Pregnant words : a study of the trial scene of Aischylos's Eumenides

Abstract

This dissertation examines Apollo’s λóγoς against maternity in the Eumenides of Aischylos (657-666). The central scene of the Eumenides, the final play of the trilogy Oresteia (staged in 458 BC and also comprising the Agamemnon and the Libation Bearers), presents a trial set in the Athenian Areopagus court, for which the play presents an aetiology. The god Apollo seeks acquittal for his protégé, Orestes, who is prosecuted by the Erinyes, goddesses of vengeance, for committing the most heinous of crimes, that of murdering his kin: Orestes has killed his mother Klytaimestra in retaliation for her murder of his father, Agamemnon. In a defiant speech, Apollo argues that Orestes did not in fact commit a crime against kin because only the father, he claims, holds a genetic relationship with his child. In support of his theory Apollo mobilizes the myth of the birth of Athena, the goddess who presides over Orestes’s trial, who has no mother.