Aeschylus' Orestia: A Trail of Blood
In the Greek trilogy, Orestia, Aeschylus focuses on the trail of blood as a crimson-splattered metaphor which brilliantly foregrounds the violence, murder, and revenge waged for three generations within a doomed family's genealogy. In the triadic dramas of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, Aeschylus indicates how the violent deeds of the past and the blood spilt within these misdeeds cannot be forgotten. Beginning with the crime of Atreus against Thyestes, Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigengia, Paris' abduction of Menelaus' wife Helen, Clytaemestra's murder of her husband Agamemnon with the assistance of her lover Aegisthus, continuing with Cassandra's murder, and the theatrical crescendo of Orestes and Electra's matricide of Clytaemestra, there are multiple foretellings that the Furies, the dark avengers for all past crimes will arrive on the scene and in their relentless pursuit of justice, refuse to leave. Throughout these three plays, Aeschylus' evocation of blood is used with his justly famed economic compression. Blood in Orestia evokes the irrevocable ties between kin which even death cannot obliterate, the remembrance of lives lived and slaughtered, and the ongoing life-force which cyclically returns, even when brutally vanquished, forcing itself to flower again. Scrutiny of blood's saturated appearance in the Orestia indicates that its presence grows so increasingly thick and vile that by the conclusion of The Eumenides Aeschylus calls it not by name but as that "vindictive poison" (782) causing "cancer, the leafless, the barren/to strike" (785-6).
After surveying the three plays of the Orestia, it appears that Aeschylus allows blood to appear in its most benign context in the first play of this grouping, Agamemnon. The Chorus indicates the sorrowful irony of Iphigengia's death, a daughter's sacrifice, "innocent blood" (215) spent to allay ...