Read Online Marriage, a History by Stephanie Coontz - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephanie Coontz
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ties to her birth family came to symbolize the worst excesses of aristocratic rule, and Athenian playwrights developed this theme in tragedies that still capture our imagination.
Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians, leveled a powerful indictment of aristocratic governance and marriage politics in his fifth-century B.C. three-play cycle The Oresteia. The plays, based on a traditional Greek legend, condemn aristocratic marital intrigues and advocate a new hierarchy of obligations.
The first play of the trilogy begins as Agamemnon, king of Argos, returns home from the Trojan Wars. He does not know that his wife, Clytemnestra, has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and that together they have plotted his death. The opening chorus explains that each of the adulterous pair has legitimate grievances against Agamemnon and his forefathers. On his way to Troy, Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get favorable winds for his ships. Clytemnestra has brooded for years over his murder of their daughter. For his part, Aegisthus longs to avenge his brothers, whom Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had murdered and fed to Aegisthus’s unsuspecting father, because the father had once slept with Atreus’s wife: “Bloodshed bringing in its train/Kindred blood that flows again,/Anger still unreconciled /. . . Wreaking vengeance for a murdered child.” 2
Agamemnon, however, is oblivious to these resentments. On his return from the war, he enters the palace haughtily, giving instructions for the care of the concubine he has brought home with him. Clytemnestra then kills him offstage. She and Aegisthus proceed to banish Orestes, her son by Agamemnon, and announce they will rule together in peace. Although the play expects us to condemn the lovers’ behavior, the two victors were more humane than many real-life ancient rulers, who ruthlessly killed all the descendants of their foes, even those to whom they were themselves related.
The second play in the cycle takes place seven years later. The banished son, Orestes, returns, having been ordered by the god Apollo to avenge his father’s death or face the Furies, goddesses who punish those who shed the blood of kin, betray a host or guest, or blaspheme the gods. The Furies, who represent the old-fashioned principles of family vengeance, never punished Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, because her husband was not a blood relation. Nor did they try to get Orestes to kill her in revenge. It is only Apollo who threatens to unleash them, to prod Orestes into action. But as soon as Orestes does kill Clytemnestra, the Furies—“avenging hounds, incensed by a mother’s blood”—descend upon him. Although they had done nothing to punish the murder of a husband by a wife, they are outraged by the murder of a mother by a child.
The last play addresses the dilemma the first two have posed. Which is the worse of two crimes? In one case a wife kills a husband, not a blood relation, who has shed their daughter’s blood and has then insulted the wife further by bringing a concubine into their home. In the other case a son kills a mother who has committed adultery and murdered her husband. This is a tough call by aristocratic standards. The bonds between a mother and child are at least as strong as those between husband and wife, and even within the general context of male dominance, a highborn wife has a right to exact vengeance for slights against her dignity.
But in the play the answer of the state, represented by Apollo, is unequivocal: A woman’s duty to her husband and ruler outweighs the claims of kinship. “He was a king/Wielding an honoured sceptre by divine command,” says Apollo. Mother-child bonds are insignificant compared with the duty of wifely obedience. “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers,” Apollo declares. “She is a nurse who tends the growth/of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”
In the final
Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians, leveled a powerful indictment of aristocratic governance and marriage politics in his fifth-century B.C. three-play cycle The Oresteia. The plays, based on a traditional Greek legend, condemn aristocratic marital intrigues and advocate a new hierarchy of obligations.
The first play of the trilogy begins as Agamemnon, king of Argos, returns home from the Trojan Wars. He does not know that his wife, Clytemnestra, has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and that together they have plotted his death. The opening chorus explains that each of the adulterous pair has legitimate grievances against Agamemnon and his forefathers. On his way to Troy, Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get favorable winds for his ships. Clytemnestra has brooded for years over his murder of their daughter. For his part, Aegisthus longs to avenge his brothers, whom Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had murdered and fed to Aegisthus’s unsuspecting father, because the father had once slept with Atreus’s wife: “Bloodshed bringing in its train/Kindred blood that flows again,/Anger still unreconciled /. . . Wreaking vengeance for a murdered child.” 2
Agamemnon, however, is oblivious to these resentments. On his return from the war, he enters the palace haughtily, giving instructions for the care of the concubine he has brought home with him. Clytemnestra then kills him offstage. She and Aegisthus proceed to banish Orestes, her son by Agamemnon, and announce they will rule together in peace. Although the play expects us to condemn the lovers’ behavior, the two victors were more humane than many real-life ancient rulers, who ruthlessly killed all the descendants of their foes, even those to whom they were themselves related.
The second play in the cycle takes place seven years later. The banished son, Orestes, returns, having been ordered by the god Apollo to avenge his father’s death or face the Furies, goddesses who punish those who shed the blood of kin, betray a host or guest, or blaspheme the gods. The Furies, who represent the old-fashioned principles of family vengeance, never punished Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, because her husband was not a blood relation. Nor did they try to get Orestes to kill her in revenge. It is only Apollo who threatens to unleash them, to prod Orestes into action. But as soon as Orestes does kill Clytemnestra, the Furies—“avenging hounds, incensed by a mother’s blood”—descend upon him. Although they had done nothing to punish the murder of a husband by a wife, they are outraged by the murder of a mother by a child.
The last play addresses the dilemma the first two have posed. Which is the worse of two crimes? In one case a wife kills a husband, not a blood relation, who has shed their daughter’s blood and has then insulted the wife further by bringing a concubine into their home. In the other case a son kills a mother who has committed adultery and murdered her husband. This is a tough call by aristocratic standards. The bonds between a mother and child are at least as strong as those between husband and wife, and even within the general context of male dominance, a highborn wife has a right to exact vengeance for slights against her dignity.
But in the play the answer of the state, represented by Apollo, is unequivocal: A woman’s duty to her husband and ruler outweighs the claims of kinship. “He was a king/Wielding an honoured sceptre by divine command,” says Apollo. Mother-child bonds are insignificant compared with the duty of wifely obedience. “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers,” Apollo declares. “She is a nurse who tends the growth/of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”
In the final
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