It is important to remember that in ancient Greece, despite attempts to find the roots of the public-private distinction in ancient Athens, such a clear division didn’t exist (and we can argue today whether it does, in fact, exist or whether it remains a cherished myth we tell ourselves). In politics, justice may be the most pressing issue of any politeia. The Oresteia is a play that is concerned with the question of justice. Drama concerned itself with this theme as well, inspired by those sublime events that secured Greek freedom against Persian imperial pretensions. It wasn’t just history and philosophy that was touched by this concept of justice: tisis (τίσις). Then came Plato’s Republic and various other dialogues. This theme of justice triumphing against injustice became themes of later Greek works: Herodotus’s Histories and Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War. The Greeks, as we know from their subsequent writings, saw their victory as the triumph of justice over injustice of right over might.
Aeschylus subsequently fought with the victorious Greek forces at Salamis and Plataea which drove the Persians from Greek soil.
Living through the Second Persian Wars, he experienced the tumultuous sack and burning of Athens by Persian forces after the Hellenic allies led by Sparta were defeated at Thermopylae. In his thirties, he was a hoplite in the army that defeated the Persians at Marathon. Its themes touch on the eternal relevance of the human condition and struggle with much consideration for how to live today.Īeschylus lived through the golden age of Greece and Athens. From the murder of Agamemnon to the revenge taken by Orestes, his flight to Athens, and exoneration before the court of Apollo and Athena, the Oresteia moves from “hell” to “purgatory” to “paradise.” Yet the Oresteia, written two and a half millennia ago, touches on themes still so relevant today: justice, injustice, revenge, and gender conflict. The finale, Proteus, was a cosmic dance of the gods and heroes, the full fruition of the work’s manifestation-the waltz of the heavens and earth in harmony already implied and presupposed at the conclusion of the Eumenides.
Originally a four-part play, only three pieces of the movement survive: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides. It is said that the Oresteia is the ancient world’s Divine Comedy, with some justification.
0 kommentar(er)
