By their own Recklessness (Odyssey 1.34)
A Few Remarks Concerning the Motives, Dynamics and Consequences of the Crimes in Aeschylus’s Oresteia
Abstract
The aim of the article is to analyze the Aeschylus’s Oresteia in terms of selected motives, dynamics and consequences of the committed crimes. The motives for the murders perpetrated by the main dramatis personae included the ancestral curse of the House of Atreus, the individual character of the heroes and the intergenerational nature of revenge. These three elements interact with one another to increase the suffering of the victims and augment the conviction in the characters about the inevitability of human fate, which pushes man towards evil. In discussing the dynamics of Oresteia, a particular attention was given to the three types of murder that coincide and interact with one another: the infanticide committed by Agamemnon; the maritricide perpetrated by Clytemnestra and the matricide carried out by Orestes. Analogically to the motives of the crime, there is also an inextricable cause and effect relationship between the types of murders. The last part of the article draws attention to the consequences of evil deeds, which have been classified into three main categories. The first one is of a social nature and concerns the role of public institutions in making decisions about the life and death of citizens. The second category is of a religious nature and raises the question of the role of religion in social life, in particular the influence of the dead on the living, and the importance of religious rituals in the purification of a criminal. The third category is of a legal nature and raises the question of the origins of law, with particular emphasis on the Attic judicial procedure.
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