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This chapter examines those endlessly polymorphous entities, the Erinyes, sometimes the enforcers or even the embodiments of curses and the rectifiers of familial transgression. It first looks at their history and nature in life and in genres other than tragedy to learn about their range and prerogatives. Analysis of their appearances in a number of plays where they are crucial shows that in all these texts, they share certain features that set them apart from curses and inherited guilt. Their central place in Aeschylus' Eumenides is then considered, which is often taken, more or less consciously, for a locus classicus. It is shown that the one extant play in which Erinyes almost literally hold centre stage is an exception to the rule in more ways than one. Aeschylus' play helps define the province and limitations of tragic Erinyes.

Through examination of four of Cratinus' comedies, Ch 3 challenges the generally accepted argument that Aristophanes is unusual in his engagement with tragedy and demonstrates that paratragedy was also a major feature in Cratinus' comedy. It shows that Cratinus' Plutoi had an intertextual relationship with Prometheus Lyomenos and the Prometheus trilogy (which has survived under the name of Aeschylus) more generally, as well as with Aeschylus' Oresteia, especially as far as the characterization of their choruses is concerned. Drapetides is shown to have been a pastiche of suppliant tragedies, with special reference to Aeschylus' Hiketides. Seriphioi is argued to have contained paratragic metatheatre, and Nemesis parody of tragic manner. Finally, Cratinus' Eumenides, like his Plutoi, seems to have engaged with the homonymous tragedy of Aeschylus. Looking back to Ch 1 (fr. 342), the unusually intense interest of Cratinus in the old master of tragedy who had recently acquired canonical status, is argued to have been part of Cratinus' rhetoric of self‐presentation.

Aeschylus' Oresteia is a trilogy comprised of Agamemnon, Choephori (Libation Bearers), and Eumenides. Agamemnon presents the return of the king to Argos after the fall of Troy. For the Greeks the nostos or return home was a familiar literary motif. At a literal level, home is Argos – the city ruled by Agamemnon and his father Atreus before him – and his house, the oikos. Contained within the idea of the oikos is an implicit narrative, for the present is defined by the past history of the family. A special kind of fear attaches to this past because we know that it haunts the time and space which we can actually see. The second play of the trilogy, Choephori, repeats and reverses some of the principal actions of the Agamemnon, and things take on forms of agency through Aeschylean metaphor. In the third and final play, Eumenides, there is a dramatic movement away from the house of Atreus and its embodied bloodshed, which had haunted the first two plays of the trilogy.

This chapter looks closely at the Erinyes and two related groups of goddesses, the Eumenides and the Semnai Theai, and at the relationship between the goddess Erinys and Demeter. The Erinyes acted on behalf of dead souls who were angry at the living, especially blood kin who had mistreated those souls, and also punished souls who deserved it after death. The role that the ritual practitioner Epimenides played in simultaneously quieting the restless dead after the Cylonian affair and establishing cult to the Semnai Theai is examined in this light. The chapter ends with a close reading of the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, arguing that it offers a new myth about the origin of the Athenian court system on the Areopagus, in which Athena plays the role of a goês, quieting the Erinyes who are angry on behalf of Clytemnestra’s ghost, and thus reiterating the new importance, in the fifth century, of maintaining good relationships between the living and the dead.

After introducing Greek tragedy and its Athenian context, this chapter explores the significance of Helen of Troy for Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Oresteia. Though Helen does not appear on stage, she has a significant offstage role in the first play, Agamemnon, where she and her sister, Clytemnestra, are presented as complementary models of bad womanhood, each emasculating and controling her husband in a different way. Clytemnestra is a visible, concrete embodiment of female evil, but Helen is portrayed, through choral lyric, as a horrifying yet enchanting figure transcending the limitations of human existence. As the Oresteia proceeds both sisters are dramatically erased, to be replaced in the final play, Eumenides, by the Furies. The Furies are the opposite of Helen: ugly and anti-erotic, yet a source of blessings for the men who take them in. Their welcome into Athens reverses the disastrous welcoming of Helen into Troy, reaffirming conventional gender norms in the interests of Athenian democracy.

This chapter examines myths-in-tragedy, asking especially whether tragic retellings of myth are ‘distinctively Athenian’. Starting from Aristotle's Poetics, the argument asserts that tragedy is, from the point of view of the spectator, both here and not here, both now and not now. The analysis deals in turn with the time, space, and ideology of tragedy, and goes on to suggest that one of tragedy's characteristic functions may be described as ‘testing to destruction’. The chapter ends with an account of the ideology of the trial scene in Eumenides, which is compared to a scene in The Merchant of Venice.

This chapter examines the structure of the Supplices, more than half of which consists of lyrics. It considers the claim that the chorus' role of ‘protagonist’ in the play does not really explain the extent of its lyric and that Eumenides has the lowest proportion of lyric to dialogue of any Aeschylean play, arguing that the cases are not quite the same. It underscores the central dramatic role of the chorus from the beginning of the Supplices, in contrast to Eumenides where Orestes is for the most part the central character. It also cites the chorus as a principal character in Eumenides and the principal character in the Supplices. In addition, the chapter discusses Aeschylus's adoption of the third actor, between Supplices and Eumenides, and its implications for the mailer. Finally, it suggests that Aeschylus was experimenting when he decided to make the chorus his ‘protagonist’ in both plays.

This chapter examines various attempts to establish the date of the Supplices based on its supposed allusions to contemporary events, as well as the argument from the similar praises of Argos in the Supplices and the Eumenides that both plays must have been written in the same period. It begins by considering Aeschylus's treatment of Argos as a constitutional monarchy and whether to grant asylum to the Danaids, along with the relationship between tragedy and democratic civic ideology at Athens. It rejects the notion that Aeschylus was using the Supplices as a means to express his own political views, claiming that the reason for Argos's strange (and anachronistic) constitution is purely dramatic. It also suggests that Aeschylus is writing for an audience that regarded democracy as the ideal form of constitution. The chapter concludes by highlighting a double tragedy in the Supplices: granting asylum to the Danaids may be disastrous for both Pelasgus and his people.

As has been remarked by Hegel, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and others, Antigone stages a tension between two different formulations of individuality, one more archaic and mythical, the other more modern and political. Chapter One shows how that basic antinomy simplifies tensions in the play, which themselves expressed a cultural moment in which the notion of individuality – and the means for conceiving it – were elusive and often contradictory. Beginning with a description of the civic importance of tragedies that includes a reading of Aeschylus's Eumenides, the chapter situates Hegel's readings of Antigone within that historical context and then focuses on Sophocles's play itself.

Chapter 2 examines plays that turn to Greek tragedy in response to collective predicament and catastrophe in the contemporary world. The discussion focuses on Steven Berkoff’s Greek, after Oedipus the King, Hélène Cixous’s La Ville parjure, ou le réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies), and Martin Crimp’s Cruel and Tender, an adaptation of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis. While in the first two examples the adaptation of tragic themes and patterns involves a critique of tragedy and its histories of reception, Crimp’s play challenges Western perceptions of tragedy in a more overt manner, resisting the polarizing discourses of tragedy reproduced by the mainstream media in the aftermath of 9/11. The rewriting of the Greek tragic texts in these plays provides a frame that challenges established definitions of tragedy and, at the same time, proposes a renewed more egalitarian understanding of tragedy.

This chapter investigates what appear to be the three earliest extant examples of paracomedy: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides’s Alcestis, and Euripides’s Heracles. Aeschylus’s Oresteia uses paracomedy to confer a sense of ugliness upon the Furies and a sense of transgressive sexuality upon Clytemnestra, which characterizes them as threats to a democratic worldview. Euripides’s Alcestis symbolizes the close relationship between comedy and satyr drama by paracomically staging a drunken, gluttonous version of Heracles, who exemplified the license of both genres. Euripides’s Heracles co-opts aspects of Aristophanes’s Wasps to instill a sense of unsettling horror in Heracles’s madness scene and later on alludes to comic episodes from Heracles’s past to show what he must overcome before regaining his heroic status. This chapter suggests that even in these early examples, tragedians used paracomedy both positively and negatively to delimit tragedy’s relationship with comedy.

This essay focuses on the third play in the Oresteia trilogy, the Eumenides. Telech provides a compelling reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s reading of Aeschylus's masterpiece, saving the reading from the complaint that it oversimplifies and sentimentalizes the Oresteia by celebrating the triumph of a modern and liberal understanding of law's rationalist virtues over customary and traditional forms. Telech provides an alternative Nietzschean reading that is consistent with Nietzsche's own, that reintroduces passion and irrationality into the trial and sentencing of Orestes, refrains from romanticizing law, and along the way makes a case for institutionalizing a role for mercy in contemporary legal processes.

This chapter looks at theatrical productions created in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, which sought to convey the shock that permeated Israeli society as a result, and to provide theatrical responses to help the grieving community come to terms with his death. The chapter analyses the theatrical oeuvre of four post dramatic theatre creators—Ruth Kanner, Ilan Ronen, Rina Yerushalmi, and Hanan Snir—who saw Greek classical tragedy as a vast artistic arena where the political, the humanistic, and the artistic-performative merge, encompassing present and past, myth and history. Moreover, classical Greek tragedy allowed them to project their most disturbing concerns about the Israeli present and future by tearing apart the well-known texts, deconstructing their dramatic templates, and editing, adapting, revising, and redesigning their content in the decades after Rabin’s assassination, when hope gave way to despair.

This chapter develops a new theory of political accountability in light of political vices like hubris, blindness to moral blind spots, and political recalcitrance. It considers the various barriers and forms of resistance (both institutional and psychological) that subvert calls for accountability. Putting practices of accountability to work in the service of highlighting and challenging political vice requires that we expand our appreciation (and material support) for the type of public institutions that can do the critical, interrogative work of political accountability. This chapter argues that literature, theater, music, film, and cultural institutions in general are vital supplements to the regime of law in virtue of their creative powers to help realize democratic aspirations for political accountability, understood as a reiterative ethical and political aspiration for self-knowledge. In form and content, Aeschylus’s tragic drama the Oresteia inspires this alternative theory of democratic accountability.