Department of the Classics, Harvard University

Maenadism in the Oresteia

Author(s): William Whallon
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 68 (1964), pp. 317-327
Published by: Department of the Classics, Harvard University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/310809 .
Accessed: 26/11/2011 19:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Department of the Classics, Harvard University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Harvard Studies in Classical Philology.

http://www.jstor.org
 MAENADISM IN THE ORESTEIA

BY WILLIAM WHALLON

THE title of this paper is discussed with regard to (I) the dream of
Clytemnestra, (II) the chorus of Erinyes, (III) Apollo the iatro-
mantis, (IV) the Murray theory of a sacer ludus. The argument pro-
ceeds from an assumption that the known trilogy of Aeschylus is likely
to have drawn upon his previous work.1

In Iliad 6.136 Thetis receives Dionysus in her bosom, while his

tithinai let fall their thusthla, after being stung by the bouplix of
Lycurgus. Of probable identity with the tithinai are the nymphs. of
Homeric Hymn 26, who receive a newborn Dionysus in their bosoms,
nurse him during early childhood, and become his boisterous compan-
ions. The cult religion thought to speak through these lines 2 is in-
audible in the serene epic idiom, but the persistence of certain rites
across a millennium may appear from a patristic admonition, which is
reliable because it does not coerce details into complete intelligibility.
By this later time the Olympians no longer announce themselves through
priests or the thunder or human disguisings; in their stead local deities
consecrate votaries in ceremonies which are perhaps edifying and
assuredly disturbing. The ox-goad and the wands are combined,
Dionysus is a totemistic Zeus, and the nurses are initiates who take to
their bosoms a surrogate. Both father and defiler of the maid, "Zeus
copulates with her in the form of a snake, his true nature thus becom-
ing evident. The sign given to those inducted into the mysteries of
Sabazius, at any rate, is 'the god through the bosom,' &8t Kod7Tov
OE6O, that is, a snake dragged over the bosom of the neophytes, 8p(KCOV
'
700 which is testi-
0o•7o0 8t&OKOvf/rOS d-ovKoArrov rwv TEovLEVWcov,
mony to the immoderateness of Zeus. Pherephatta, furthermore,
conceives a child which has the form of a bull. In any event, a certain
pagan poet says, 'Of the snake the bull, and father of the bull the
snake; on hills the herdsman bears his secret goad,' the kentron
318 William Whallon

being, I think, a term for the narthlx wreathed by the Bacchic cele-
brants" (Clem. Alex. in Migne, PG, 8.76-77 = Euseb. Pamph. in Migne,
PG, 21.124-125). The wording is curious and may indicate that the
snake is dragged "through the folds of a robe" or "across the loins"
instead of "over the bosom." But other scraps of evidence tell of the
same or a similar voluptuous distortion without ambiguity. A fresco in
the Villa of the Mysteries on the outskirts of Pompeii depicts a seated
Panisca with pointed ears who suckles a fawn which stands beside her;
a cameo in the Duke of Marlborough collection shows a reclining
woman of average age who suckles a lynx.3 Nonnus gave the breasts of
his Bassarae or Bacchantes to the young of shaggy lionesses (I4.361-
362, 45-304-305), and even caused the revels to incite the lactation of a
virgin (45-294-303).
But whether such women were thought Atovud'ov rpo~botin fifth-
century Athens remains questionable. The Aeschylean play by that
name is hardly informative, since it is best known from the hypothesis
to Euripides' Medea, which declares only that the trophoi and their
consorts are rejuvenated in an Aeson's bath, presumably by being
cooked en masse. Euripides' Bacchae is in fact the superb and unique
existent study of the Dionysiac mania in the Hellenic era. Here women
dance in communal ecstasy, twine snakes in their hair (Bacch. 102-104),
and jostle with gazelles and the whelps of wolves. Re-enacting a myth
under the compulsion of delirium, they suckle these incarnations of the
god (Bacch. 699-702), and figuratively or ritualistically4 become his
trophoi, the ptatvoLdvoto Jtov`aoto T-rtO4vawho find human and
inhuman indistinguishable. Finally they fall upon a lion or a young
man and tear him to pieces. Such episodes were a part of lost Aeschy-
lean plays, in particular the Pentheus, as the hypothesis by Aristophanes
of Byzantium to the Bacchae bears witness. That the dream of Clytem-
nestra in the Choephoroewas fashioned from a previous creation of the
dramatist thus seems to me very probable - even though the crump-
ling of a nipple by a snake has the grim neatness that is likely to suggest
itself independently to a strong imagination. (Having transformed him-
self into "the subtlest beast of all the field," the Satan of Paradise Lost
9.581-582 speaks of fruit more desirable than "sweetest Fennel, or
the Teats of Ewe or Goat dropping with Milk at Ev'n," and the
identical jointure in Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.308-309 is a haunting
extension of Plutarch's hint that the asp left no mark upon the sensuous
flesh.) 5
In the Oresteia of Stesichorus, Clytemnestra dreams of a snake, its
crest besmeared with blood, from which appears a scion of Pleisthenes.
 Maenadism in the Oresteia 319
The debt of Aeschylus to his lyric precursor is obvious, but hardly less
so is his innovation, the homologue of a Dionysiac episode postulated
in the corpus now lost. Romulus (Aen. 1.275) and his ancestor Aeneas
(Aen. 4.367) may have imbibed from foster mothers the mana of wolves
or tigers; conversely, the devote who suckles a beast becomes entheos
and akin to the beast. The phantasm that terrifies Clytemnestra is an
iconic mark of her own character and anticipates her metempsychosis.
Cassandra had named her an amphisbaena (Ag. 1233); Orestes had
spoken of the adder that slew the eagle (Cho. 248-249). The serving
women later urge him to become a Perseus (Cho. 831-832),6 and hail his
destruction of the serpent pair, after he has butchered his mother with
her alter ego (Cho. 1047). Immediately he sees an ensemble of Gorgons
encrusted with snakes: Clytemnestra is transmuted and multiplied
before him visually.' Then the perspective changes during the entr'acte.
The antagonistic elements within Orestes' mind become manifest and
struggle to possess him as in a morality play. The serpentine woman he
has slain is a spectral dragoness (Eum. 128) who arouses the projections
of herself.
The suckling beast is a recurrent sign of violence. Iphigenia is raised
as a kid to the altar (Ag. 232) to requite the portent of the eagles' feast,
because Artemis delights in "the groping dewdrops of raging lions and
the philomastois of all wild things" (Ag. 141-142). The Argive Elders
return to the dark phrasing of the seer, as they relate an allegory about
the youngster of a lion, taken from its milk and philomaston, which a
certain man nursed in his home (Ag. 717-719). The cub is held in
the arms like a newborn child (Ag. 723-724), as gazelles and the whelps
of wolves are held by Bacchantes (Eur. Bacch. 699-702), but in time
repays its nurture in an unbidden banquet, bespattering the house with
blood and giving anguish to the householders. Finally Clytemnestra
dreams of a snake at her breast and the aftermath is not dissimilar.
She is slain herself and her shades consequently mark Orestes as their
own victim, not to be slaughtered at an altar but to be a feast alive
(Eum. 304-305). Guilt is transmitted along an intricate catena of
relationships, and one crime darkly mirrors its causal antecedent. In
the palace doorway a man and a woman twice lie slain at the feet of an
avenger (Ag. 1372ff, Cho. 973ff). The feast of Thyestes is likewise
ceaselessly atoned for and prepared anew; the interchange of bestial
with human young is shattering and persistent. As well as a possibly
formalized presage of what is to come, the vision of Clytemnestra is a
paraphrase of much that is anterior, a climax of sustained and powerful
preoccupation.
320 William Whallon

Orestes might have been incompletely exonerated by the dry legalism

of the close. Though the mother is alleged to be no parent but only
the host of the implanted seed (Eum. 658-659), he would still retain the
lion cub's debt for its tropheia, had not a counter-argument been
developed dramatically, beyond his awareness but to our own intellec-
tual satisfaction. Clytemnestra assumed she was visited by a straight-
forward Homeric or Stesichorean premonition, in which Agamemnon
reached toward her through the person of his natural ally. Orestes
came to this interpretation himself (Cho. 540-550), and accomplished
the seemingly prescribed retribution, though troubled by the bosom
bared for pity (Cho. 896-899). But in actuality he had already been
shown as innocent of any deed against his tropheia. For the gentle
and humdrum reminiscence of the nurse revealed her as not merely
the former nutricia of Orestes but his nutrix.8 At one time the nurse
was known in the poem of Stesichorus, as declares the scholium on
Cho. 733, and I should like to believe that Aeschylus recast her role, not
otherwise than he reshaped the nightmare itself.

II
The authority that Aeschylus exercised upon those who came later
was very great indeed; his debt to those who had gone before was by
no means negligible; less evident but reasonably conjectured is a
further profit he derived from autodidacticism. Because the priestess
in Eumenides 48-51 compares the Erinyes with Gorgons and Harpies,
the beldames known to us are likely to have dominated the Phorcides
and Phineus. Now altered entirely in name and role, they have imper-
ceptibly changed in appearance. Apollo threatens them with a winged
glistening snake (Eum. 18i), a weapon different in species from its
target, for though the Erinyes have snakes in their hair (Pausanias
1.28.6) they are themselves wingless and black (Eum. 51-52). A repug-
nant dramatic coterie, they were nevertheless familiar, since women
deranged and deformed, likewise with snakes in their hair, had danced
in the Edonians, the Bassarae, the Trophoi, the Aeschylean Bacchae,
the Xantriae, and the Pentheus. The tragedian solved an exigent prob-
lem by refurbishing forms with which he was familiar, and the Erinyes
owe their dramatic origin, as do even the Gorgons and Harpies, to
thiasoi of Bacchantes by the same creator.
Dionysiac myths were rather easily turned into plays because a
splendid role for the chorus was not far to seek, but most other subjects
lent themselves to oppressively stylized assemblies of commentators.
 Maenadism in the Oresteia 321
A dramatist regarded his chorus as a single-minded actor whenever
possible, but was usually compelled to cast mere sympathetic observers,
whose caricature in Housman's "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy" is
recognizable. All choric roles were as susceptible to reworking as were
the traditional legends themselves, but the resultant similarity of roles
did not cause the legends to contaminate each other, for the Bassarae
and Trophoi were not more identical than were the Elders of Persia
and Argos. The spectacle of the Eumenides likewise does not distract
from Orestes toward a bizarre consideration of an altogether irrelevant
Pentheus, and the Erinyes have the stamp of Bacchantes only because
Aeschylus found how his study of a curse might conclude with a chorus
of participants.
Such speculation is to a moderate extent supported by posterior
evidence. A. Baumeister observes that in the visual arts Erinyes and
Bacchantes are sometimes hard to distinguish; both wear snakes in
their hair, both are apt to carry wands or torches, and their clothing is
often of a kind.9 A sculptured Erinys in the Enciclopedia dell'arte antica
s.v. "Erinni" resembles the classical descriptions of a Bacchante.
Jane Harrison speaks of a Bacchante on a red-figured vase who has been
taken for an Erinys,1o and Hetty Goldman discusses a Volute Crater
on which Orestes and an Erinys associate with a Bacchante who is a
baffling visitor unless she is herself an Erinys in actuality." The lack
of visually discernible difference between the two forms seems in fact
to comment upon a Virgilian simile (Aen. 4.469) where Pentheus
demented sees not the Bacchantes but the Eumenides, that is, Erinyes.
The forms may have been identified or confused even verbally. The
Minyades in Aelian (Hist. Var. 3-42) are disinclined to join other wo-
men in bacchanalia, and as punishment are scourged with a spontaneous
generation of snakes. Now mad, they rip apart one of their own children
as if he were a fawn, then rush eagerly to join the other maenads, or
Bacchantes, but are pursued by them in consequence of the pollution.
The story is strange because the sparagmos, which would normally end
the Dionysiac trace, seems to stimulate the Minyades toward further
revelry, and the townswomen may plausibly be thought offended
because the sacrifice, a sacred act when preceded by dancing and other
formalized preparation, was executed in impious isolation from the
ritual. Nevertheless, the Bacchantes do resemble Erinyes exacting
vengeance for kindred bloodshed.
If in truth mythographers came to regard the names as interchange-
able, the influence of artists upon the literary tradition was possibly
more vigorous than one would have thought. In painting and sculpture
I I +-H.S.C.P.
322 William Whallon

the similarity of Erinyes to Bacchantes is less remarkable, though still

of sufficient interest to warrant a brief quest for their earliest connection,
which I would suggest as the dramaturgy of the Oresteia. Apollo
describes the Erinyes as margous, "furiosas" (Eum. 67), much as
Bacchantes might be named in another situation. Both are maenads
in the broad sense of the word, the Erinyes being a kind of fpo-roOrKOdTWV
/Latv&3wv, soi-disantes, as in Eumenides 499-500. They are certainly
not confessed Bacchantes, but they do resemble their postulated proto-
types, in comportment as in lineament, for they mark Orestes as the
victim of their ceremony, as might hags in a Dionysiac laceration. I
should agree that the trilogy concludes with the finest choric role the
theater has seen; I would argue only that Aeschylus planned the role
for a cast he had used before.
The snake of the dream is by no means immediately perceptible in
terms of Clytemnestra rather than Orestes, and even at length the
identification is less demonstrated than suggested. But there is an
essential accord among the rational significance of Cilissa's monologue,
the accumulation of metaphors for Clytemnestra, and the nature of her
reappearance as Erinyes. Whether the ambiguities and ironic delusions
of Euripides' Bacchae 12 were anticipated by the Pentheus is thoroughly
unknown; whether the multivalent allusions of the Oresteia were
developed earlier is yet more remote. What one can perceive is the dream
in its manifold relevance. The adder that slew the eagle sees her death
from the snake she bore and suckled (Cho. 928); the slayer of the ser-
pent-woman finds a throng of Gorgons in his tracks.

III
The Homeric Apollo is perhaps above all a god of archery. Pandarus
pledges him a hecatomb before releasing the shaft that breaks the truce
from a similar promise he influences the marksmanship in
(1. 4.119),
the Funeral Games (II. 23.863-876), and upon his feast day the bow is
strung in Ithaca (Od. 21.258). His traditional epithets are accurate, for
he impels arrows of pestilence toward the Achaean host (II. 1.40-52),
Idas takes up the bow for suitable combat against him (I1. 9-559), and
Hector dead lies like one slain by his bow of silver (I1. 24-758). But
the god of archery is at the same time and without change a god of
healing. He answers the supplication of Glaucus (I1. i6.528-529), and
it is to him that the decimated Achaeans sing the paean
(I1. 1.473-474),
rather than to the divinity of that very name, who will balm the pain of
Hades and Ares (II. 5.401-402-5.900-901) and propagate the healing
 Maenadism in the Oresteia 323
race of Egypt (Od. 4.232). Apollo is the father of Asclepius (Hom.
Hymn Asclep.), and hence the grandfather of Machaon and Podaleirius
(II. 2.731-732), the battlefield healers of their comrades, except when
Eurypylus seeks out Patroclus, the friend of the student of Chiron (II.
I1.828-835).
J. Huizinga observes that certain Christian saints who were believed
to cure specific maladies, such as St. Anthony and St. Vitus, became
in high medieval times associated with the cause of the maladies: "As
soon as the thought of the disease, charged with feelings of horror and
fear, presented itself to the mind, the thought of the saint sprang up at
the same instant. How easily, then, did the saint himself become the
object of this fear, so that to him was ascribed the heavenly wrath
that unchained the scourge. Instead of unfathomable divine justice, it
was the anger of the saint which seemed the cause of the evil and re-
quired to be appeased." 13 Apollo is graced by the analogous and
opposite extension of character. At first a destroyer as his ancient titles
indicate, he is before long regarded as the source of remedy, for he
takes the name of an obsolescent Paean as a sobriquet, and men who
would practice his art pronounce the oath, "I swear by Apollo the
Physician." Resident at Delphi he discerns the existence of pollution
and prescribes the requisite cure, thus becoming a lawgiver as well as a
ritualist, and he further enjoins harmony by alternating his bow with a
lyre (II. 1.603, Hom. Hymn Ap. 201, Hom. Hymn Hermes 496, and
in visual representations). The earlier concept of Apollo as nemesis
survives, chiefly in the performances of the Homeric rhapsodists, but
seems an archaism or memory in the age of the Oresteia.
The entire available Aeschylean corpus is a warranted explicator of
its several parts: as certain choric roles in all probability bore mutual
resemblance, many items of thought received expression more than
once. Because the scholium on Iliad 22.351 tells that the ransom for
Hector was visually weighed out in the Phrygians, the description of
Ares as a merchant trading bodies for gold reaches beyond its context
of Agamemnon 437ff. The figure of the Danaides as doves in Prometheus
857 is extended from Supplices 224, and the words of Aphrodite in
Nauck Aeschylus frag. 44 are akin to the resolution of the Eumenides.
Since Pelasgus in Supplices 263-267 relates that Apis, the son of Apollo
and an iatromantis, purged the territory of the swarming serpents which
bloody deeds caused to arise from the earth, the language of the priestess
in Eumenides 62-63 seems to possess uncommon significance and even
sanctity, for she speaks of Apollo as an iatromantis and seer who purges
homes of miasma. In their conception of a healer and magus, with
324 William Whallon

power over Erinyes manifested as snakes, the passages are similar if

not congruent. The final surviving instance of the word is the sardonic
inversion of Agamemnon 1623, where the textual note of Eduard Fraen-
kel is persuasive in its suggestion of blasphemy, as Aegisthus declares
to the Argive Elders that chains and starvation will be the iatromanteis
to their old age.
In the earlier part of the trilogy the extirpation of the family appears
inevitable from the raw and capricious Homeric Olympianism which
governs the world. A vindictive Apollo or Pan or Zeus sends ruin
toward Troy (Ag. 55-56), Apollo has maimed the manteia of Cassandra
before bringing her to the block (Ag. 1270-77), and his injunction to
execute Clytemnestra (Cho. 9oo-901) is likely to destroy Orestes. But
in the third play the winged glistening snake drawn against the Erinyes
(Eum. 181) is an instrument of surgery, precisely as was the arrow that
slew the Python warding Delphi (Hom. Hymn Ap. 357). The implica-
tions of the word iatromantis were an enduring segment of Aeschylean
belief, and the contrast between a benign and a malevolent Apollo,
which may be extrapolated from the Iliad, is central to the theology of
the Oresteia, as to its development in the theater. Though he engages
in the wrangling and flytings of the courtroom (Eum. 614-673),
Apollo ultimately defends sobriety against maenadism.
Should the overlord have sacrificed his daughter or his fleet? Should
a man punish or relent when the felon is his mother? Is blood-guilt or
righteousness the more deeply rooted? 71 -rvc' a'VEVKCWuKV; Both
contestants upon the final dilemma confidently favor the due process of
justice,14 and the Areopagus is established to decide questions of
homicide, the year of the play being a handsome moment for the
sanctification of the tribunal, since its powers had recently been curtailed
by Ephialtes. But the disputation proves of dramatic interest rather
than metaphysical profundity, for the begetting of the judge provides
a rhetorical thrust against the matrilineal plaintiffs, and incidentally
dignifies the eupatridae including Aeschylus himself, yet can hardly be
thought to urge an issue of political consequence. The imbroglio cannot
indeed admit juridical resolution; Zeus is incriminated but Orestes is
unabsolved. He must be released as an innocent in conscience, for any
other outcome is repugnant, but the Erinyes cannot be defeated under
the law, and the panel of citizens is unable to make a clear ruling. The
acquittal is determined not on the merits of the case but by the fore-
sight of Athene. She compels the old era to close, the cause of Orestes
is successful, Zeus is rendered secure in his dominion, the Erinyes
become tutelary deities, the tale of a familial curse becomes a civic saga.
 Maenadism in the Oresteia 325
Reconciliation has been reached without compromise; satisfaction is
plenary and will be lasting; the tragedy is completed without the
expected calamity.
Verbal and momentary catachresis or metaphor is no very rare
commodity: the KgpEs-va7rAarIKIpTO of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus
472 are perhaps Erinyes in conventional terminology; "the blind
Fury with th' abhorred shears" in "Lycidas" 75 is certainly the Fate
Atropos. Far more difficult to exemplify is such intellectual and con-
tinuous syncretism as the association of the Erinyes with the Eumen-
ides and then with the Semnai. The latter pair of terms are synonymous
designations in Sophocles' Oedipus of Colonus for the genii at Colonus,
who have no crucial connection with their counterparts localized in
Athens by the Oresteia. The former pair of terms are synonymous a
good deal more widely, as in Euripides' Orestes 38 and 321 where the
chorus speaks euphemistically, or in Aeneid 6.28o and 6.375 where the
likelihood of euphemism is slight. That Aeschylus was the terminal
cause of this interchangeability is not removed from doubt, particularly
because the Eumenides receive no mention within the text of the trilogy,
but the identification of the Erinyes with the Semnai does seem a
creation never anticipated. Homeless spirits of imprecation enter into
residence nearby the theater itself, and upon their name as august
goddesses will one swear before the Areopagus in times to come
(Dinarchus, Against Demosthenes 46-47)-15 "If then one should ask,
'What has this to do with Apollo?' we shall say that it concerns him
and Dionysus as well" (Plutarch, The E at Delphi 388 E).

IV
The Aristotelian derivation of tragedy may be wrong,16 but cannot
be censured as altogether unreasonable, since Bacchylides 18 (17) is a
dithyramb in dramatic form, though rather late for admissible evidence
about origins. Archilochus frag. 77 speaks of the dithyramb as a song to
Dionysus, who is therefore not inconceivably associated with tragedy,
especially if the word denotes a goat-song or a spelt-song. 17 From the
time of Peisistratus the Greater Dionysia were the occasion of the
poetic competition, which was observed by a statute of the god pre-
viously borne into the theatre, and Dionysus was further honored with
sacrifice, though we lack cause for supposing his victims human, as
they were before the battle of Salamis (Plut. Pelopidas 21). The fact
that phalloi were ceremoniously prominent is more difficult for us to
accept wholeheartedly than the legend that Dionysus once spoke to
 326 WilliamWhallon

Aeschylus in a dream and bade him compose (Pausanias 1.21.3). Which

myths were first enacted cannot be named with certitude, but there may
be truth in the report that spectators eventually grumbled, "Nothing
to do with Dionysus."
The Golden Bough was no doubt responsible for the anthropological
literary criticism of Gilbert Murray, who believed that Greek tragedy
resurrected the Eniautos Daimon year after year under a variety of
masks. The insufficiency of this theory was demonstrated by A. W.
Pickard-Cambridge, and Murray forthrightly assented to the argu-
ment brought against him, though with reluctance to think he had been
misled altogether. T. B. L. Webster has restored the inoperative sacer
ludus as a more pliable tragic rhythm,18 and I would reach a similar
though narrower conclusion from considering practical dramaturgy.
If the dismemberment of Dionysus was ever a spectacle in cult worship,
the scenario would lend itself readily to plays about Pentheus, Lycurgus,
Orpheus, perhaps also Osiris, Marsyas, and others. Convenience alone
caused the similarity among several Aeschylean works recorded by title.
With the replacement of names they are variations of each other and of a
presumptive if incompletely describable prototype, which instituted the
lyric dance indifferently appropriate to the greater number of tragedies,
except within the severe circumscription of custom.
From Euripides' Bacchae and other indications of the Dionysiac rites,
the scope of the Pentheus can be roughly estimated, one of the probable
elements being the suckling of a beast by a woman. Such an episode
might subsequently have suggested to its creator a bold modification
of the dream from Stesichorus, which retains the nature of an omen in
the Choephoroebut at the same time suggests the bestiality of maenadism.
The feelings of Clytemnestra are not those of a mother, but she is aware
of her motherhood as indisputable fact, and finds herself unnerved by
the pathological nightmare. At the end of the second play and throughout
the third, by a condign metamorphosis seemingly Dionysiac, she takes
the likeness of the creature she had nursed, and becomes hallucinatory
Gorgons who would suck the blood of Orestes. Their binding spell is
possibly a relic from a very early kind of tragedy,19 and they execute
one of the few successful choric roles in the genre. The dramatist
assigned a new task to the familiar and effective tribe of Bacchantes;
the madwomen associated with Pentheus, Lycurgus, Orpheus, are
changed in little more than appellation. The expectation of a Dionysiac
sparagmos in the Eumenides is not fulfilled, for an iatromantis purges
the land of the Erinyes appearing as snakes, a conception expressed in
the Supplices here becoming dramatic. The maenadism of an antique
 Maenadism in the Oresteia 327

legal code is undone, and hostility is replaced by amicability. In

significancethe Oresteiais exceedingly remote from a Dionysiac pas-
sion play; as a work for the theater it may now and then resemble a
putative ancestor.

NOTES
I. I am extremely grateful for the year at the Center for Hellenic Studies
during which this paper was written. John Gould has sharpened my thinking
on a few matters. I would also mention the profound reading of the Oresteia
by my teacher C. M. Dawson. Previous remarks of mine on the trilogy appear
in AJP 82 (1961) 78ff and TAPA 89 (1958) 27xff.
2. E.g. by K. Deichgriiber, " Die Lykurgie des Aischylos." Nachrichten
v. d. Gesellschaft d. Wissenschaften zu G6ttingen, n.s. vol. 3, no. 8, p. 236.
3. C. O. Miller, Denkmdler der alten Kunst, continued by Friedrich Wie-
seler (G6ttingen 1854-56), vol. 2, fasc. 3, p. i, and table 46, plate 579.
4. R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus (Cambridge, England
1948) 92 and 157; E. R. Dodds ed. Euripides, Bacchae, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1960),
n. on lines 699-702.
5. Masaaki Kubo calls my attention to these astonishing lines from the
soprano aria toward the beginning of the Bach St. Matthew Passion: "Ach, ein
Kind, das du erzogen, das an deiner Brust gesogen, droht den Pfleger zu ermor-
den, denn es ist zur Schlange worden."
6. In visual representation Orestes is attacked by a pair of Erinyes, one of
them holding "a mirror that reflects the image of his murdered mother,"
whom he may therefore have slain as Perseus slew the Gorgon: Hetty Goldman,
"The Oresteia as Illustrated by Greek Vase Painting," HSCP 21
(1910) 153.
7. See Herbert Weir Smyth, Aeschylean Tragedy (Univer. of California
1924) 217, and George Thomson, IEschylus and Athens, 2nd ed. (London 1950),
275.
8. Robert F. Goheen, "Aspects of Dramatic Symbolism", AJP 76 (1955)
132-137; see also Thomson, JEschylus and Athens, 2nd ed., p. 272.
9. Denkmdler des klassischen Altertums (Munich and Leipzig 1885-88),
s.v. "Erinyen" and "Mainaden."
io. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Meridian Books reprint
1955) 399.
II. HSCP 21 (1910) 152.
12. See Dodds ed. Bacchae, n. on lines 987-990, and Winnington-Ingram,
Euripides and Dionysus, p. 70.
13. The Waning of the Middle Ages (Anchor reprint 1956) 173.
14. See K. J. Dover, "The Political Aspect of Aeschylus's Eumenides,"
JHS 77 (1957) 230-231, on Eum. 490-493.
15. For this reference I am indebted to John J. Keaney.
16. See Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's Poetics (Cambridge, Mass. 1957) 143-163,
on Poet. 48b34-49aI5.
17. See Harrison (above, n.io.) 415-423.
18. Pickard-Cambridge, Dithyramb, Tragedy and Comedy, 2nd ed., revised
by Webster (Oxford 1962) 126-129, which sums up the differences of opinion.
19. Thomson, ,Eschylus and Athens, 2nd ed., p. 186.