This is unit 2/2 on Aeschylus.  The first play ended with the collapse of archaic power.  AG scythed down all opposition.  To what end?  The warrior must go home sometime, to the "home" that he desecrated by trampling down "the lovely grace of things," Iphigeneia.  AG's home is another battlefield.  Power dare not sleep, nor trust.  Civilization is not possible under these conditions.  At the end of the play KLY & Aegisthus, cynically proud of their obsequious treachery, are worse than the general they assassinated:
AG1707    Let them howl [for justice]--they're impotent.  You & I have power now.
                We will se the house in order once for all.

LB begins some years after KLY's "masterpiece of Justice" & her boast that she & Aegisthus would "set the house [city] in order once for all."  The obvious question is, how are things going?  The answer is given by Electra & the chorus who virtually compete with each other to express their hatred for KLY.  The monarch, herself, has problems.  Her masterpiece of justice breeds guilt.  Thus she sends Electra to AG's grave with:
46      empty gifts
          she hopes will ward them [guilt, ghosts] off
502    Why did she send libations?  What possessed her . . . ?
510    She had bad dreams.  Some terror
         came groping through the night

The hope for how to achieve justice is as confused as it was in AG:
121    Let some god or man come down upon them.
          [ELK] Judge or avenger, which?
          [Leader] Just say "the one who murders in return!"
          [ELK] How can I ask the gods for that
          & keep my conscience clear?.

Almost immediately, Electra finds a way, praying:
148    Raise up your avenger, into the light, my father--
          kill the killers in return, with justice!

Electra testifies that KLY has sacrificed her daughter (Electra) for political ambition just as much so as AG did (with Iphigeneia):
138    Mother has pawned us [children] for a husband, Aegisthus,
         her partner in her murdering.
191    the murderess, my mother.  She insults the name [of mother]
         she & her godless spirit preying on her children.

Discovering Orestes, her brother, Electra confides:
242    I turn to you the love I gave my mother--
         I despise her

Orestes announces that he has returned home to see justice done:
272   Apollo will never fail me . . .
         his oracle charges me
         to see this trial through.

Does Electra get worked up?  She chants:
388   Both fists at once
        come down, come down--
        Zeus, crush their skulls!  Kill!  Kill
        . . . from these ancient wrongs bring forth our rights.

You should have suspected that Electra is manic &, like everyone in her family, prone to imbalance frenzy.  Consider again her rather manic speech to her new found brother:
240    4 loves in one!
         I have to call you father, it is fate;
         & I turn to you the love I gave my mother--
         . . . & the love I gave my sister, sacrificed
         on the cruel sword.  I turn to you.
         You were my faith, my brother--
         you alone restore my self-respect.

 What is wrong with this speech?  "You alone restore my self-respect."  When you so desperately expect someone else to confer self-respect on you -- aren't you asking for trouble?  Aren't you bound to be disappointed? & when you are, who do you blame?  Your no-good mother, your fawning foster father, & next, your brother.  Everyone is bound to fail in restoring your self-respect, because by definition you must create this for yourself.  Ultimately this contains Aeschylus' theme or answer for how justice can flourish in the city.  Like self-respect, it cannot be given by anyone else.  We citizens must produce it through our dedication to those institutions that we designed to produce justice.  When you willingly enslave yourself to someone else, you forfeit self-respect, because it requires independence.  So too, when citizens fall in love with some charismatic leader, hoping to be led to bliss, they forfeit justice, because it requires the kind of civic investment that Aeschylus celebrates in the last play.

When KLY so arrogantly turns her back on the people, taunting them to impotently howl their outrage, don't you think that she recruits body-guards?  Orestes returns in disguise & must figure out how to get through the security in order to carry out his plans for justice.  Because he is also motivated to achieve a literal balance in the name of justice (e.g., an eye for an eye), Orestes vows:
543    They killed an honored man by cunning, so
          they die by cunning, caught in the same noose [of lies]

Orestes' cover story is that he has come to Argos in order to report to the mother of his friend, how he died.  The friend is supposedly Orestes.  Many of the lines in this part of the play are delicious, because of the double-entandra.  Literally asking to be announced, we also understand Orestes' intention to come for the masters of the house in the sense of arresting them or bringing them to judgment:
640    Announce me to the masters of the house.
         I've come for them

Footnotes 35 & 36 explain the powerful visual drama at work when Orestes encounters his mother & she seems not to recognize him.  Thus there is a double meaning to Orestes' cover story about telling a parent how her child perished:
674    A parent ought to know.
A parent ought to know her own son!  When she fails to recognize him, how do you think this affects Orestes?  I hope you thought of the Oedipus complex: "reject me!  Not if I reject you first!"  After the long process of being worked up to the pitch of violence, by the chorus & Electra, Orestes still confesses:
886    I dread to kill my mother!
We can imagine that some hurt child, rejected by his mother, lashes out, remembering the look on KLY's face when she fails to recognize her son.  The child feeling that he has been unjustly treated, vows to return justice . . . injustice?  Which?  It seems to hardly matter in the pitch of unendurable emotion; or even to be decidable in the welter of "wedded love-in-hate" (607).  This could even be rendered as love expressed through hate: killing the beloved daughter, chopping up the loved/hated husband who (unlike Aegisthus) could not be controlled, slashing the mother who rejected the father I look like in preference for the womanly Aegisthus.

Is it true that KLY does not recognize her son?  You recall the theme of subliminal recognition about OD.  Told by the supposed stranger that Orestes is dead, KLY laments:
679    You strip me bare of all I love, destroy me,
          now--Orestes
Like so much of Aeschylus, that can be read 2 ways, with "Orestes" rendered in either the 2nd or 3rd person.  In this family of expert liars, KLY may well understand that her son is acting out this scene of repudiation & rejection.  She may even subliminally recognize his intent of retribution, which, in her guilt, she may not entirely wish to escape.  Footnote 36 implies some of this.

When Aegisthus is executed, notice how ignominious the chorus is.  The leader warns:
859    Back,
         till the work [of justice] is over!  Stand back--
         they'll count us clean of the dreadful business.

A moment later the infatuous leader cajoles Orestes to not be satisfied with the blood of Aegisthus:
870     Her head is ripe for lopping on the block.
          She's next, & justice wields the ax.

We who are proud to live in a democracy cringe at the cowardly & devious behavior of the chorus that represents the citizens of Argos.  Why does Aeschylus render them as almost near cousins to the likes of Aegisthus?  I should save this for Chat, but it is a rather abstract point.  Remember the formula for Greek tragedy: it provides illustrations of negative moral instruction, portraying characters that we shiver at; all the more so because we were initially envious of the heroic & great.  In regard to the chorus, Aeschylus wants to show us civic behavior that we would be ashamed of.  The benefit is to be fore-armed.  How much better to be sitting here in the dark & feel insulted & then ashamed at a model of our possible evasion of civic duty, than to suffer the actual humiliation in the light of day when our city, possibly, lies in ruins like Troy because I was too cowardly (like Paris) to stand up like magnificent HK.  Remember also that the theatrical experience educates experientially, below the threshold of consciousness.  We need not fully analyze the scenes, such as I have done with this one, in order to derive the benefit: to be cautious or to feel that there is a danger in situations they seem like deja vu because they subliminally remind me of what I saw illustrated in the theater.

Orestes dares to execute his mother, praying that Apollo can explain why he did so:
978     So he may come,
          my witness when the day of judgment comes,
          that I pursued this bloody death with justice,
          mother's death.

The final scene of the second play promises madness & the disintegration of the personality that parallels the person who is the city.  As the Furies & Gorgons rise out of the shadows of the unconscious, anarchy & madness walk the streets of Argos that is now abandoned by the proud house of Atreus.  The chorus asks "where will it end?" (1074) -- this thirst for justice that tastes only blood.  By the end of these 2 plays, many in the audience may feel that things are hopeless.  If there is justice, it does not live in our human cities.  & if we flee the specters of madness, violence, & anarchy, is it only to fall prey to the likes of AG or KLY who complete the circle & delivering us to madness & chaos again?  Stay for the third act, or the third play.

The Eumenides offers 2 definitions or understandings of justice: one emotional, the other reasoned.  The Furies speak for the emotional outrage we feel when we are affected by crime & injustice.  We want blood!  The Furies not only give voice to the cry for revenge & balance, they also threaten guilt rising up out of the unconscious to consume the perpetrator:
309    now to declare our right
          to steer the lives of men
          . . . we are
          the just & upright, we maintain [justice, upright behavior]
          Hold out your hands, if they are clean
          no fury of ours [guilt, regret] will stalk you,
          you will go through life unscathed [innocent]

The Furies (guilt, regret, madness) work in the dark.  They do not speak.  They tear, they weep.  Words will not appease them.  They want blood.  This is why Apollo (Reason) is repelled:
EUM 70    these obscenities!
                They disgust me.
183           Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out,
                where Justice & bloody slaughter are the same . . .
                castrations, wasted seed, young men's glories butchered,
                extremities maimed . . .
                & the victims wail for pity
                spikes inching up the spine, torsos stuck of spikes.

We may object (especially if our relative has been the victim of crime) that the perpetrator & criminal has no right to "wail for pity" since he had none for his victim; & that he is not a "victim" but a criminal.  Perhaps our society has veered too far in the direction of Apollo.  Has justice become too abstract?  Too much a matter of legal technicalities to satisfy our fury at the crime?  Let's discuss this in the Chat session.  To further illustrate Apollo's sense of disgust at torturing to death criminals, consider this famous beginning to a famous book, Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (1977):

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the [French] regicide was condemned . . . before the main door of the Church of Paris . . . to be taken . . . to a scaffold [where] the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs & calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, &, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, was & sulphur melted together & then his body drawn & quartered by 4 horses & his limbs & body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes & his ashes thrown to the winds.  [The next month, Damiens was so punished, although the quartering] was very long, because the horses used were not accustomed to drawing; consequently, instead of 4, 6 where needed; & when that did not suffice, they were forced, in order to cut off the wretch's thighs, to sever the sinews & hack at the joints.  [A witness reported that] though a strong, sturdy fellow, this executioner found it so difficult to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the same spot 2 or 3 times, twisting the pincers as he did so, & what he took away formed at each part a wound about the size of a six-pound crown piece.  [When the attempt at quartering took place] The horses tugged hard, each pulling straight on a limb . . . .  After a quarter of an hour . . . & several attempts, the direction of the horses had to be changed . . . .  This was repeated several times without success.  2 more horses had to be added to those harnessed to the thighs.
     After 2 or 3 attempts, the executioner Samson & he who had used the pincers each drew out a knife from his pocket & cut the body at the thighs; the 4 horses gave a tug & carried off the 2 thighs after them; then the same was done to the arms.
     One of the executioners even said shortly afterwards that when they had lifted the trunk to throw it on the stake, he was still alive.

Aeschylus attacks the problem in another way, asking which relationship is more fundamental, blood relations (parent-child) or oath relations (spouses).  Orestes act was an outrage violating the first relationship; KLY's act was an outrage against the 2nd relationship.  The Furies believe the first relationship is most fundamental, which it inarguably is in the sense of chronology or development.  We must first have children before they can grow up to be citizens.  Apollo says:
215   Marriage of man & wife is Fate [of the city] itself,
        stronger than oaths, & Justice guards its life.

Marriage & citizenship are identical in that they are an alliance formed by strangers who mutually vow loyalty to each other.  When citizens break this oath, the existence of the city is imperiled; & if it dies, so does every hope for justice.

On the other hand, if Apollo is granted an easy victory, this promises corruption: the appearance of justice with money exchanged beneath the table; one type of justice for the poor, another for those who can afford the price of justice; & still another form of (non)justice for my relatives.  How many clearly guilty people have to walk away from justice, exonerated on some technicality, before civic loyalty melts into cynicism?

Although the dramatic place is Argos, Aeschylus' play is performed in Athens where we are proud to have invented legal due process, including trial by jury.  This is not simply some secular or technical civic form.  This is adoration.  Living in Athens is going to church.  Our polis is not a neutral zone within which people can make various individual commitments.  Our bumper stickers say: Athens: love it or leave it.  To live in Athens is every bit as much of a religious statement as the choice to live in Jerusalem or any other holy city.  What is distinctive about Athens is that it is dedicated to the divine manifest in Reason.  Our divinity (Athena) wants, not blind faith & obedience, but the life of the mind: reasoned behavior.  This is no where better tested than in the emotional extremity of outrage & justice.  Dizzy, reeling, in desperation we call out to the divine for justice & Athena responds:
408      From another world I heard a call for help. 
           I was on the [river] Scamander's banks, just claiming Troy.

Our course began with AK & AG destroying a city.  Now with Aeschylus we begin to hope for a city that will not fall, because it based on law instead of personality.  Athena speculates that the moral & legal enigma possessing Orestes may be:
484     Too large a matter,
          some may think, for mortal men to judge.
          But by all rights not even I should decide
          a case of murder--murder whets the passions.
          Above all, the rites have tamed your wildness.

The rites & ritual she has in mind are those of judicial process:
498   I will appoint the judges of manslaughter,
        swear them in, & found a tribunal here
        for all time to come.

The rest of the play is commemorative.  If we were ashamed to see ourselves reflected in the cowardly chorus in The Libation Bearers, we now proudly recognize the familiar institutions of justice -- not only as imagined Athenians, but as Texans, as Westerners 2,500 years later!  Athena tells us in the audience to pay attention:
576   So that you can learn
        my everlasting laws

We Athenians do not expect the logos to come in dreams to some prophet or to wrapped in the mystery of some arcane ritual.  We profess in the efficacy of reason invested in dispassionate civic institutions, especially the law, to render justice, measure, & the good life. We follow Apollo, who says:
586    Bring on the trial.
         You know the rules, now turn them into justice

Following the familiar question & answer technique of prosecutor & defense attorneys, Apollo commands the jury:
691    Cast your lots, my friends [friends of justice]
          strict to the oath that you have sworn.

Athena insures that we recognize the religious solemnity of this moment that is the salvation of the polis:
694     Now & forever more, for Aegeus' people
          this will be the court where judges reign
703     Here from the heights, terror & reverence,
          my people's kindred powers
          will hold them from injustice.
709     Neither anarchy nor tyranny, my people.
          Worship the Mean, I urge you

Who holds the olive branch of peace, civility, & stability?  Neither Apollo, nor the Furies alone.  It is offered in their mutual grasp; in the support & alliance represented in the person of Athena & not simply as an ideal, but in the daily political life that flows through the streets of Athens.
 

Go to the top & click on the next section: Questions.