Oresteia

"The Oresteia is an immense political and legal allegory. It’s about the replacement of a world in which justice meant vengeance by a world in which you have a serious investigation of the facts and an examination of the relevant law. It’s about the creation of courts as an alternative to anarchy and despotism. The critical part of it is in the third play of the trilogy, The Eumenides . The first two plays are essentially a reprise of the Homeric legend. You have a succession of murders. Agamemnon, king of Argos, sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to persuade the gods to send him a favourable wind to conquer Troy. He returns 10 years later and his wife, Clytemnestra, kills him to avenge the killing of their daughter. Their son Orestes is then commanded by Apollo to avenge his father’s murder by killing Clytemnestra, which he does. So this is a world in which justice is vengeance. In Greek mythology, avenging injustice was the job of the Furies. They were creatures of hideous aspect who hunted sinners from their communities. “I think that Mill would have deplored the pressures created by social media to conform to particular ideas.” The Eumenides is about the trial of Orestes for the murder of his mother. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, puts an end to the cycle of lawlessness and violence and anarchy by founding a court to decide whether Orestes has a defence. Orestes raises two defences. His first defence is that Clytemnestra had it coming to her because she murdered Agamemnon. His second defence is that Apollo told him to do it—superior orders. The outcome is that Orestes is acquitted by Athena’s casting vote. Now, that’s a very crude and short summary of a play which is really a very profound analysis of the process by which law comes to restrain the violent instincts of men and replaces capricious violence and despotism with something more ordered and predictable. The great phrase of Athena in the translation that I use is “let no man live uncurbed by law or curbed by tyranny”, which is a very exact description of the function of law. It is something that constrains the activities of men and spares them the tyranny of arbitrary violence. It’s not just an allegory of law—the Oresteia is also one of the greatest achievements of human civilization. It’s profound, it’s intense, it’s dramatic and, above all, the language is exceptionally beautiful. There is a problem about translations. In many translations, you won’t get the beauty of the language. Greek is a very allusive language. It’s rich in subtle synonyms and metaphors, and therefore hard to convey in the kind of down-to-earth language that is now fashionable for translators. Most people I suspect read the Oresteia in the Penguin Classics versions or the Oxford Classics translation. I have to say I find them rather flat. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I much prefer the old-fashioned Victorian translations. The best of them is by Edmund Morshead. He was an eccentric Victorian schoolmaster who wrote a verse translation. Verse translations inevitably mean you have to take some liberties or resort to paraphrase. It’s not literal. It’s dramatic and rhetorical. It’s high-flown. But it conveys the ideas better than an exact translation would do. Yes, it’s available on Amazon."