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Orestes Pursued by Furies in The Eumenides

A scene from the "Eumenides" red-figured bell krater, South Italian, c. 375 BC (Louvre, Paris)

The unknown painter of this pot (a large punch bowl for mixing wine and water) here combines two images from the third play of Aeschylus' tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. This play is called "The Eumenides" or "Sweet Ones" because Athena manages to tame and turn them from blood-thirsty hounds of vengeance into mild-mannered mascots of the Athenians, with an honored place on the Acropolis. Until that unlikely transformation, they remain, as Orestes called them after killing his mother in "The Libation Bearers," "the bloodhounds of my mother's hate" (line 1054).

The opening scene of "The Eumenides" is shown here on the left: The Ghost of Clytemnestra, now in Hades, pokes and prods the Furies (their Roman name, but called Erinyes in Greek) to wake up and take bloody revenge on her son Orestes, who murdered her in revenge for her murder of his father, King Agamemnon. Orestes did so on orders from the god Apollo, who is shown here purifying Orestes from all guilt by washing it away with the blood of a suckling pig. The pig is placed in the center of the scene and painted white to highlight and dramatize the importance of Orestes' purification of any guilt.

Safe for the moment from the pursuing Furies, but still holding the sword he plunged into his mother's breast, Orestes sits on the suppliant's seat in Apollo's temple at Delphi, resting against the Omphalos, the stone that is the center, navel or "bellybutton" of the world. Hanging overhead on the wall, among wreaths left by previous suppliants who came to honor Apollo and ask his blessing seems to be Orestes' own wool-wrapped wreath,

Who is the young woman in hunting dress and boots who holds two spears on Apollo's left? Could she be his twin sister, the virgin huntress Artemis? I thought so for awhile. But note how her costume, right down to the white armbands, is nearly identical to that worn by the three Furies on the left. (The only difference is that they wear black crossbands). But to show Artemis dressed like the Furies would be worse than a costume failure. Aeschylus would have cried out against it! Nor does she appear in his "Eumenides." She cannot be Artemis, but must be a fourth Fury, though later thinkers thought of the Furies, like the Fates and the Gorgons, as Three. But the real problem is that this painter, like others of his time, has made the Furies far too attractive! A century after the play, he, like other men, no longer takes them seriously. He is no longer afraid of them.


A drawing of a similarly dressed Fury from a vase painting of about the same period. Besides the hunting costume and the spears, she carries a torch to light her way through the night and the darkness of Hades, and a chain to scourge and draw blood from her victims by beating and torturing them.

Now back to the play. In its opening scene the chorus of Furies lies slumped over in sleep so that the audience cannot see their faces and the hideous masks they wear - masks probably modelled on the Gorgon faces that the Greeks set up on temples to scare off those who would desecrate or rob the place. It is said that at the first performance of the play, as soon as the Furies awoke and sat up, many in the audience were so frightened by their faces that they fainted. Here are two images of what they might have looked like:

This masklike Gorgon with snakes in her hair is not a true mask but a terra cotta antefix from the roof of an Etruscan tomb or temple.

These college students are in costumes they created after studying ancient masks and descriptions of the Furies in this play. Unlike ancient Greek masks, theirs are only half-masks to better let them speak and chant their lines.

At first, the only one who speaks - the Prologue - is the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo who channels Apollo's prophecies. When she sees the Furies sprawled out asleep after chasing Orestes, she finds them repulsive and Gorgon-like:
"..not women, I think I call them rather gorgons, only
not gorgons either, since their shape is not the same." (48-9)
They're more like blood-sucking vampire bats:
"They have wings; they are black and utterly
repulsive, and ...they snore with breath that drives one back.
From their eyes drips the foul ooze... "

And here's how the Pythia describes Orestes:

"See, I am on my way to the wreath-hung recess
and on the centrestone I see a man with god's
defilement on him postured in the suppliant's seat
with blood dripping from his hands and from a new-drawn sword,
tree, decorously wrapped in a great tuft of wool,
and the fleece shown...." (lines 39-44)

This is a very strange and puzzling speech from one who supposedly speaks with the authority of Apollo, even if she is not now sitting on the tripod inhaling the fumes from the rotting Python that induce the trance-like state in which she channels the god's own words. For she says she sees the "god's defilement on him" and "blood dripping from his hands and from a new-drawn sword." Words like "defilement," "pollution, " "stain" "blot" and the like are usually used to translate the sense of the Greek word "miasma," which is the terrible sin, sickness or infection that a murderer, especially one who murders his mother, receives. Its source is the blood of his victim, and the Pythia adds that she sees blood dripping fom his hands and his sword. All this seems to mean that Orestes has just arrived at Delphi with his mother's blood still on his hands and his sword, and hence with the pollution or defilement - "on his soul," we might say - of which those bloodstains are just the outward cause and signs.

But either the Pythia is mistaken, or Aeschylus is deliberately ambiguous and misleading about how she says it. For both Orestes and Apollo himself later make clear that he has already washed Orestes clean of the blood-guilt and infection that he received when he spilled his mother's blood, and that the rite of purification with pig's blood that we see in the vase painting has long since taken place. If that's the case, then the blood that the Pythia sees on Orestes' sword must be the blood of the sacrificial pig rather than the blood of his mother. So maybe the vase painter, who clearly had in mind this speech by the Pythia, has got it right in showing Orestes holding his blood-stained sword up beneath the pig, if he himself has just cut its throat, while his mother's blood was washed from it long before his arrival at Delphi. As we shall see, that is what Orestes himself claims later in the play.

After the opening speech by the Pythia, the temple doors open, showing Orestes, with Apollo and Hermes beside him, surrounded by the sleeping Furies, who have pursued him to Delphi, (In Aeschylus' play the "Eumenides" or Furies are the Chorus.) Apollo assures Orestes that he will protect him from them:
"...See now
How I have caught and overpowered these lewd creatures.
The repulsive maidens have been lulled to sleep, those gray
and aged children...." (lines 66-9)

Daughters of Gaia, mother Earth,
"It was because of evil they were born, because
they hold the evil darknes of the Pit below [Tartarus]
Earth, loathed alike by men and by the heavenly gods." (71-3)

Apollo tells Orestes to go to Athena's citadel in Athens..
"Kneel there, and clasp the ancient [wooden] idol in your arms,
and there we shall find those who will judge this case,...
...
For it was I who made you strike your mother down." (80-4)
[Apollo had ordered Orestes to avenge the muder of his father, Agamemnon, by his mother Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus.]

Apollo tells Hermes to guide Orestes to Athene's temple, and they go off.

The ghost of Clytemnestra enters and wakes and harangues the sleeping Furies for not chasing after Orestes to avenge her murder:
:"Look at these gashes in my heart..." (103)


She tongue-lashes them for "dimning the anger of the mother-snake" - the mother of the Python, slain by Apollo to establish his oracle at Delphi, Gaia herself was often depicted as snakelike. The Furies whimper and moan in their sleep, not wanting to awake and take up the chase, Finally they stir, even while asleep, and mutter: "Get him, get him, get him." (130). Clytemnestra prods them one last time as fiery hounds of hell to hunt down Orestes and howl and bite him to death:
"Let go on him the stormblasts of your bloodshot breath,
wither him in your wind, after him, hunt him down
once more, and shrivel him in your vitals' heat and flame." (136-9}

As Clytemnestra leaves, the Furies, one by one, begin to poke each other awake, then start to howl as one chorus to complain that Apollo, along with the other "younger gods" of heaven and Olympus, has overthrown the old matriarchial order of the earth gods. And by sheltering Orestes as a matricide they have replaced by force the ancient law of Nature, the law of retribution, the "eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth" of the old lex talionis, with artificial man-made laws and notions of "justice." The Furies complain especially of Apollo's having violated and taken over their oracle at Delphi by slaying their brother the Python and staining with its blood the Omphalos, the navel-stone of the Earth (shown behind Orestes in the vase painting above):

"The very stone center of earth here in our eyes horrible

with blood and curse stands plain to see." (166-7)

Hearing these howling complaints, Apollo emerges from his sanctuary and threatens to shoot them with his bow and arrows to drive them away like blood-sucking vampire bats:
"to make you in your pain spew out the black and foaming
blood of men, vomit the clots sucked from tteir veins." (183-4),
and drive them back to such dark places of retributive justice as execution and torture chambers - places where
"heads are lopped
and eyes gouged out, throats cut, and by the spoil of sex
the glory of young boys is defeated, where mutilation
lives, and stoning, and the long moan of tortured men
spiked underneath the spine and stuck on pales." (186-90)
The "spoil of sex" implies castration, though one wonders which "young boys" are referred to. Older men.who were executed often had their genitals cut off and stuck beneath their armpits. And Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus were said to have done the same to Agamemnon.

Quite plain in this exchange between the actor speaking as Apollo and the chorus of Furies is not only the opposition and overthrow of the Old Law by the New but also the War between the Sexes. (Were there women in the audience at this time? I think so!)

Unfazed, the Furies stand firm and insist they have only come to do their duty, "to drive matricides out of their houses" (210). But when Apollo asks, "Then what if it be the woman and she kills her man?" they seem to step out of character and speak more like Athenian ("Philadelphia") lawyers, arguing that a woman who kills her husband does not spill the blood of her own family: "Such murder would not be the shedding of kindred blood." 212


Here's another South Italian (?) vase painting of this scene. but one in which Apollo, rather than purifying Orestes with a pig, debates with the Furies, while the one with wonderful wings answers him most civilly, not by baring her fangs but by making that nice legal point. Orestes, however, kneeling naked on the omphalos, prepares to defend himself with his sword. No wonder, after hearing Apollo describe the "mutilation" of one's manhood! On the wall are two wool-adorned bull heads left by other suppliants.

The scene soon ends, and reopens at Athens, on the Acropolis before the temple and the ancient wooden statue of Athena. Orestes enters and falls at its feet to ask her to protect him from the Furies, who soon enter, one by one, to say:

"... like hounds after a bleeding fawn, we trail
our quarry by the splash and drip of blood.... (247-8)
Our man has gone to cover somewhere in this place.
The welcome smell of human blood has told me so." (252-3)

Does this mean Orestes suffered scratches during his trek from Delphi to Athens? And from branches, or the Furies' claws? Presumably the blood they smell now is his own, and not, still, his mother's? But note the tenses in Orestes' next speech:

"The stain of blood dulls now and fades upon my hand.
My blot of matricide is being washed away,
When it was fresh still, at the hearth of the god, Phoebus [Apollo],
this was absolved and driven out by sacrifice
of swine, and the list were long if I went back to tell
of all I met who were not hurt by being with me." (280-5)

Aeschylus does not say just how Apollo washed (and, for good measure, is still washing?) from Orestes the blot and stains of his mother's blood. But these lines explain why the "Eumenides painter" shows Apollo standing behind Orestes to hold a young, suckling pig over his head. It is a blood sacrifice to appease the Furies and atone for Orestes' murder of his mother by substituting the animal's blood for his own. Though we cannot see the drops of blood that should be washing down on him, there is no doubt that this scene, like that of the angel who substitutes a goat for Isaac as Abraham is about to cut his son's throat on the altar to Jehovah, records a shift from human to animal sacrifice. The Greek word here for this ritual washing and purification is "catharsis" - the same word Aristotle uses a century later in his Poetics for the emotional effect of tragedy upon the audience - a term still debated by critics who favor either "purging" or "purifying" to translate and explain just how it works!

I myself favor "purging" - the use of a cathartic that "flushes away" and "drives out" the poison of an infection. The emetic or purgative is also a case of "homeopathic" medicine: driving out an infection or disease by applying more of the same, or somthing of the same kind. In Orestes' case, it is pure, fresh, innocent (?) blood that washes and drives out impure, bad, guilty blood. And at the end of this speech Orestes reveals something else about Greek medicine. I first thought that by those last two lines he meant that none of all the people he had met since killing his mother were harmed by him - that he was not just some homicidal maniac or mass murderer. But I've just read* that what Orestes really meant was nearly the opposite: that the proof that he is now free from all pollution and sickness is that no one else he'd met since had been infected with the same disease: the "disease" of wanting to kill someone (and not just one's mother or another blood relative?). So in this little "sacrifice of swine" speech Orestes tells us a thing or two about ancient Greek medicine.

It was that old vase painting that sent me back to reread the "Libation Bearers" and "Eumenides" to see what Aeschylus had to say about Orestes' purification or washing away of the "pollution" or "sin" of matricide. Where and when did Aeschylus mention it (or avoid it), and why? He alludes to it in several places, but only vaguely. But here, in this speech by Orestes, Aeschylus is quite specific, and he even mentions the sacrificial pig.

I'll leave the rest of "The Eumenides" for you to read, or rediscover, how Athena decides the case, for or against Orestes, and how she handles the Furies - the Roman name for these hideous spirits of vengeance.
================

The quotations from "The Eumenides" are from the translation by Richmond Lattimore in "The Complete Greek Tragedies," edited by him and David Grene

For more views of Apollo's temple at Delphi and the omphalos stone, and info on them, see my article "Apollo's Temple at Delphi: the Python, Omphalos, and Tripod"

*In James C. Hogan's useful commentary on the play (and on Lattimore's translation of it) in the Aeschylus volume of the series, "A Commentary on The Complete Greek Tragedies."

The image of the Gorgon is from an exhibition card for "Etrusci. Le Antiche Metropoli del Lazio" - an Etruscan show that preceded the fabulous Etruscan show that followed which I saw in early January at Rome's Palazzo dell Esposizioni. A fabulous place also for an elegant buffet lunch beneath a soaring glass skylight!

The photo of students masked and costumed as Furies from the chorus of Aeschylus' "Eumenides" is from a fine article by Nancy Sultan, their professor at Illinois Wesleyan Unversity, that appeared in the December 2004 isssue of "Erato; the Newsletter of the Classicists of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest."
To read it, and see more photos of them, go to: www.hope.edu/.../erato/issue5sultan.htmle Eumenides

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Orestes Pursued by Furies in The Eumenides