Contradictions: Aeschylus illustrates 3 disturbing contradictions regarding justice & political authority.  AG's herald announced that Paris & Troy were "convicted of rapine" & punished by AG, who "scythed them to the roots" (AG 525).  AG himself boasts that:
AG 809    we raped their city--we were right.

Some words have variable connotations, depending on tone, context, & other factors.  Other word cannot be nuanced.  Words like "murder," "torture," "rape," have no positive connotations.  Consequently, we are disturbed when AG makes the equation: rape = righteousness.  Something must be wrong in that equation.  Rape is a vicious crime & tragedy.  It cannot be defended, much less twisted into a policy of justice!  Once we recognize the contradiction, our attention turns to AG.  Do we want such a leader who is proud to have raped a city?  What is likely to do to our city?  In his 2nd homecoming speech, he promises to "summon the city for a trial" to "burn the cancer at the roots" (831, 835).

If we remain equivocal about AG (at best), doubting that he is the leader we want, perhaps KLY would be a better choice.  She has ruled for 10 years in AG's absence, not without some opposition.  The chorus tells the herald they welcome the army home & he asks why?
538    So anxious for the armies, why?

The leader of the chorus responds:
539    For years now,
         only my silence kept me free from harm.

In any case, KLY consolidates her power through treachery & murder.  She then invites the people to recognize her actions as just:
1439   Here is AG, my husband made a corpse
          by this right hand--a masterpiece of Justice.

Here is our 2nd disturbing contradiction: my husband, made a corpse = Justice.  The key word in our equation is "husband."  It is understandable that KLY would seek justice for the murder of IPH.  In that context, AG's identity changes.  He is criminally indicted, not a husband.  The word "husband" should have only positive connotations, reminding us of wedding vows to love & cherish.  So we are as aghast at KLY's twisted & self-serving sense of justice as we were by AG.

The third contradiction is evident in Orestes' execution of his mother.  Once again, the word "mother" cannot be reconciled to the act of executing a criminal or to the word "butcher":
LB    891    I want to butcher you [KLY]--right across his [Aegisthus'] body!

Orestes formula -- "You killed & it was outrage--suffer outrage now" (LB 917) in return, is as unacceptable as his parents' formulas for justice.  The chorus hopes that with the execution of KLY, the dawn of justice is breaking:
LB 950    Look, the light is breaking!
Ironically, we are right back at the beginning of the AG.  The light is not a new dawn, but the glow of civilization burning.

If we citizens cannot trust AG, KLY, nor Orestes (nor Saddam Hussein, Joe Stalin, or Mao), who can we trust?  No one.  Does that mean that the polis is doomed?  No, it means we were tragically mistaken to think that the city is one man (or woman).  Creon's son, Haemon makes this crucial point in Antigone:
824    It's no city at all, owned by one man alone.

The Eumenides presents Aeschylus' solution.  What is it?  Ah, a smell another Chat question.

Who is Reason?

In Greek myth reason has at least 4 names.  The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote a very influential & highly readable book on The Birth of Tragedy in which he contrast Apollo & Dionysus.  Apollo personifies conscious, explicit, rule driven logic or legal reasoning.  He teaches grammar & computer languages.  Dionysus teaches creative writing.  He personifies the "reasoning" or associative thinking that goes on below the threshold of consciousness.  Apollo has no emotions.  Dionysus, the god of wine, is our emotional life.  Aeschylus does not evoke Dionysus, but a form that resembles him.  The Furies represent only a fraction of Dionysus' realm.  They lie dormant, sleeping in the unconscious until they are stirred to life by hubris.
399    Then where is the man
          not stirred with awe, not gripped by fear
          to hear us tell the law that
          Fate ordains

The Furies are terrible & awesome powers, but it is their feared power that deters the criminal act.

These 2 powers can be brought into tension.  Apollo is disgusted by the primitive demand for blood & revenge that the Furies demand in the name of justice.  From the other direction, the Furies are appalled when the guilty walk away, freed by some legal technicality.  Justice is served by neither power alone.  It requires their marriage or cooperation, which is personified by the androgyne, Athena.  She is reason, but she is female.  The Furies say:
449    We respect you [Athena].  You show us respect.
In contrast to Apollo who is disgusted by the primitive, emotional depth of fury/outrage.

Obviously, Athena is the most complete & propitious image of reason.

Chorus: We know what a chorus is: singers.  There is also a chorus line of dancers.  In ancient Greek drama the chorus chanted lines & also danced.  Remember that the audience looked down on the stage & choral pit or ground.  The chorus could therefore work something like a marching band at football game half-time.  They could illustrate themes by dancing or standing to represent patterns.  In Aeschylus' Orestia trilogy, two themes are prominently illustrated by the chorus: dizziness & being caught in a net.  Orestes & the chorus are dizzied by the complex moral dilemmas they find themselves in.  The chorus would have whirled & spun in dance movements to illustrate their inability to find a straight moral line of behavior.  Aeschylus also uses the idea of how our moral decisions (in what we hope is a straight line) tie knots & how these knots ultimately form an inescapable net of fate.  This would also have been illustrated by the chorus in dance as well as song.

Aristotle: In his work explaining how tragic drama works, Aristotle was especially interested in two principles: mimesis & catharsis.  Interestingly, Plato thought the exact opposite on these two principles that are argued to this day.  Plato's thought was modeled on the idea of monkey see, monkey do.  If children watch violent cartoons, movies, video games, they imitate the models they studied to become more violent.  Therefore they should be protected from such influences.  On this issue of catharsis, Plato thought that the more often one is emotionally moved, the harder it is to return to temperance & emotional neutrality necessary to dispassionately analyze what is best.  The more often you go to the movies or read novels, the stupider you become because you are not doing your math homework & because you are becoming addicted to emotional excess.

Plato's reasoning on aesthetics makes sense in regard to children.  Most adults find Aristotle more convincing.  In regard to mimesis (or what the artist seeks to imitate or present as reality), it is a complex human motive & emotion, not some relatively simple response.  Orestes & Antigone & Medea are involved in far more complex moral problems than was AK whose simple response was violence.  Plato was dead wrong.  Instead of being a waste of time, drama teaches & informs an audience about moral truths that are intelligible or understandable in no other way.  We might hear a sermon or lecture about pride a hundred times & still be bored by the topic.  In contrast, a single attendance at the performance of Sophocles Oedipus might demonstrate exactly how intellectual pride works & how disastrous it can be.  We may leave the theater much better educated about the moral problem than if we had heard yet another bland & over intellectual sermon.  Aristotle claims that art communicates a kind of reason that reason itself fails to recognize.  Secondly, art does not emotionally disturb people.  It does the very opposite in association with the process of catharsis, which works like this.  Our everyday life fills us with tension & hostility.  If we are mature, we do not vent our pent up resentments against our spouse or dog.  Hopefully we go to the theater where we have an opportunity, when the lights of the movie theater go down, to vicariously identify with Dirty Harry or some Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris movie.  The more violence the better, because in vicariously participating with the fantasy ego of Harry or Chuck, slaughter hundreds, we cathart or vent our hostilities, leaving the theater "cured" or fairly placid & ready to resume a "real" identity & ego that knows violence is not an easy solution to life's problems.

Athens was more convinced by Aristotle, making attendance to the theater obligatory for citizens, as much, perhaps, for its cathartic emotional affect as for its instructional function in regard to the lessons of citizenship.
 

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