Theme of Disorderliness in 3 Plays

The resolution of the Oresteia that takes place with the Eumenides cannot be understood without fairly detailed reference to the curse of the house of Atreus of Argos, which is bound up with the legend of the Trojan war and which is rife with complex causal relationships and actions that long predate the trial of Orestes before Athena in the Eumenides. The curse began when Atreus killed sons of his brother Thyestes, who had seduced Atreus's wife. After a banquet in which Atreus fed Thyestes's children to him, Thyestes laid a curse on Atreus's descendants. Atreus's two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, married two sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen, respectively, and when Helen either eloped with o

has preceded them. That mistake is the real subject of the Eumenides; the cycle of revenge has a life of its own that has the effect of reifying and justifying disorder. Both human beings and gods are perfectly capable of continuing the cycle of retribution indefinitely, with the gods using human beings as their sometimes unwitting instrument. Gods' motives belong to an exercise different from human motives, even though humans pay the price. Or not, in the case of Orestes. Why this happens has to do with the function of Athena. Kitto says she brings "superior wisdom" that results in the establishment of customs, practices, and norms of civil society that absorbs and overtakes for its own purposes the details of blood vengeance (divinely mandated or not). Yes, the Furies are shocked and amazed when Orestes is acquitted. They make so bold as to accuse such gods as Athena, of the "younger breed" (Eum. 879) of divines, of overriding The laws of ages, torn from my hands, And I am desolate, stripped of honor. But I will come heavy in anger on This land: then sorrow will match sorrow (Eum. 879) But Athena, who knows as well as Orestes that other Furies would have been shocked and amazed had Orestes not killed his mother, rejects th