The Eumenides Gender

These are the first words of the play. Does anything strike you as weird about them? Okay, we know that one weird thing is that Aeschylus's killer opener is just a list of the gods who were in charge of the oracle of Delphi. But how about the fact that Apollo is the first male divinity to be lord over Delphi?

Now think about the play as a whole, in which, you know, some Furious ladies are chasing down a guy who killed his mother—only to have that guy get acquitted based on a blatantly sexist argument and the vote of a judge who explicitly sides with men in all things. The play as a whole shows a society becoming increasingly patriarchal. How does this speech relate to that?

Notice that, among the ways in which Apollo describes the Furies as disgusting, he places special emphasis on the fact that they have not had any children. (Don't think there isn't a double meaning in that word "mixes with.") What does this say about Apollo's views on the proper role of women in society? Do you think the play as a whole agrees with his opinion, or not? In thinking about this question, you might want to broaden your perspective to look at the earlier two plays, Agamemnon and Libation Bearers.

Note that, when Apollo calls Hermes his "blood brother by the father we share," he could be using the same standard of relatedness that comes up again in his defense speech at the trial. There, he says that only fathers are related to their children by blood, because mothers are merely incubators of embryos. And Apollo and Hermes have different mothers, and so are only be related by blood through their father, Zeus. (Apollo's mother is Leto; Maia is the mother of Hermes.)

The "earth's navel"? What the heck are they talking about? So glad you asked. Actually, the earth's navel—bellybutton if you prefer—was a stone placed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. This stone is commonly called in English by its Greek name, "omphalos," which is just the Greek word for bellybutton. You can see a picture of the omphalos of Delphi here.

Why Delphi? Because the people of Delphi considered themselves the center of everything, that's why. Seriously, we're not kidding.

So, if the omphalos of Delphi was the center of the world, what's that have to do with gender? Well, check out the first quotation from this section. There, you'll see that the Earth is imagined as a female goddess. How do these pieces fit together? Think about it, Orestes, dude who killed his mother, is lying on the omphalos or bellybutton-stone of the Earth, which reminds us of an umbilical cord, which reminds us that the Earth is the mother of us all.

Basically, the way the Greeks thought of the gender of the Earth gives Aeschylus an opportunity to work a really cool metaphor into the Furies' song. By touching the omphalos of Delphi with the blood of his own mother, Orestes is defiling the entire earth, the entire idea of motherhood, and all of nature.

Notice anything weird about this speech? Maybe you won't, if you were raised in a Christian tradition, or another tradition that regards a husband and wife as becoming "one flesh" after marriage. But even if you don't think that's weird, how about the fact that what Apollo says here seems to flat out contradict what he says later in his speech to the jury, about how mothers aren't related to their children?

When he calls sex "the source of what is dearest to mankind" (216), he doesn't mean just sex itself, but also the children that result from it. (This is the interpretation of Christopher Collard, on p. 207 of his Oxford World's Classics edition of the play.) But if marriage-vows make husbands and wives share the same blood, and that union results in children, wouldn't that mean that the children should be blood-relations to their mothers? This looks like Apollo is twisting his arguments around to suit the needs of the moment.

Orestes's words are striking for how they portray Athena in distinctively masculine activities. Athena's predisposition towards typically male activities will become important later on in the play, when she explicitly tells everyone that she is voting for Orestes because she is biased towards men.

We're not asking you to explain the entire belief system and religious history of ancient Greece (even scholars haven't got all that figured out), but do you have any thoughts on why the Athenians might have been fascinated by a goddess like Athena, or why she is so relevant as a main goddess in this play? In thinking about this, you might want to consider the generally patriarchal bent of the play; given these attitudes, doesn't Athena kind of seem like the exception that proves the rule—like, sure, she's a woman, but she's a woman who, more than any other, blurs the gender lines, inhabiting more male characteristics?

From the general gist of his speech, it almost sounds like Apollo is less angry at the fact that Agamemnon was killed than at the fact that he was killed by a woman. Do you think that Orestes has the same attitude? For most of the trilogy, we've been assuming that it was especially painful to kill Clytemnestra because she was his own mother—but is it possible Orestes could have been extra motivated to kill her out of outrage at what she had done? Just food for thought.

Well, there you have it. Only fathers are parents, not mothers. The more you know. Ugh. Idiots.

In any case, before you get in a big huff about how sexist the ancient Greeks were, just think: if Aeschylus thought everybody in his audience already thought this, would he really have made it the climactic moment of the play—make that trilogy—for somebody to argue it? Is that what he'd really have been going for: the climax of the Oresteia comes around and everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, we know, the mother's not a parent, whatever."

We find that a little hard to believe—and so do some of the other characters of stage (the Furies, hint-hint). So, it seems pretty clear that even Aeschylus knows this is a wacky idea. So why does Apollo make the argument? Is he just improvising, making up something on the spot to get Orestes off the hook? Maybe. But what would the consequences be if people in Athens started widely believing in it?

Okay, so at first glance, this doesn't look like it's got much to do with gender. But let's take a second glance. We notice that this hill marks the point where Theseus, the first king of Athens fought a war against the Amazons, a tribe of warrior women. Wait a minute… men fighting against women… doesn't that sound a bit like a lot of other stuff in this section? We sure think it might. What does it say about the New Athenian Order established at the end of this play that its major law-court is on the site of a battle between the sexes?

There you have it, pure sexist prejudice on the part of Athena, patron goddess of Athens. Is there any other good argument for letting Orestes off the hook, aside from this sexist one? If not, why do you think Aeschylus chose to give this idea such prominence at the end of his Oresteia trilogy?