The Oresteia
Murder answering murder across three generations until a court is invented to stop it. Klein wrote on it late in life.
Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth.
Agamemnon returns from Troy to a wife who has waited with a knife, and the killing that follows answers an older killing, the daughter he gave up for a fair wind. In The Libation Bearers his son takes the same route, avenging one parent by shedding the blood of another. The Eumenides moves the quarrel off the palace floor and into a courtroom, where the ancient goddesses of retribution are heard, out-voted, and then settled rather than crushed.
Klein read the sequence as a map of the mind under its own destructiveness, tracing the shift from vengeance driven by persecution toward a justice that can hold guilt without being destroyed by it. For a clinician it sets out, in plain dramatic terms, how retaliation reproduces itself down a family line, and what changes when rage is acknowledged and contained rather than discharged. The Furies are not banished at the close; they are given a place and a name, which is a picture of reparation worth carrying into the consulting room.
About the author
Aeschylus
Aeschylus (c. 525 to 456 BCE) was an Athenian tragedian, the earliest of the three Greek playwrights whose work survives. He is remembered for shaping tragedy into a form capable of weighing large moral and civic questions, and for adding a second speaking actor to the stage. His trilogy the Oresteia follows a house bound to cycles of blood vengeance until Athena establishes a court to try Orestes, marking a shift from private retribution to public law.
Details
- Greek
- 336
- 9780140443332