. Not one of the Homeric undead, however, actually manifests any power over the living.Footnote ²⁶

In tragedy generally, and Aeschylus more particularly, undead figures can be pivotal to the dramatic action.Footnote ²⁷ Aeschylus himself may have been the first to bring spirits on stage.Footnote ²⁸ Certainly the summoning and appearance of the Ghost of Darius is the central dramatic action of the Persians. Although our evidence is limited, the extant sources are most likely not the only literary undead to which Athenian audiences had ever been exposed by 458 bce.Footnote ²⁹ For example, Aeschylus’ fragmentary Psychagogoi (“Ghost-Raisers”), of uncertain date, is connected with Odysseus’ journey to the underworld.Footnote ³⁰ In the Oresteia, the unsettled spirits of the dead play a number of roles: the Herald denies the desire of the Trojan War casualties to rise (Chapter 1), Cassandra sees the ghostly forms of the Children of Thyestes (Chapter 3), the mourners of Agamemnon call on him to rise bodily (Chapter 4), and Clytemnestra’s Ghost actually arrives on stage and activates destructive forces in the world (Chapter 6).

In Greek religion, attributions of divine power to the dead sometimes blurred the line between humans and gods. Heroes were conceived of as the powerful spirits of dead individuals. They were local semidivinities with shrines where they received ritual cult, unlike the gods, who were worshipped at multiple sites all over the Greek world.Footnote ³¹ Historically, both Agamemnon and Orestes received cult as heroes. In the Choephoroi, the mourners of Agamemnon attempt to harness his supernatural power for vengeance (Chapter 4), and in the Eumenides, Orestes speaks of his own powers after death in the manner of a hero (Chapter 5). However, I will argue that the afterlife of each bears a counterintuitive relation to their living characters and their cultic worship in Greece.

The Ghost of Clytemnestra, for her part, neither haunts Orestes directly nor gains heroic powers but mobilizes the Erinyes on her behalf. These chthonic deities, known from Mycenaean times, had only a minor cultic presence in Greek religion.Footnote ³² The Erinyes are widespread, however, in the visual arts and Archaic literature. In the former, they are depicted as snakes, symbolizing divine vengeance.Footnote ³³ In the latter, the Erinyes have their own genealogy and functions: myths before Aeschylus present them as older than the Olympians, the daughters of Gaia.Footnote ³⁴ This locates them in a wide constellation of dark, chthonic, bloody, and deadly forces.Footnote ³⁵

There is always an undertone of terror to the Erinyes, yet previous references to their functions fall into two connected categories – balancing the universe and carrying out curses among humans – the first of which is seemingly benign. In Heraclitus, they prevent occurrences contrary to nature, keeping the very sun in its course, as ministers of Justice.Footnote ³⁶ This also covers one of their most prevalent duties in Homer, namely to guard against actions and events contrary to the universal order, even when divinities themselves would transgress it.Footnote ³⁷ This is the only function of the Erinyes within the Prometheus Bound (whether or not it was written by Aeschylus). Along with the Moirai (Fates), they are explicitly the pilots of divine necessity, whom not even Zeus can contravene (Prom. 515–18). In curbing the excesses of the gods, the Erinyes function as noncontingent enforcers of the current structure of the universe.

For mortals, however, the balancing power of the Erinyes is far more sinister. Their most neutral function is as the guarantors of oaths, in which, however, self-cursing is also involved.Footnote ³⁸ More destructively, they are the divine forces of vengeance, deeply identified with family curses.Footnote ³⁹ In many of these examples, they come from under the earth.Footnote ⁴⁰ Both literary and material sources group the Erinyes with other avenging or killing divine forces, such as the Kēres (goddesses of death, often associated with sickness), the Alastor (Avenger), and the Arai (Curses).Footnote ⁴¹ In the Seven Against Thebes, the curse of Oedipus on his sons accounts for all eleven uses of “Erinys,” which are again paired with a variety of other divinities such as the Curses, Hades, and Moira (Fate).Footnote ⁴² Numerous studies have examined the Oresteia’s staged Erinyes as representatives of the old lex talionis who transform into beneficent spirits.Footnote ⁴³ Few, however, have examined in any depth their connections to the larger structure of afterlife punishment. Hints of it wind through the choral passages of the trilogy and will be examined in Chapters 2, 4, and 7.

In the most significant of the choral references, the Erinyes reveal to Orestes and the audience the universal judgment and punishment by Hades for ethical transgressions (Eum. 264–72). This passage has little precedent in Greek religion, art, or literature. Although he is a brother of Zeus, in neither Homer nor Hesiod does Hades have a personality or much interaction with the world of the living. Of the “Homeric Hymns,” he appears only in the Hymn to Demeter. Due to the inability of the dead to return from his realm, his inexorability is proverbial already in Homer.Footnote ⁴⁴ For this, he and his realm are hated by its heroes.Footnote ⁴⁵

Hades, in his aspect as a god of death, was seldom worshipped in mainland Greece because of his nature as unseen, removed, and implacable.Footnote ⁴⁶ The known temples associated with the underworld are regularly related to Demeter or Persephone and only use a pseudonym if they refer to Hades, for they are concerned with a different aspect of chthonic power, fertility.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, Hades alone was never connected with the possibility of an improved afterlife. Nonstate salvation cults from this period pick up on the return of other figures from the realm of the dead, including Orpheus and Dionysus, who offer secret knowledge and rituals meant to improve an individual’s afterlife.Footnote ⁴⁸ As is well known, Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, the cult site at which there were year-round festivals, the most famous of which were the Eleusinian Mysteries.Footnote ⁴⁹ These were run by Athens and were connected with the story of Demeter and Kore, but they did not, as far as we know, entail any worship of Hades.Footnote ⁵⁰ Following roughly along the lines of these religious demarcations, there is no discernible reference in the Oresteia to salvation of the soul through initiation.Footnote ⁵¹

The Oresteia’s Hades passage is one of the earliest descriptions of ethical punishment for all humans in the Western tradition. Surprisingly, it has received no attention to speak of in a wide range of relevant studies.Footnote ⁵² The idea is extremely unusual in its culture, for Hades is not seen as a judge of the dead in early Greek cult, nor is such judgment a theme in almost any Greek literature until Plato.Footnote ⁵³ The notion that every human is subject to punishment in the afterlife based on their action in life is unknown in Homeric epic. The Iliad does not differentiate the dead except for the unburied, whereas the Odyssey describes penalties and rewards only for great transgressors and those connected with the gods.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hesiod differentiates afterlives by mythical era rather than individual deeds. He does grant positive outcomes for the gold and silver races, with increasingly worse ones as humans degenerate, not even mentioning it for people of his time (WD 109–201).Footnote ⁵⁵ The first afterlife reward for ordinary people’s actions in life is the Hymn to Demeter and its associated Eleusinian Mysteries, but these were specifically reliant upon ritual cleanliness and knowledge through initiation, not ethical action.Footnote ⁵⁶

Pindar’s Olympian 2.56–80 is the only explicit passage of ethical judgment in Archaic literature. Judgment is performed by “someone” below (δικάζει τις, 59) and afflicts with terrible punishment those who are wicked in life (56–60, 67). The singular occurrence of this theme in extant Pindar, its brevity, allusiveness, and description of this punishment as a truth not ordinarily known, all mark how unfamiliar it is.Footnote ⁵⁷ The passage, moreover, also includes a set of rewards for good people (61–6), which are seen to be the counterpoint to punishment. The statement that humans “remain three times on either side” (68–9) is the first mention of reincarnation in extant Greek literature. The poem’s promise of the Islands of the Blessed to those who keep their soul pure in these multiple journeys (68–80) also has no literary or cultic precedent in mainland Greece. The many novel aspects of this structured conception of a universal afterlife in Olympian 2 are deeply obscure and appear to be related to Southern Italian and Sicilian religious ideas.Footnote ⁵⁸

The above survey should make it clear that in Aeschylus’ time there was no single, shared picture of life after death, despite a desire by some scholars to reconstruct one.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nor was Aeschylus himself a religious innovator, as has sometimes been claimed.Footnote ⁶⁰ Rather, in the Oresteia, Aeschylus uses the available bounty of religious and literary ideas concerning the afterlife in ways that differ radically from his culture, other authors, and even his other extant plays.Footnote ⁶¹ The following chapters address in detail the conflicts he creates through a poetics of multiple afterlife ideas. These conflicts are specific to the context of the trilogy. They are therefore relevant to subsets of ethical and political thought evident within the Oresteia. Since “poetics,” “ethics,” and “politics” are heavily contested terms and refer to broad fields of study, the remaining portion of the Introduction preliminarily defines and narrows how each will be used.

Ethics and Tragic Poetics

Throughout the Oresteia, characters make conflicting claims about acceptable and unacceptable behavior, take actions that fall under the categories they themselves discuss, and find themselves subject to proliferating repercussions. Central to every statement about transgression and justice, every deliberation about consequences, and every plot action is the implicit understanding of relationships between beings as ethically bounded.Footnote ⁶² It is crucial, however, to delimit the scope of the term “ethics” – a fraught notion throughout the history of philosophy – in order to give it analytical utility.Footnote ⁶³ Doing so clarifies how tragedy in general and the Oresteia more specifically fall outside the domain of most modern philosophical discussions of ethics.

This book will use the terms “ethics” and “ethical” for the evaluations of individual behavior toward others, of more general norms of individual behavior, and of the transgression of such norms.Footnote ⁶⁴ Everything concerning benefit and harm to others fits within this definition: evaluating actions, individual relationships, and criteria of judgment. Often, scenes contain spoken or unspoken indications of communal norms concerning individual actions; at other times, characters make overt declarations about “justice” as it relates to the individual. Such discourse demonstrates individual and communal values, standards, and behavior and will fall under the category of ethics for the purpose of our analysis. Yet there are still distinctions to make. Ethics, for one, is here analyzed at the level of individuals, as distinguished from the structures of civic entities and interactions of larger groups; these are covered by “politics,” as defined in the next section. The separation is by no means absolute (they often overlap within the Oresteia) but is necessary for clarity. The ethical analysis in this book focuses on the way representations of the afterlife transform interpersonal behavior, norms applied to such behavior, and the understanding of transgressions against both.

Ethical issues in literature are interpretable on a range of scales and from a variety of positions. The analysis may take on a whole genre (such as “tragedy”), an author or work (e.g. the ethical thought of Aeschylus or that expressed in the Oresteia), one act (e.g. Agamemnon’s decision at Aulis), or a combination of these. During and after the play, spectators and interpreters might discuss subsections of this range as well as compare them with their own communal mores and experiences.Footnote ⁶⁵ The relentless interconnections of the Oresteia compel a continual cycling between these levels of interpretation. Yet each modern interpreter is at many removes from the original performance and its culture. At times, it is inevitable to consider (surely a variety of) audience responses. This is a necessarily speculative exercise, and I do not claim any special insight into the minds of Athenian audience members.Footnote ⁶⁶ Instead, I have tried to foreground the internal logic of the play and then add what can be deduced from the strongest available evidence outside of it. The analysis thus includes relevant cultural, linguistic, and dramatic elements whenever they may buttress particular points.

For this reason, also, ethics and poetics are herein jointly analyzed. The manifestation of themes in language and dramatic representation is what the term “poetics” refers to throughout this book.Footnote ⁶⁷ This includes both metaphorical connections across thematic categories and, at one point, even metatheatrical features (in Chapter 6). The analysis in several chapters will identify specific features of a “poetics of the beyond.” This phrase refers to the warping effects of perspectives on the afterlife, from recasting the referents of particular words to affecting the interpretation of the trilogy as a whole.Footnote ⁶⁸ Also connected to the afterlife is a related “poetics of multiplicity.” This refers to the creation of contrasting and sometimes totally opposite perspectives on the afterlife in one scene or across the trilogy, and to the effects specific to such plural perspectives.

Positing these two types of poetics and deriving ethical points from them requires responses to three methodological objections.Footnote ⁶⁹ The first is that there is no inconsistency between multiple views of the afterlife in the Oresteia because Greek society and religion itself contained these very contradictions, which were discussed in the previous section. The second is that references to death and dying, punishment in the afterlife, and ethical rules are all merely expressions of popular morality.Footnote ⁷⁰ Commentators routinely mark such statements as “commonplaces,” list references to similar statements, and thus imply that there is no further meaning worth investigating. On a more specific, linguistic level, there are interpreters who claim that certain Greek words have a singular meaning, based on their understanding of Greek culture or tragedy as a genre, oftentimes picking comparanda from later examples. They then use this idiosyncratic, specific, or later meaning to deny the multiplicity of possible meanings in a particular passage in the Oresteia.

These three positions miss something fundamental to tragedy. Part of what makes the genre so enduringly important is precisely that it focuses on cultural incongruities and linguistic ambiguities. It thus challenges the audience by taking contrasting meanings to extremes, soliciting ethical responses.Footnote ⁷¹ Of course, what we can tell of ideas circulating at the time serves as useful background for phrasing and themes in the trilogy. However, this does not determine or fix the meaning of a particular word, idea, or passage.Footnote ⁷² Every chapter of this study will draw attention to the peculiarities of specific phrasings in context and to antithetical views pitted against each other, either in close proximity or across the trilogy. In linguistic discussions, I have been careful to cite the Aeschylean corpus along with relevant earlier sources, if necessary, rather than later tragedies. I put forward the reasons for each claim of problematic meaning or linguistic ambiguity, taking into account other uses, a wide range of commentaries, and specialized studies. As a whole, the book attempts to demonstrate just how much there is to be gained from closely analyzing the language of the afterlife.

The approaches one takes to dramatic character are especially consequential in interpreting ethical ideas within tragedy. Dramatic characters most often – although not always – speak as agents with their own perspectives.Footnote ⁷³ The chapters thus generally focus first on individuals embedded in their context, then build connections to the larger ethical issues in the trilogy. This practice addresses ethical issues as characters experience them, since prolepsis in interpreting ethics should be avoided.Footnote ⁷⁴ Following the course of the trilogy also more strongly emphasizes the specificity of particular ethical actions and choices. These are often reconceived in later scenes, and the Summations/Connections at the end of each chapter draw out these links, whereas the Conclusions chapter addresses the interplay between the local level and the trilogy as a whole.

Tragic characters are also always constructed through conventional language and action, against which their individuality emerges.Footnote ⁷⁵ From this generic axiom come more subtle distinctions: “character” (etymologically from a distinctively engraved mark) includes all of a wide range of both individual features and positions in society. One can thus consider the structuring elements of character in terms of ethos (e.g. whether characteristics are inherited or actions are affected by a divinity) or the roles a figure plays in particular circumstances (e.g. what is expected of a “king” versus a “father” in Agamemnon’s dilemma at Aulis). Understanding the issues that arise when dramatic characters are placed under stress requires scrutinizing their continuity from one scene to the next. Has anything changed when they reappear? This is an especially germane issue when examining the shift from a living figure to a representation of the same figure after death.Footnote ⁷⁶ A number of the following chapters will demonstrate that instances of ghostly returns, spiritual continuation in the underworld, and supernatural power in the living world significantly transform previously staged characters.

The analysis in this book is also intended as a delimited argument for reconsidering the use of Greek tragedy in ethical philosophy. Some thinkers attempt to draw universal ethical insights from tragedy.Footnote ⁷⁷ The dilemmas discussed and enacted within each play and the reconciliations that sometimes occur pull in this direction. Yet there are major quandaries for ethical generalizations from tragedy. Formally speaking, such readings begin from (often unstated) socially normative assumptions. Among these are the requirements for agents to act within relatively stable societal structures and to work to preserve such structures.Footnote ⁷⁸ Greek tragedies, however, unceasingly undercut the gender, kinship, political, and even divine structures they depict.Footnote ⁷⁹ Tragic scenes of ethical action or deliberation consistently occur at moments of crisis and follow societally toxic transgressions. Political turmoil and kin murder are particularly prevalent. Tragedy often follows flawed central characters who commit such acts, yet still critique the oppressive norms of their societies.Footnote ⁸⁰ Moreover, the solutions offered at the end of tragedies are oftentimes unexpected, including divine intervention and rituals that – despite serving as a form of reconciliation – often fail to address the provocations to the structure of society raised in the course of the action.Footnote ⁸¹ Thus, the tragic genre as a whole presents insuperable challenges precisely to the foundational premises of normative ethics. The afterlives of Agamemnon, Orestes, and especially Clytemnestra will provide illustrations of such challenges to normative ethics as echoes of these characters’ transgressive living actions.Footnote ⁸²

Tragedy also contains far stronger and more diverse divine influences than accounted for in modern ethical thought. Supernatural forces repeatedly pressure human agents in ways that affect ethical claims. Examples in the Oresteia are the real or interpreted alterations of mental states, signs construed as supernatural demands, and more or less direct divine commands.Footnote ⁸³ The Oresteia’s polytheistic framework and the competing claims of divine justice within it are part of its poetics of multiplicity, as will be discussed in Chapter 7. Whereas divinities may be responsible for framing these situations, characters routinely construe action as (at least partially) the agent’s responsibility.Footnote ⁸⁴ This can be seen in the Elders’ often-discussed formulation concerning Agamemnon’s fulfilling the divinely demanded sacrifice of Iphigeneia: “He put on the yoke of necessity.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The divine pressures on characters warp the Oresteia’s ethical dilemmas beyond normative frameworks. They thus bedevil any abstraction into ethical rules for conventional situations.

Continuity after death further strains the stable societal structure implied in most philosophical analyses of ethics.Footnote ⁸⁶ Claims on behalf of the deceased also entail the uncertainty inherent in the multiple Greek pictures of the potential afterlife. As we will see, appeals for justice on behalf of dead family members recur in scene after scene in the Oresteia without any suggestion of sure knowledge of the beyond. Instead, the many ideas about potential continuity raise new questions concerning actions taken by an individual or their kin in life or after their death: What might affect their status in any society of the dead? How might postmortem existence, or even divine punishment, force rethinking of living actions and values?Footnote ⁸⁷

Just as in religion and philosophy, in literature transformations of the self and of how one is valued may occur after death. In general, it is only literature, however, that presents the perspectives of the deceased, sometimes startlingly unpredictable ones. To give a famous example from Homer (heavily oversimplified by necessity), Achilles in the Iliad must choose between two foretold paths: glorious early death or long, inglorious life (Il. 9.412–16; 18.97–126). For reasons less to do with glory than with vengeance and guilt, he eventually embraces death in battle.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the Odyssey, by contrast, the soul of Achilles in the underworld declares that he only values life, even without property or freedom. He thus abnegates any honor accrued in battle and denies that glory gives him power in the afterlife (Od. 11.488–91). That is, he finds no joy in the state that his choice hastened.Footnote ⁸⁹ It soon becomes clear, however, that the soul of Achilles is anxious about the status of his son (Od. 11.492–3), who is unmentioned in the Iliad. Achilles seemingly returns full circle to valuing glory by rejoicing at Neoptolemus’ earthly deeds, despite renouncing any continuing benefit from his own.Footnote ⁹⁰ Odysseus’ encounter with the soul of his comrade entails a number of reversals of Achilles’ stated concerns. It ends with an underworld happiness grounded in continuity through living children.

Crucially, the story itself also demonstrates the reflexive use of the afterlife to reevaluate life on the level of poetics and metanarrative.Footnote ⁹¹ Since Odysseus narrates the tale simultaneously to an internal audience and to the external audiences of the epic, both sets are invited to rethink the terms of Achilles’ choice: glory relative to longevity and the individualistic mentality of the hero versus a legacy through family, among other themes. This example, with its continual turns, fits in especially well with the following discussions of the transformations of Cassandra, Agamemnon, Orestes, and Clytemnestra after death. A major indication of this theme’s importance in the trilogy is that each of its three choruses sings of the afterlife as a place for the reversal of fortune.

Conscientious analysis of ethical issues in the trilogy ought to elicit their complexity, to temper unconditional conclusions, and to reconsider any tempting generalizations. Despite the multivalenced language of tragedy and the repeated reversals of many themes, ambiguity cannot be an endpoint for interpretation. Therefore, this book concatenates afterlife themes as the trilogy progresses, with the later ones also qualifying the earlier ones. Each chapter draws out the consequences of major and less obvious aspects of possible human afterlives. The book as a whole thus builds a layered argument about the trilogy’s challenges to ethical thought based upon plural perspectives on human afterlives.

Politics and the Oresteia

“Politics,” too, is a term in need of wider, provisional definitions and narrower redefinitions in individual chapters. It is easily seen that structures of government, actions with effects on rulers, and discourse about societal values all play a role in understanding the political aspects of particular scenes, whole tragedies, and tragedy as a genre. Tragedy, having evolved in Athens, has long been understood as enmeshed with the city and its ideas, especially those opposed to the heroic values of epic.Footnote ⁹² More specifically, in studies of Athenian democracy and scholarship on tragedy’s connection with political theory there is a widespread tendency to refer to the Oresteia as an essentially democratic text.Footnote ⁹³ Consequently, the analysis of political themes in this book will touch on references relevant to contemporary Athenian concerns, writ large, and analogies to democratic governance, both of which included high-stakes conflicts throughout Aeschylus’ lifetime.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet there is much more to politics in the Oresteia than its relationship to democratic Athens. This becomes evident in the following brief survey of the political context of tragic performance, the events surrounding the Oresteia’s staging in 458 bce, and the scope of political themes affected by the afterlife within the trilogy.

Over the last several decades, a great deal of attention has focused on tragedy’s relation to the festival of Dionysus, within which it was staged, and to the related civic discourse of contemporary Athens. Many features of the festival structure can be labeled as demonstrating “democratic ideology.” Although our evidence is tenuous for Aeschylus’ time, some democratic features of the dramatic festival and performances include: theater seating by tribe and political status; ticket distribution by deme; the audience as the most numerous annual congregation of citizens, who overlapped with voters and jurors; the judges, chosen by lot, voting on the victors; the presentation of crowns for benefactors of the city; the institution of khoregia; and the control over funding by the assemblies and the Council of 500, which made decisions about the festival and audited it thereafter.Footnote ⁹⁵

A number of other features of the festival and performance are ambiguously democratic. The chorus – which was a widespread feature of festivals around the Greek world – also has elements that scholars have connected specifically with democracy. As a collective, they model plurality and sometimes socially conventional reactions.Footnote ⁹⁶ Other aspects of the festival are possibly democratic, but definitely militaristic in nature: the generals led ceremonies and sometimes judged (at least once in 468 bce); the war-orphan ephebes, raised at the expense of the city, paraded in full armor; and the choral dance training might have had some correlation to training for hoplite warfare (a link which is disputed).Footnote ⁹⁷ Even the introduction of the City Dionysia has been tagged as a political-theological ploy for the unity of a formerly decentralized Athens, but this element was, again, not necessarily democratic. It has been plausibly argued that the ritual procession for Dionysus was part of a wide-ranging attempt at bolstering Athenian imperialistic policy through integrating cult practices from elsewhere.Footnote ⁹⁸ It is possible that this nexus of religion and politics was initiated by Peisistratus, whose scheme to regain the tyranny of Athens through mocking up a human avatar of Athena in procession drew Herodotus’ scorn, yet seems to have worked.Footnote ⁹⁹ Emotions elicited by tragedy, such as pity and fear, have a central place in political statements within the Oresteia. They have strong analogues in Athenian political discourse, but the use of pity for suppliants and fear as a means of social control may be widely shared across forms of government, and not a fundamental feature of democracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The conjunction of religion and militarism in the festival under strict polis control provides crucial background elements for understanding the Oresteia’s political engagements. The focus on positive ceremonies in Athens and the procession that closes the play may be understood as staging the festival within itself. Yet the fictional ceremony also displaces elements of the real one: the Athens of the play is a mythic double of the real city, Athena is made the founder of both festival and Athenian law, and the divinities whom the festival honors are not Dionysus but chthonic demons.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Since the Oresteia links the Erinyes to the Semnai Theai, divinities with their own procession, the Dionysian tragic festival that contains democratic features is no longer a precise referent, but only a general parallel to the trilogy’s closing rituals.Footnote ¹⁰² Thus, from the start, it is worth examining political and political-religious ideas in the Oresteia from a perspective broader than the study of Athenian politics or democratic ideology.Footnote ¹⁰³

The Oresteia certainly alludes to contemporary events, yet their place in its political message, if any, is disputed. The trilogy contains transparent references to Athens fighting in Egypt and in what historians retrospectively refer to as the First Peloponnesian War.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Contemporary interpolis relations, too, are the obvious reason for the move of Agamemnon and Orestes to Argos (Chapter 5). Scholarship has analyzed references in the Oresteia as a reaction to recent, contentious democratic reforms against aristocratic privilege, which led to civil strife. Within the Oresteia’s mythical-historical narrative, however, the Athenian government is contrasted with Argos, a monarchy. That is, the warnings against civic infighting, stasis, are clear, yet Aeschylus’ references to internal Athenian politics are ambiguous.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The reform of the Areopagus, hinted at in the Eumenides, serves as a prime example. Several aspects of the trilogy’s ending seem to be a reaction to the recent turmoil. Historically, Solon transformed the Areopagus from a homicide court to a council of ex-archons.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He claimed that it would be “a second anchor” for the state.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is thought that part of the function of these officials was to keep the current archons in line during their year of office.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Over time, the Areopagus became a seat of aristocratic influence with wide-ranging powers, through its mandate to “preserve the nomoi.” Ephialtes in 461/2 (only a few years before the staging of the Oresteia) contentiously reduced its power back to judging homicide cases and prosecuted its members, leading to further turmoil and possibly to his assassination.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the Eumenides, by contrast, the institution is divinely mandated. Athena establishes the Areopagus under the rubric of a new “law for all time” and declares that it ought to inspire fear (Eum. 690–708). It is represented as the place for men “without fault” chosen, in the first instance, by Athena (482a[475]–84); it is not selected from the ex-archons, nor by vote of the demos, nor by lot. Aeschylus thus leaves room for the Areopagus to be identified with an aristocratic (or at least nondemocratic) bulwark for the current laws and against any change whatsoever, but, again, this is only hinted at.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is impossible to reconstruct his affiliation or a partisan message from the Oresteia.Footnote ¹¹¹

The Areopagus example illustrates that instead of taking a specific stance in contemporary affairs, tragedy addresses them indirectly. The distance in mythical time and the lack of direct references to contemporary politics and public figures that are prevalent in comedy appears to be (with some exceptions) a tragic convention. Tragedy might be said to appeal only to general political principles, such as civic unity. Yet since tragic language, themes, and action also pose challenges to such general principles (including, as we will see in Chapter 7, civic unity), one must continually refer first of all to internal context. By necessity, therefore, this book greatly restricts its treatment of the historical aspects of the allusions in the Oresteia. Similarly, the democratic “ideology” of the tragic festival, itself always ambivalent, will be understood as the background for a set of themes in the play and the closing procession. Politics in this study thus refers to the themes related to the Trojan War, the poleis Argos and Athens in mythical time, and allusions to contemporary democratic institutions. Additionally, it refers to explicit statements about governing from rulers in the trilogy, general injunctions to humanity from the Erinyes, and Athena’s foundation of a new law.

It is precisely these political aspects that afterlife references can both enrich and challenge. The destiny of poleis is at stake in a number of depictions of the beyond: postmortem punishment for those who instigate war, the honor or dishonor of rulers in the underworld, monarchical succession related to the status of the dead, and the political influence of ghosts and heroes.Footnote ¹¹² The Choruses of the trilogy declare that war, coups d’état, and blood-spilling in general are judged by chthonic powers. Afterlife ideas, expressed or enacted, give new perspectives on the political choices of individuals, rulers, cities, warfare, divine justice, and the Athenocentric ending.Footnote ¹¹³ The postmortem existence of Orestes and Clytemnestra, as well as the ethical punishment by Hades, add layers to the heavy emphasis on the individual’s action in tragedy as intrinsically opposed to the state, which is the topic of much philosophizing about tragedy.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In analyzing each, this book strives to maintain the tensions between the power of tragedy’s normative pull as elevated public discourse and its subversion of widely accepted political notions.

Order of Chapters

The ever-increasing prominence of afterlife themes in the Oresteia allows this book to address them in a natural order. The first two chapters thus analyze death as closure, along with the first, barest allusions to possible continuation after death. Chapter 1 addresses the Herald’s remarkable focus on his own death at home and the ethos it implies. The chapter then turns to his repeated attempts to suppress speech and thought about the dead of the Trojan War, which lead to twists of language and untenable political positions. The chapter also includes the first reference to Hades, but in an entirely restricted sense.

Chapter 2 analyzes the Chorus of the Agamemnon, who treat death as an absolute end to suffering even more explicitly than the Herald does. Throughout their songs, however, they speculate on a variety of continuations of the self, including brief allusions to a resurrection of the dead and to punishment in the afterlife. Together, these two chapters provide the background for the rest of the trilogy by focusing on characters who lack access to the beyond, but who demonstrate multiple attitudes to death and the afterlife. What are only hints in their scenes continually grow in importance as the trilogy progresses.

The next two chapters concern characters who more actively consider the afterlife, with powerful implications for themselves. Chapter 3 provides a new perspective on Cassandra, the oft-discussed prophetess facing a foretold doom. Cassandra briefly and ambiguously refers to herself singing prophecies in Hades. Attention to this passage leads to questions that have never been asked: How would her continuity in the underworld transform consideration of her predicted death? Does it circumvent Apollo’s curse or reinforce it? The notion of fate, built up by Aeschylus throughout the scene, is at stake if Cassandra continues to exist beyond her foretold demise.

Chapter 4 focuses on the multiple relationships to the dead Agamemnon that his mourners create in the Choephoroi. The laments of the Chorus of Slave Women, Electra, and Orestes intertwine diverse possibilities for Agamemnon’s afterlife, including appeals to his spirit and even attempts to raise him from the dead. As discussed briefly in this Introduction, the Chorus also depict Agamemnon in Hades, with the implication that his current dishonor might be reversed by ethical and political action. Specifically, they call for vengeance on his behalf, which eventually constitutes a second coup d’état. Together these chapters begin to expose a pattern in the Oresteia that has garnered little attention: over the course of the trilogy what seemed to only be a personal consideration, the individual afterlife, becomes ever more politically significant.

The next two chapters pick up on this pattern with characters who straddle life and death. Chapter 5 analyzes heroes as afterlife figures of worship in the Oresteia, which has not been the subject of sustained study. The only example of the word “hero” in the Aeschylean corpus occurs in the Agamemnon. Yet both Agamemnon and Orestes transform into afterlife figures to whom supernatural powers are attributed. Both of these mythical figures received geographically specific rituals in contemporary Greek religion. Within the Oresteia, however, their roles shift significantly between life and death, demonstrating the unexpected political-theological use of the afterlife as staged before Athenian spectators.

Chapter 6 examines the dynamics of Clytemnestra’s Ghost, who emphasizes her own dishonor in Hades in order to call for the Erinyes to take vengeance on her living son. This afterlife figure is thus a direct instigator of dramatic action, for the Erinyes’ pursuit of Orestes structures the plot of the Eumenides. I will argue that Clytemnestra’s Ghost challenges normative ethical thought through themes unique to her postmortem reappearance and continuation in the underworld.

Chapter 7 analyzes the universal judgment of the dead by Hades. Whereas other Choruses only hint at it and characters on the whole ignore it, the Erinyes present it as a divine revelation. I will argue that afterlife punishment for living deeds forces reconsideration of the ethical calculations of characters and thus gives a new perspective on the ethical points made by the trilogy as a whole. Hades’ punishment also has unexplored political consequences, since it continues the Erinyes’ check on transgressive deeds even after these divinities subordinate themselves to Athens. A contrast with Athena’s law and collective vision for Athens closes the chapter. I argue that Hades’ continuing, alternative justice deeply complicates her rewriting of human politics and values.

Finally, the Conclusions chapter links insights from each earlier chapter to demonstrate the layered and unique poetics of the beyond in the Oresteia. It draws out the sophisticated revaluations that occur when human life is extended past its normally understood ending. These possibilities beyond death present new perspectives and challenges for some of the trilogy’s most widely debated ethical dilemmas and its political resolution.