← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we are discussing the Libation Bearers, the second play in Aeschylus's Oresteia. So today we're gonna talk about Orestes who comes home and he meets his sister Electra. We'll discuss how her own plight and how to pray is an analog or a foreshadowing of Orestes own plight as the Blood Avenger. We'll have a good conversation on intercessory prayer and its own roots in both the Greek and Hebrew cultures. We'll also talk a little bit about Providence and how they use the Greeks and Hebrews to talk about Thomas Aquinas. And we'll have a lot of Old Testament references, more than normal. So join us for a very fruitful conversation on Aeschylus's Libation Bearers.
- [00:59]
Thomas Lackey
Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. We're so glad that you're joining us as we work our way through Aeschylus's Oresteia. This is actually the third part, but the second play in which we're going through the Libation Bearers here with Deacon Harrison Garlick and our good friend Thomas Lackey. Thomas, it's great to have you back onto the show. So glad that you're joining us once again. I enjoy having you on the show every time. I also very much am grateful that you are part of the Sunday Great Books that we have. Maybe I'd be very interested, Thomas, in hearing your thoughts on the impact that Sunday Great Books has had on you.
- [01:42]
Adam
It's really forced me to. The many of these texts that I have known the stories of but never actually dug into the text and are great books. I've never been at a book club, but I'm going to guess that ours is more serious than most because, I mean, we're really, we're going line by line. If you think the podcasts are intense, our Sunday takes it up a notch. So, you know, I think, I think it's, it's been, it's been really good to make me work with a text, to chew on a text, and then also to hear all the ideas that you, you, you can honestly say I, I could have read this 10 times and I'd have never thought of that. And if I hadn't been sitting here with you and discussing it, I, that's an insight that I just would never have come to me. I think it's been, it's been really rich and I've, I've, I've just loved it. It's. It's Truly a highlight.
- [02:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. It's really humbling to hear that, Thomas, and I. I deeply appreciate it. Cause I just think, you know, for my own formation of the Great Books, which I think really can't be extricated from my coming to become Catholic because, you know, my studying of the Great Books started at Ave Maria while I was working for the Master's program, which is also when I was going through, you know, then rcia. And so I think there's really, like a treasure here that I've really wanted to share with a group of people. And I had done previously independent groups like I did one time, a, you know, come read Plato's Republic with me for 10 months. Just one book a month. And, you know, Adam one time joined me for. No, Adam, you joined for that one, too, didn't you?
- [03:07]
Thomas Lackey
No, I was not invited. I wasn't cool enough yet. I was making my way up the cool chart and I finally got there on Dante's Inferno. So that's what.
- [03:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's when I. I do remember that three cool points short of joining the Players Republic group. I remember that now.
- [03:22]
Thomas Lackey
I did that and then I. I borrowed some points from my wife and I. I made it up for the Inferno.
- [03:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So then we had to move that along. So then, yeah, we did. I did do a. A Linton reading group of Dante's Inferno. And I. I think that having the Sunday Great Books in which we actually move through chronologically and we've actually. I think our biggest hurdle was convincing everyone to read Homer for a year. And once we did that, I. And like, you know, we're like three books deep and everyone's like, arguing about what word means and, you know, which, like, which character is the good guy and et cetera. I just loved it. And it's been really. It's just been a blessing, I think, in my life to see those conversations. And I'm. I'm still very much a student. I don't want to paint myself. I mean, I coordinate and host the events at my house, and I think the hospitality is very important for me and how to host them. But I'm still very much a student. Right. So here, Aeschylus is the teacher, Homer is the teacher. But I'm very humbled, Thomas, to hear you say those things, because it really has been on my heart, I think, to have that fraternity and work through the Great Books.
- [04:27]
Adam
Yeah, I mean, I just, it's. I absolutely love it and I'm very, very grateful to be part.
- [04:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And we should say, right, that that is the historical impetus for this podcast is then, how do we take that fraternity? How do we take those good small group discussions and bring them to a larger audience? As you know, we were sharing on X that, hey, we were doing these Sunday great books. A lot of people are commenting saying, hey, how could I do this in my own group? Like, is there anything I can have? Do you know, any resources? And so, I mean, that's why we have the guides now to the Iliad and the Odyssey for those who want to start a small group is because we really wanted to try and be. Which kind of try and be that person in the group that's just like the student who's already taken the class before. Like, it's really rough for, like, six or seven people to try and get together and read Homer for the first time. You kind of need someone who's at least kind of, you know, just familiar with the text. But if you don't have that, I don't want you to be robbed of reading the great books. And so this is really where a sin steps in, is to say, okay, could we be kind of like that. That student who's been here before that can join you in a certain way in that small group, whether it's our guides on our website or whether it's the podcast or the YouTube channel or whatever it is. Can we help you in your own fraternity kind of go through these great texts together?
- [05:43]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. And it's really been cool just to see other people responding as we've been going through as, as. As you said, Deacon, where we've gone through the year of Homer and we've been listening or seeing other people actually getting together, taking pictures, singing them to us, asking, like, in depth questions about the text. Right. It's like, there's been several guys who have responded on X and, like, actually asked us questions like, hey, this is something that we talked about in our group. What are your thoughts? And that's. That's like kind of like it's. There's multiple fruits, multiple layers to. To the Sunday Great Books, one being this podcast, but another one is just like, seeing other people get together and having real meaningful conversations and have, like, really taking a deep dive and taking their intellectual life seriously, regardless of where they've been. Like, regardless if they, you know, have a master's degree or whether they. Ha. They don't have a college degree at all. Whether they, you know, whether they. They're very new to great books or they're kind of a master of the great books. So to Speak. They've read them all. It's been really cool to see other people engaging in it.
- [06:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Thomas, do you think that you have become a better reader of scripture through meeting, like, kind of through moving through the small group, through, through the Sunday great books and like, studying the great books? Cause I noticed I read the gospel of St. John to my daughter a while back. So every night we just, you know, read a chapter or so, and I just realized, like, how much more critical I was. And I don't mean that in a. In a negative sense, but just like my. I noticed that the way I read scripture had changed, in which, like, little details and why did they include that detail and why is he saying that? All of that stood out to me much more after working through Homer than I think it did previously.
- [07:25]
Adam
You know, actually I'm going to flip it around that reading things like St. Augustine's on Christian doctrine, which is a lot about how to read Scripture, and then reading a lot of the commentaries on scripture by the Fathers, I think prepared me to read the great Books. So I'm actually. So it's, in a sense, studying to try to learn to read scripture has now prepared me to also read these other great texts. But I, I mean, without creating an equivalence, I'm just saying that the idea that you come to a text with on that has multiple layers of meaning that you need to tease apart. Obviously scripture is inspired. It's at a different. It's a different standard. But nonetheless, any of these books that have stood that kind of test of time and have something to teach are usually can't be engaged with that one level of meaning. They have to be teased apart into the, you know, allegorical and the literal and, and so forth. And so I actually think it's kind of a little bit the other way around. But it starts to work in a cycle where the, you know, now going back and reading this, you can go forward and read Scripture and then studying the scripture, you can. You bring insights back to this. They, they work in concert.
- [08:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think I'm very much looking forward to reading scripture on this podcast. So I haven't really charted out when that's actually going to be, but my grand idea is, is that once we kind of work through the Greeks, then we will actually pick up the Hebrew culture before moving into the Roman culture, because we'll, we'll want to see the Hebrew lineage, right? That then comes together because that meeting between Hebrew faith and Greek reason happens prior to Roman occupation. And so I think there's a certain way after reading the Greeks, to take a step back and pick up another thread of history and say, okay, can we do this? I'd really like to do, you know, our own kind of, you know, whether that's a year on Scripture or whatever we decide to do. But I'm really kind of eager to take all the lessons that I've learned now reading through the Greeks and to see these parallels. And actually, in this text, we're going to see a parallel that I'm very fascinated to play out. And I think that's going to bring such a rich reading to the Hebrew text, to the Old Testament, and then to then bring that plus some Roman reads into the New Testament is something that I'm very much looking forward to. And we'll be 45 or whatever we're going to be by the time we get there, but it's going to be wonderful.
- [09:56]
Adam
Well, the New Testament is an interesting one, too, because I, I think if you, I mean, if you start with Genesis, I, I. It'd be interesting to see just how long you could spend on Genesis in the classical world, in the ancient world, through the early church and onward. It'd be, that'd be that. That's a lifetime right there. I say, I think you could seriously do a year on Genesis.
- [10:19]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah.
- [10:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Adam's the one that keeps adding realism to the podcast and being like, no, because we can't spend four years on Plato, like narrow.
- [10:29]
Thomas Lackey
JP2, who did, like, Wednesday audiences, just on basically a chapter or less than a chapter of Genesis. Genesis 2. He basically did a Wednesday audiences. But we could call it the better Bible in a Year podcast.
- [10:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There you go.
- [10:45]
Thomas Lackey
That would be pretty cool.
- [10:47]
Adam
Chapter in a year.
- [10:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's going to be good.
- [10:49]
Thomas Lackey
Let's get, let's get into the text. Let's, let's start. Maybe, Deacon, you want to kind of maybe like, start it, like, figure out, like, set the scene.
- [10:57]
Adam
Yeah.
- [10:58]
Thomas Lackey
I found it was interesting that there's also a call to the gods at the very beginning.
- [11:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. It reminded me of, you know, all three of the volumes of the Divine Comedy and with a reference to the stars. And so here, Aeschylus's Oresteia. Each one seems to start with an invocation to the gods. So, you know, Thomas, I think, did a really good job walking us through an Agamemnon of, like, the opening monologue is really important because it kind of sets the stage right, I guess, literally, and it kind of lets, you know, like, where are we? What are we doing? So, you know, my understanding here is kind of Looking at Fagel. So I'm using the Fagel's translation and looking at some of his endnotes that, you know, we're several years after Agamemnon, right? So we're are. Right. We're several years after Agamemnon. Orestes, Agamemnon's son, is probably 18 to 20 years old. That's probably where we are in this narrative, is my understanding. And so he opens. Right? He opens the monologue. And it's interesting that not only do we get an invocation to the gods, but we get an invocation of Hermes. And that's something I'd really like to explore in tonight's conversation is what is Hermes actual role now in this kind of like more classical Greek mythology? We saw him in Homer, and he was the messenger God to a certain degree. Iris played a lot of that role. But Hermes in his cult, I think, has really matured and grown. And so as we kind of start off, one of the things that I would be wanting to look at is what's the role of Hermes and does it actually have a Hebrew parallel?
- [12:29]
Adam
One note I'd put as well is we have to be thankful for Aristophanes for having the opening at all, because we are only have one text of the libation bearers and it is missing the opening. And in fact, we still don't have all of the opening prologue. But we only have the opening lines of the play because Aristophanes quotes them elsewhere. So we know how it began. And then we have. And then it's sort of lost. And then it picks up again. The other thing that's kind of interesting is if you look at Agamemnon, it opens with this invocation of the gods, but then he immediately looks to the heavens. So there's this. This reference towards sort of the cosmic gods, while this one also references the gods, but immediately turns to the Olympic gods. And I see you're starting to see. I don't know, I don't want to draw too much out of that because it might be overreading. But there. I think there's a sense here in which we're also seeing a progression through various conceptions of the gods and of justice. And you're seeing in that even that progressing through the plays. And we'll see this in Eumenides as well, essentially a move past the Olympic gods in some extent. So there's progression.
- [13:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We would probably tether that then to the statement of Zeus, right, as the nameless. The nameless God, Right. That I'LL call you Zeus if that's what you will. Right. That's. That's a movement. That's a. I guess, in a certain way, a maturation of Greek thought on who Zeus is, where he's starting to actually be a stand in for this, like, divine power.
- [14:01]
Adam
Yeah, I think so.
- [14:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that a lot. You know the other thing, too, just more on an empathetic note, that really struck me reading this now, because again, I. I am not terribly sympathetic towards Ag Menmon. Like, I'm. I'm sorry he got murdered in the bathtub, but this is a character. I haven't been terribly sympathetic to him since the Iliad. But Orestes monologue here really did strike me of. That he was deprived. Not just. Not just simply deprived of his capacity or his ability to say goodbye to his father because he wasn't there when they buried him, but also that he just never saw him. That he was deprived of actually seeing his own father when he came home. And I think last time with Agavin Mon, the play, we spent a long time talking about why Clytemnestra spent so much on the tapestries that they really denied that he even walked on the Earth again.
- [14:57]
Adam
Right.
- [14:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
They denied in a certain way that he really came home to Argos, he never touched the earth, but also that he didn't. That he was denied seeing his own son. And there's a part of that. Of that that I actually find very touching slash horrific.
- [15:10]
Adam
Yeah, we're seeing kind of an inverse of the Iliad, I mean, of the Odyssey, Right. We're seeing the tragic version of Odysseus son. Just as Odysseus and Agamemnon have a parallel, we have Orestes and I've already forgotten his name, having a. Telemachus.
- [15:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Telemachus. Yeah. It's interesting reading in them in this order, right? Because I think the Odyssey actually plays in heavily into libation bearers. And we'll see a few parts where I think it plays in. So interesting that in the narrative where. Between Iliad and the Odyssey, but because the whole audience already knows the Odyssey, the Odyssey in a certain way is now informing that interim period. And I think there's several periods here where I was like, this just sounds like a riff right out of the.
- [15:50]
Adam
Odyssey, because I think this one has the most resonances, right? The, the, the Agamemnon Mortel tells a story that's referenced in the Odyssey and taken as a given. And then this one, again, as you're saying, seems to pick up on themes and even scenes from the Odyssey and represent them in a. In a. With twist.
- [16:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Mm. Correct. The other. The. My last thought kind of. This opening monologue is more of a theme or something I'd like to explore. As we move through the text, it grows so we can kind of discuss it where we think it actually becomes more mature. We talked about justice is. Excuse me, that religion is a virtue under justice, that religion is actually a natural virtue, that you don't have to actually have divine revelation as a human to know or to have an intuition that you need to give God his due. And then out of that kind of springs a natural religion that obviously takes different shapes and forms. And it's really striking to me in the Libation Bearers how developed the intercessory for the dead is. And we get this here a little after line 15. Or perhaps they come to honor you, my father bearing cups to soothe and still the dead. And we're going to see both. Both movements here. So we're going to see that the living can offer sacrifices to affect the dead, right? To soothe them, to appease them, to do these things. But then we're also going to see. Which somewhat surprised me the first time I read Libation Bearers is we're actually going to see that then the dead can intercede for the living, that they can actually somehow affect the living. And that's something that I think really need to watch in this text and maybe draw out some, like, Old Testament Hebrew parallels there. Any other thoughts on this kind of opening monologue by Orestes?
- [17:46]
Adam
I think just a comment on the lost portion. Probably we can guess just by what happens later. Where we talked earlier about how the prologue sets the time and the place. Probably Orestes was. Would have set the. Something about his mission and vision from Apollo. And then, you know, and here I am, you know, in response, we can just guess that. But it's.
- [18:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It.
- [18:10]
Adam
No one can know for sure.
- [18:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good insight. So let's move on to the chorus. So again, we've talked about the. The practicalities. If you didn't listen to the episodes on Agavidmon, go back to those. Thomas really helped us understand kind of the mechanics of the play. The chorus, they come out, you know, who are they? But one thing is the chorus. The identity of them changes per play, right? So they play the same role, I guess, if you want to say it that way. But their identity changes. So in Agamemnon, the chorus was the old men, which in a lot of Ways were very parallel to the inept men of Ithaca in the Odyssey. Here, if I understand correctly, right, the chorus are the libation bearers. So the name bearers of this play, mainly led by Electra, who is the sister of Orestes. And so here at line what is that 26 or so, we see the chorus come in, the libation bearers, and we get a very job esque opening here where they. Their cheeks are glistening from tears and their nails have raked their faces and they are streaming with blood, and they have torn their linen garments and they beat their chests. So this is very much, you know, lamentations. And so here comes these women, led mainly by Electra, even though there's also a leader of the chorus, to the tomb. And Orestes sees this and he hides himself. So this chorus, I think, is very fascinating. What stood out to you guys?
- [19:42]
Adam
I think the first thing that stood out to me, at least in many of the commentaries, is that the chorus is made up of slave women, probably even Trojan women. Right. So this is an interesting thing too, that you have these captives being sent out to mourn for Agamemnon of all people. In their case, he focuses on Electra, conspicuous in her grief. He makes a distinction between her grief, which strikes him as somehow distinct and more authentic than the others that are sent. And I think that's an interesting thing, that he marks her out as unique. This must be Elektra.
- [20:28]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I also found it interesting on about, like line 45 or so when they're talking about the course it talks about the proud dead stir under the earth. They rage against the ones who took their lives. I thought that was really interesting because it gives an insight into what they think. The afterlife, or what do they think about the afterlife? What are their roles with those who are. Who are still alive on Earth? You know, what they think of Agamemnon, like, where he is. I'm not really sure exactly where they think. Heaven, hell, all the different types of afterlife there is, but clearly this one, it seems to me that they know that Agamemnon is a proud dead man who is raging against the ones who took his life, namely his wife.
- [21:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We kind of saw an insight into that, into the Odyssey, right, Of that Agamemnon is in Hades, you know, he's in this house of the dead. And he is still very much preoccupied by the evil of his wife and what she did to him, which really did, you know, rob him of his glory, his chaos of being the one who conquered Troy. And now we just all remember him as the one who got murdered in his bathtub by his wife and her lover, which is not a great way to go. And so, no, I, I underlined those lines as well. And also the next two lines, right, but the gifts, the empty gifts, she hopes will ward them off. So this gives us a little bit of insight. It becomes more clear later. I don't want to jump ahead, but now we have a little bit of an impetus here of the purpose, right, of why are the libation bearers coming? Oh, okay, so they're sent by Clytemnestra and she's trying to appease the dead, which kind of tells us several things, one of which is that several years later, she is still haunted by us, right here she is still trying to appease the dead. We don't quite know why she's agitated yet, but this is the actual purpose or impetus of the libation bearers coming out.
- [22:28]
Adam
I think there's a couple of things to draw on that, too. One, as this translation puts it, what amends can there be once blood falls to the ground? There's this kind of idea. Can you simply pay off the debt with a sacrifice? And, I mean, that's obviously a thing that Plato is going to bring up later, but in this instance, I do think that there's a questioning here of a type of justice in which wrongs can be done and then simply atoned for by offering the right, offering to the right God at the right time, or in this case, to the dead themselves, and say, well, I know I did this wrong thing, but what was that? And you just like, run up a. You just like, go down the price schedule until you see the right price to pay and you pay it off and you're like, okay, I'm done. And I, I think there's a. There's a sense in which Clytemnestra is treating justice that way. And I think our, you know, already Aeschylus is, Is questioning that through the course. This can't work, can it?
- [23:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think. No, I, I very much agree. And I think too, you know, we need to parse that out because again, the overarching theme of the Oresteia is justice. And I took the libation bearers, just maybe as a preliminary thesis. I found it very much to be a straightforward extension of the narrative. I mean, what we thought was going to happen happens. There's some, obviously there's some different shifts and emphasis from what we see, maybe in Homer, but the narrative plays out the same way that we thought it Would. And again, the theme of justice saturates the text. And again, it is this primitive lex talionis, eye for an eye, cycle of violence, primitive form of justice. And so, you know, you kind of get your first taste of this. Line 66. I mean, one of the. This is one of my favorite lines, actually, in the whole play. And the blood that Mother Earth consumes plots the hard. It won't seep through. It breeds revenge. And frenzy goes through the guilty. Seething like infection swarming through the brain. I mean, just a wonderful series of lines. 1. I mean, I wrote Cain and Abel like six times during this play, right? I mean, that whole narrative, you remember Cain and Abel of Abel's blood crying out to God of what has happened to him. I mean, it's interesting that that type of imagery is not. Obviously, that story is much more ancient, but here again, you see that same imagery and same kind of motif used here in the Oresteia in more this Hellenized Greek culture. So that was something I noted as well. And the other thing too here is that it gives us, at least how I read this, it gives us the two acts that do this. Right? So what are. What are the acts that actually cry out for vengeance? Which has some deep parallels, you know, in Catholic teaching and even the Old Testament, of the things that cry out to heaven for vengeance? Well, here there's two of them, right? One is murder, which we were expecting, and then the other one that I didn't quite expect was on line 70. The other one is rape. So there's murder and rape, and these are the two sins. Well, sins is the wrong word there, right? I'm transposing a bit. But these are the two actions that cry out for vengeance under this kind of primitive justice of lex talionis.
- [25:55]
Adam
Calling back to something you said a bit earlier about Clytemnestra being haunted by this, I think one of the questions that to ask the text is, has she been haunted by this the whole time, or is she. Has she just newly become haunted by this? And as we get to the next part about the dream and that, now I think there's this idea. And then as you engage, especially with the passages that you just said, she's attempting to essentially wash her hands. Is it this, you know, image of Lady Macbeth that you could work out here where she's trying to wash the blood off her hands and it just doesn't work, which is an strictly speaking analogy Escalus has as well, to purify blood on polluted hands, go straight Onward in vain. They're stained and the stains won't come off.
- [26:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like, I very much like the Lady Macbeth parallel there.
- [26:47]
Adam
Well, I think Shakespeare is borrowing from this a lot, to be honest. I mean, we've mentioned this in some previous things, but I think Shakespeare, now, he's picking and choosing, he's plucking. But if anyone goes back to read Hamlet or Macbeth or some of these other plays, Titus Andronicus we mentioned, which has references to thyestes, at least in form. He is, he's, these are themes that are so deep that he can pick out one of these characters and then make a play that centers. Or Hamlet, for example, has a lot of parallels to Orestes, but he can build, work out a whole play that focuses on just one of these themes. So Aeschylus is really, you know, Aeschylus has the masterclass here because even Shakespeare is borrowing from Aeschylus.
- [27:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, he's the father of the tragedians. Right. I mean this is, this is in a lot of ways to the father of Greek poetry, even outside of say, Homer or Hesiod. So no, I think these are why we read the great books. Right. Because there's perennial themes here, there's perennial questions, there's things about human nature that tend to rise to the surface. And I very much actually like reading these in a poet narrative form. It's kind of refreshing after spending so much time reading say St. Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle. To read these like in a narrative is just, it's a different type of skillset and I find it very beautiful.
- [28:01]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, yeah. And I, I, I find it interesting as we continue on here that we know that Agamemnon's family is just like disordered in so many different ways. Right. You know, Agamemnon himself is he, he killed one of his daughters, his wife killed him. Like, there's been a lot of turmoil within the family. But I would like to like focus as we go through this text on the, how they interact with one another throughout this play because I think it kind of shocked me for the first time as a first time reader, like how it seems pretty genuine, it seems pretty normal, you know, as a, as a family should be. Even, like, let's see, in between 85 and 90, Electra comes up and she, she, she says, like, what kindness, what prayer can touch my father? Shall I say, I bring him love for love? Like, she, she's just talking to him about this, which I think is a little funny. Um, I think this, that, that section is, is is just a little bit funny. But, but Elektra and, and Orestes, their relationship and how they interact with one another, I think is worthy of. Of tracking verse. The family as a whole, I was gonna say.
- [29:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, let's. Let's use that to push into that next section. Right. Which is when Elektra starts to speak. I think, to Adam's point, there's. There's two things that, that I noted that kind of begin to start here. One is that I was really taken back by the lack of references to Ephigenia. So Orestes and Electra's sister was murdered by their father and there seems to be a thick veneer of filial piety over Agamemnon now. Right. They just kind of reaching out to him and asking for his invocations and etc. Maybe, maybe that's because there's a. There's a practical element to that because they have to have someone support them as they try and reorder the home. But I was. I think the role. Where is Ephigenia in this? Is a legitimate question because obviously Clytemnestra thinks that's a legitimate question, and that comes up towards the end. The other thing that caught my attention here about Elektra is that we see her plight. It's. It's a really beautiful scene, her plight with the prayers that she doesn't know how to pray in this situation. Right. She's sent by her mother, who murdered her father, to go pray for her father. And the fact that she's stuck and feels tension is itself an analog or a foreshadowing to the same tension that we're going to see with Orestes, but in a different way. Right. So both of the simple, both the siblings here are struggling with this thing between justice, or at least in a primitive form, and what we might call a filial piety towards her parents.
- [30:51]
Adam
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really perfect analogy there because she, she's stuck between these two conflicted duties. And I think conflicted duties that are both absolute is the theme or sort of the, the truly tragic dilemma that, that Aeschylus is putting out for Orestes. And you've got it already in micro form right here, just over something that seems as small as a prayer and a drink offering.
- [31:19]
Thomas Lackey
Also, can you guys give me a little bit of insight, like whenever you. You lift your cup, like whenever you kind of give a. A cheers, so to speak.
- [31:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like a toast?
- [31:27]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, like a toast, not a toast, but like you know, like, so she, she's lifting her cup and she's talking about this, right? Like, and, you know. Yeah, to like one. One for my homies kind of thing. Right.
- [31:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that's actually the line in there directly, is one for my homies.
- [31:44]
Thomas Lackey
I'm pretty sure my homies. Yeah, yeah. Like, like, it just seems that this would be something that would. Would be taught, would be passed down. Like here, here's kind of the formula in which you should do something like this. Like, it does. It seems very interesting that she does not know how to do it. Like, do I do it this way? Do I do it that way? Should I remain silent?
- [32:03]
Adam
I think it's different in that. I mean, I think she's saying that none of the traditional formulas will work. How does the murderer offer sacrifice to the victim without. Clytemnestra is not sorry. Right. She's not asking for forgiveness. She's just trying to somehow pacify and mollify this, what she believes is almost an angry spirit that's sending her these bad dreams to torment her. And I mean, we're, what, pushed on somewhere between six and ten years later, and she's now had this one bad dream that's awakened her. There's no hint that she's been, for example, tormented by the Furies for 10 years.
- [32:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think. I think maybe pushing into Thomas's point. And Adam, you're correct to highlight the tension, but I, I did take it as. I don't know how to pray in the situation. It's like. Because I find it to be an analog to Orestes. Orestes isn't quite sure he knows how to actually do justice and be the Blood Avenger, because, oh, I know how to be a Blood Avenger. I murder the person who murdered my dad. That's very straightforward. But when the person who murdered your dad is also your mom, it bumps up against filial piety. And then you're also going to be someone who murdered a relation and be subject to blood vengeance yourself. So I took the way I read Elektra was that Aeschylus is giving us an insight into this tension not through the blood vengeance, but through prayer, which I found to be a very beautiful structure. And so the reason she can't pray for her dad is because. Well, let me just maybe throw out a thesis here. I think one of the reasons she is struggling to pray for her dad is because part of pouring out the libation for your murdered father is to pray for justice. But in praying for justice, she's praying for her own mother's demise. So look at. Maybe just to kind of back this with the text a bit. If you look at like 1 10, this is a lecture on the leader going back and forth. How do I pray? What should I say? The leader says, we'll say a blessing as you pour for those who love you. She responds, and of the loved ones, whom to call my friends? First yourself, then all who hate a gistus. And what's really interesting here is that what caught my attention is the leader, when he teaches her how to pray, very much predicates things off. Okay, well, pray blessing on those who love you and curses on those, right, who hate a justice. And this is very. This in itself is a form of primitive justice, right? This is. This is very reminiscent of the guard dog justice that Clytemnestra somewhat invoked in the last play, where if you will simply just love your friends and family and hate your enemies, you'll be a decently just person, right? Because you'll never be a betrayer. You'll never betray anybody, right? You're the faithful dog. And so I think, Adam, to your point, which I think, you know, is good to point out this tension, I think where she's stuck is, is that she can't make that prayer like she should for her father because it's against her mother, and it bumps up against and violates filial piety.
- [35:13]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I guess that's exactly what it says. Like in what, 124, something like that, where the leader says, just say the one who murders in return. She says, how can I ask the gods for that and keep my conscience clear? Good, I'm glad we worked that out. Thank you.
- [35:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's good. Because I really do find it to be a very beautiful foreshadowing, and I think it's brilliant by Aeschylus to take the tension of the blood avenger, lex talionis, et cetera, and be able to recontextualize it in a different situation, which is prayer. And obviously, like the prayer here, I mean, this made me, when I read it, this made me really meditate then on the thickness of Christ's command to love our enemies and what that really means in this kind of primitive form of justice. Right? Because to be a just person, I'm, you know, I'm actually hating maidens. And so to actually love them like, I'm actually doing something above and beyond what seems to be natural of the human capacity.
- [36:12]
Thomas Lackey
Do you feel like that Elektra has a little bit More just natural virtue than her parents.
- [36:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think both Orestes and Electra seem to demonstrate a certain level of like, arete or human excellence that I don't see in Agamemnon or Clytemnestra.
- [36:30]
Thomas Lackey
Like, could you ever imagine either like, Clio master or Agamemnon saying. Saying something like that at the very bottom of one, page 182, like, right.
- [36:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Before, like, yeah, how can I ask the gods for. For that and keep my conscience clear? Well, also, I mean, maybe even to push it further is for them, not Clytemnestra. I don't think she cares. Agamemnon says something very similar, right? About not wanting to commit blasphemy. But then he's effeminate, he caves right to his own life. Whereas Electra seems to have a certain level of, like, fortitude that, you know, she seems to take maybe the best parts of Agrabin 1 and Clytemnestra as a person. The line down there, though, that caught my attention that I. That I think is. It's one of those lines where it's like, wait, am I supposed to read this deeply, like, philosophically, or is this a throwaway line? And this is where Electra says, At 120, I'm so unseasoned, teach me what to say. Leader says, let some God or man come down upon them. Okay, so again, you need to pray for vengeance. This is the whole thing we've been talking about. But then she says, as judge or avenger, which. And the leader, Phagols makes a note in his commentary that the leader just really skips over this distinction and just says, oh, just say the one who murders in return. Which is going right back to the cycle of violence. And Vagals kind of points out here that, like, you can read this as Elektra actually has hit the nail on the head really early in the Oresteia. Like, when I'm praying for someone, am I, and someone to come down upon them, am I asking them to be a judge or an avenger? And the way I took that is the avenger is the cycle of violence, the blood spilling, et cetera, which is the whole problem that we're dealing with. But the judge implies that there's some standard by which they will be judged by. And we haven't really seen that yet. Right, we really haven't. That's. That's more of the justice that we're accustomed to, you know, inside of, you know, maturity of civilization, right? Where the polis, the civilization is the one who actually punishes. Not the Blood Avenger on a familial level. I just found it fascinating that this. There's like this little just throwaway line here of like, well, wait, is someone coming as a judge or an avenger? And the leader just skips right over it. But I think she really hit the nail on the head here of the problem of justice.
- [38:54]
Adam
I think there's a couple interesting things, well, more than a couple of interesting things in her speech that just follows from that. So she, in talking to her father, says, we are outcasts now, as it were, sold off by our mother, and she has taken a man in exchange against us. Are very accomplice in your murder. I am like a slave myself. So while Orestes has been sent away, I guess, I mean, Elektra has not. She obviously considers herself to be, in some real sense, cast off from her mother, who is abandoned, in her view, not just her father and murdered him, but has abandoned her children as well. And she, she. She then complains about their life. She says their great and extravagant luxury is the fruit of your labor. This is a theme that Aeschylus has brought up a time or two. It was mentioned as part of the punishment against Troy, but then also Agamemnon's hesitancy. And in the tapestries and in other things, there was always this kind of restraint that not to go too far, right? Not to. Not to overindulge in this really luxuriant but somewhat hedonistic view, which, you know, obviously I'm not going to defend Agamemnon's restraint, but even the Agamemnon seems to be contrasted to whatever extravagant luxury that Aegisthus and Clytemnestra have made the norm for the household.
- [40:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
This is one of the passages that really started catching my attention about the infrastructure of intercessory prayer. I mean, this is very thick. It's much thicker than what we saw in Homer. Right? Obviously we had Patroclus and his shade coming back and we saw that Achilles could offer some sacrifices. Yeah, there was a real relationship between the living and the dead. But this also then strongly has. Not only does the living offer sacrifices, but the dead then can intercede and, you know, cause certain effects amongst the living. And I. This just really kind of captured, you know, my attention. And she says down, let's see. She says down at like 147 or so, she says these prayers for us, for our enemies. I say, raise up your avenger into the light, my father. Kill the killers in return with justice, right? So she's really, what, it really struck me here, and Orestes does the same thing, is that they're praying to their father through Hermes, right? So Hermes is the intercessor here, right? He's the messenger God. Because that's who she invokes up there at the beginning, a little bit before line 130. Hermes is now, has come to be now the messenger God that actually can provide messages between the living and the dead. And she's asking for her father to affect a change on earth, right? To send his avenger to kill the one who killed him.
- [41:47]
Adam
Just ahead of that, she says she asked for something that is an interesting thing to ask of a person. She says, grant me also to be much more chaste than my mother and my hands to have greater piety. I mean, that's, that's a very interesting request. I'd also just point out just ahead, I mean, towards the top of her prayer, she asks for Orestes to return. Then, now she's asking Agamemnon that line you quoted. So she has not identified Orestes with the avenger. And I think this works with a judge, you mean, or a just avenger. I think there's this, this tension here where she also is, is seeing attention for Restes, right? She, they need an avenger and she wants her brother back. She doesn't necessarily see her brother as the avenger, if that makes sense, because he's conflicted like she is as to, you know, why hasn't Electra just killed Clytemnestra? She could. We know women can do it. Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon. So this story could have been about Electra avenging Clytemnestra. And I think Elektra feels this tension and she doesn't expect Orestes to do it either. Not, not necessarily out of, like, cowardice, but just because it's, it doesn't seem like the right thing to do to her.
- [43:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that's interesting. I didn't read it that way, but I'd like to go back and look at that way. I, I, my, my intuition. I'm not even sure if it was an intentional decision on my part reading the text, but I very much read that Elektra realizes that, that Orestes is the avenger, because wouldn't he be who. Because the problem with being the avenger, right, is you're the blood avenger. So it's a, it's a certain mandate upon someone who in the family, if it wasn't going to be Orestes. Who would we point to to be the avenger for Agamemon? Like, who would be the one that she would expect?
- [43:37]
Adam
That's a good question, and I don't have a good answer to it.
- [43:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, I know who it is. It would be Menelaus. Oh, that's who it would be. That actually gives me a point because even Orestes says that after he. I mean, I'm skipping, I apologize, but after he murders or avenge, whatever you want to say. Aegistus, I'm pretty sure he has a line in there in which he says, you know, tell. He's leaving again because of the Gorgons. He says, tell Menelaus you know something like what I've done. And I think if I understood correctly, the reason he mentions Menelaus there is because as soon as Menelaus comes back and realizes what's happened to his brother, he would also have a duty to be the Blood Avenger. And actually he would have been a Blood Avenger. That would have had much less of a complication.
- [44:23]
Adam
Right, you would think so, because he'd.
- [44:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Be killing his sister in law. Right. Is it Clyde to mess with Helen?
- [44:32]
Adam
Yeah, Half sister. Yeah. And so her. His sister in law.
- [44:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Which I don't know if there's a whole lot of rules about sister. No, that's a good point. I didn't really. I took it as a one for one that Electra sees Orestes as the avenger, but maybe I need to go back and parse that out.
- [44:48]
Adam
I've seen that insight uniquely. There was a commentary I listened to, I think it was by a Professor Davis that made distinction. And once I went back and looked at it, I was. I was like, oh yeah, I do see this, this dichotomy where she asks for Orestes and she asks for an avenger. And at least here does not simply seem to identify the two of them together. The Avenger is kind of this open question. And Orestes is specific.
- [45:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
One of the things too that caught my attention here, again, maybe just drawing out a parallel between the Greek tradition and the Hebrew tradition, is I really started to wonder where intercessory prayer particularly comes into Christianity. Because this is really robust. This is more robust than anything I can remember in the Old Testament of. What I mean by that is like this is very clear that the living can pray for the dead and the dead can basically intercede for the living. And you get some of this in Maccabees. Right. And in Maccabees they. They intercede for the dead. But that's post Hellenization. And it really started making me think about how, you know, is this something? Because I think on one hand you say, oh, look, this is similar to the practice in Catholicism. It's parallel to it. But I think maybe to be more bombastic, there's also another way in which you could say, oh, no, look, this is actually its origin that the Greeks had this very strong notion of natural religion that had a very robust and structured understanding of intercessory prayer, and that this really affected Hebrew thought several hundred years before Christ. Because I don't see. I try to do a little bit of research. I mean, obviously Maccabees is post Hellenization, so that doesn't count. Thomas, I think you had mentioned, either on the podcast or off the podcast, the story of King Saul and the witch of Endor calling up the soul. Prophet Samuel. I did read that one, and there were some commentaries on that that did say, like, notice that it's not really a surprise that the dead know what's going on amongst the living or that they can actually affect them. But it's more of just why Saul has done it and how he's done it. You also get some arguments about, you know, at the great I am statement, God very much talks about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the present tense as being with him. But I really was just kind of curious, as if we track this type of intercessory prayer, you know, is this something from Greek culture that really did impact Hebrew culture and gave it more of a structure, or did Hebrew culture develop this independent. I think, by the way, I just want to put a caveat that I apologize because if we have any Protestant listeners that are thinking that I'm throwing out the thesis that Catholicism pulled its intercessory prayer from the pagan Greeks. I. There's all kinds of people that are like, I told you so. But I do think that. I do think, though, because I have a strong providential understanding of how God used the Greeks to cultivate the world for Jesus Christ and the coming of the Logos. And so anyway, it was just a question I had.
- [47:53]
Adam
Well, where I would put it slightly, I think, which is to take the idea, but in a slightly different direction, which is that at least the Greeks seem to have a strong notion of the something, or it's beginning to be strong of an. The immortality of the individual soul, that it has some sort of real existence after death and is, you know, sort of individually addressable in a meaningful way there is not just like some generalized consciousness or something. There's actually the soul of Agamemnon and that that soul is crying out for justice for the wrongs that have been done to it, and that that soul is in some sense still lovable by his children. You know, I mean, I think I'm putting a slightly thinner read on it than you are, but I mean, the. I still think there's something there. I think if we wanted to balance with the Old Testament, I would think that, you know, obviously Saul's case with the witch of Endor and the rest, we get this kind of admonition that in the case of the witch especially, that she got more than she bargained for. She was probably, maybe one of the old commentaries has the idea that she's something of a fraud and doesn't expect. You know, when she gets confronted actually with Samuel, she's. She got a lot more than she bargained for. The idea of divining the dead is. Is stepping into a realm that's not. That's simply not allowed. And if you kind of bridge that with the idea that here all. Everyone would be in Sheol or Hades or something, this is not in some sort of blessed realm of pure spirits. You could see the much stronger admonition of saying, you know, these are forces that you shouldn't play with. These are not holy souls interceding for you necessarily, but spirits that are, you know, in states that you don't. You don't know or understand.
- [49:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Because it doesn't seem until revealed relig. I mean, even though you have it in Maccabees that there are sacrifices, you know, for the dead, it does seem that it takes the resurrection of Christ to really make the system make sense of how. How are the living. Right. Because even. Even talk about the soul, which I think there's a. There's a good understanding of the soul that's kind of haunting Aeschylus text. But at the same time, like, how are we actually connected, Right? So, like in the Catholic faith, like, we talk about the fact that, well, we're all part of the church, right? We've all actually come into the divine life. We've come into the life of God. We're all participating in the same body of Christ. And therefore I actually have a real relationship with both the dead in Purgatory and the dead in heaven. And so there's. There's Christ. The Mediator actually connects us and really did conquer death. So it's interesting here to have a very robust understanding of intercessory prayer, and in a pagan sense, actually devoid of the bodily resurrection in a place of Christ. The one who's actually playing that role in this text is Hermes. Right? He's divine. Right. It's the divine Hermes who's actually then serving as the bridge between the living and the dead, because you have to have something to bridge that gap. And so for us, it's the body of Christ, the church that unites us in this, but for the pagan Greeks, it's Hermes. And again, I mean, I'll drop it, but it just. We don't see, in my opinion, at least by memory, we don't see anything in the Old Testament that is this robust and this structured of the intercessory prayer. I mean, even like the one reference in Maccabees is simply that they find the idols on the dead Jews and the Jews will offer sacrifices for them. I mean, that's pretty straightforward, but it's not nearly this robust. So anyway, it's. I. It led me down a rabbit hole of, like, really being curious where intercessory prayer and, like, which culture actually developed that prior to the coming of Jesus Christ.
- [51:48]
Adam
You know, I will say, just to connect that last bit to the New Testament, there would be one. The. The parable our Lord tells of Lazarus, the poor man, and then the rich man that goes down to Hades. That would be something like this, I think, where you could say that if you wanted. I want to be really clear, but I'm not. I'm only saying the two are making a kind of analogy. But I guess what I'm getting at is it kind of is in the New Testament. It's within an Old Testament kind of framework of the state of the souls in the afterlife. Because, again, yeah, that's a good parallel.
- [52:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a really good parallel. Yeah. Because that story in the New Testament is actually framing an Old Testament salvation. Right. Because it's prior to Christ. Because post Christ, the blessed dead don't share the realm of the dead with the damned, whereas they do in the Old Testament, which is why Christ on Holy Saturday has to go down and preach the gospel to the dead and take them up anyway. It's just. It's a question that I've had that I'd like to explore more is just this very robust understanding of intercessory prayer amongst the Greeks and how that probably impacted Hebrew thought prior to the coming of Jesus Christ. Because, again, one of our little mantras on the podcast is that Hebrew faith coupled with Greek reason under Roman order prepared the world for the coming of Jesus Christ. And I actually think there's probably a real example of that happening here with this intercessory prayer. So let's sally forth into. We get a chorus. So around line, we have a chorus comeback. Kind of to your point, actually, earlier, Thomas, about, you know, why doesn't Electra do something? I did notice that, you know, the prayer here is. This is the second paragraph of the chorus. Dear God, let him come. Some man with a strong spear born to free the house. So there's a. There's an idea here that the blood avenger, right, will be masculine and we need someone to come and reorder the home. And again, I think there's strong parallels here to this story that we received in the Odyssey, right? We have a house disordered there we had the suitors here we have Clytemnestra and Aegistus. Someone needs to come in and clean house.
- [54:05]
Thomas Lackey
So question. If you saw a lock of hair laying down on the ground and you saw it and you were like, that kind of looks like mine. You know what? I bet that's my siblings. Like, has that. Would that ever happen to you? Like, again, first time reader. But like, I, I just thought like, my. I have two sisters. Neither one of my sisters have any, like, hair that looks anything remotely like mine. I just found that to be like, that was the key. It's like, look, this hair is identical to mine. It must be my brother's. Did anybody else find that somewhat humorous?
- [54:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's a bit. It's a bit of a stretch. I. Which is why I think Aeschylus has like, there's like multiple touch points, right? So there's. I think there's three.
- [54:55]
Adam
Right.
- [54:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I wrote in my notes that there's the hair and then there's the footprint, which I'm not entirely sure is much better.
- [55:01]
Adam
Right?
- [55:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like, oh, my.
- [55:02]
Thomas Lackey
I mean, I think that's actually worse. I think that's actually like, that's actually like a count against you.
- [55:07]
Adam
Like, you could have made up a story in which, like Elektra had, you know, absolutely carrot red, fiery hair or something. It was really uncommon and then. But the footprint does try to also. Euripides makes fun of this mercilessly and like recasts this scene, but in intentional mockery. But I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it a different way. I'm going to read it. I think I'm going to give Aeschylus the benefit of the doubt here. We'll say that Electra is doing a couple of things. First, she sees Hera. And I think there is a sense in which. Who else but me would take this. This is a familial thing to do, to offer a lock of hair to the dead. So who else but me? Well, my brother. And look, it does look like my hair. It's. It's similar, at least in some way. There's no one else that would do this. And she's just been praying for her brother to return. I think this is the voice of hope, right? In some real sense. And then she sees the footprints and, you know, they match. She seems to think, be saying that they're identical. What I think is that it's funny, is that she seems to have some notion now in this brother that she hasn't seen in so long, that he's just like her. Like, her imagination seems sort of directed toward this identical or this identity. But then she sees him and refuses to recognize him. I think this is this interesting balance of that hope is sometimes easier. You can. You can spin hope to yourself until you're actually confronted with the thing that you're hoping for. And then if it's not quite what you expected, you're like, no, that's. That's not it. That I. That, that can't be it. And I think that's something that. So. Because she seems to be expecting someone that in some sense is. And then when she actually sees him, he's not what she expected and kind of steps back.
- [56:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think, I think the familial. This is a familial act. Sheds a little bit more credibility on the scene. I mean, obviously I mentioned there was three. One's the hair, one's the footprint. The third one I found to be the most legitimate, which is the cloth. Right? Like, basically, you know, we both have this cloth that was given into us, et cetera. So I mean. But the. The narrative here, like its mechanism, is that this is Odysseus's scar all over again, right? I mean, is that not the. The mechanism that's happening here? Right. So how do I prove that I'm actually Orestes? Well, I have to have these touch points, right? I have to have this proof of who I am. And so I just found this to be somewhat of a retelling of the Odysseus scar narrative. But Aeschylus, for whatever reasons, feels like he has to come up with a different way to actually solve that problem.
- [57:47]
Adam
I do think it's interesting also, just on the psychological level that when people are at this level of distress, it's easy to grasp at the thinnest hope. And I, I think Elektra is. Is really just. She's desperately grasping for something, right? It's easier to imagine that your brother has returned than to be confronted with your brother actually returning.
- [58:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What did you make of, I think, was it Adam, I think you earlier talked about the relationship between Elektra and Orestes. That seems to become, like, very solid very quickly. And what did you make then of around 240, right, that Orestes becomes the four loves in one, right? He's the father, the mother, the sister and the brother, which obviously there you think of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Ephigenia, and then him in his own role as Orestes. She becomes like his whole family or her whole family. Excuse me. Which Fagles points out in his. In his notes that this is a very similar mechanic that was used by Andromache in the Iliad when she spoke to her husband Hector, that he remember because her whole family had been killed basically by Achilles. That, you know, you. You are all of my loves that I would usually give to my family now come to you.
- [59:08]
Adam
Well, and she mentioned Zipigenia.
- [59:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Where is that, Thomas? Yeah, sacrificed on the cruel sword. So, yeah, it's. It's explicit there that she's talking about Iphigenia. But I think, as I mentioned, I think that that's. As you read through that, right, you think of all three of those characters, and she's now giving all of that love to Orestes.
- [59:30]
Adam
If I'm going to make more Shakespeare analogies, by the way, I think Elektra here is very much like Ophelia in Hamlet, right? She's lost all of her family and all of her hope now depends on this one conflicted person. And she even says that she is, you know, this is agony for my, for me, my wits are destroyed. There's this sense that she's sort of on the edge and, you know, and anyway, so more, more food for Shakespeare.
- [60:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So can we. Can we jump to. Obviously, this, this dialogue happens between Aristides and Electra, but I think earlier, Thomas, you had kind of speculated about what texts are missing at the beginning of the. Of the play. And I think you had mentioned maybe some type of invocation or backstory for Apollo, but here is where I think that he, Orestes, tells the story, right, of why he's here to be the avenger. And he invokes Apollo. This is like, oh, line 273 or so he says. Apollo will never fail me. No. His tremendous power, his oracle charges me to see this trial through. There is a lot in this monologue that's like four paragraphs long that I think is worth noting. The first thing maybe that I would say to open it up is who is coaching Orestes? I mean, he's an exiled prince. His mom is a disaster. She shacked up with her lover Aegistus. His sister was murdered. Electra and him are basically exiled from one another. Like who is actually teaching him to be spirited? I mean that this is how my, my analysis went in my own head. I was like, so much of the Odyssey is about. Telemachus doesn't have anyone to teach him to be spirited. Right? His Thumas, his. His thumotic side doesn't know how to become a man. Right? He has to have his own coming of age story. Orestes just shows up on the scene ready to murder his mom and be an avenger. Like who has been, well, to use the word, mentoring him. And I think that. Let me throw this thesis out. I think right here the thesis is, is that Apollo played this role. That Apollo is the one who kind of set this crucible before him. And that Apollo plays the role of mentor, right? So mentor with Telemachus or Al's mentor should have been. But Athena takes on that guise in the Odyssey. And so does Apollo play the mentor role for Orestes? And I wonder even if you would go so far as to say that Orestes killing his mother is his coming of age story.
- [62:16]
Adam
Oh, I, I think it is. Which is as sort of fascinatingly horrible. But I think that it is. But I, I'd also say as we get into this prophecy, the prophecies here, where he starts to retell the prophecies, there's a sense in which the charge is laid on him in an ambiguous way, much like it was laid on Agamemnon in an ambiguous way, which is that it's not so much that Apollo is telling him he must do these things. He tells him all of the terrible things that will happen to him if he doesn't do them. But that doesn't. It doesn't guarantee any sort of reverse. That, for example, maybe a whole bunch of different terrible things will happen to him if he does. In the great sense of Greek tragedy. Just because they tell you that awful things are going to happen to you if you do. X equally awful things may happen if you do.
- [63:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good point. Because I think Apollo kind of leaves out some of the things that might happen to Orestes if he actually carries us through. Because the two things, this goes back to the Blood avenger, Alex Talionis, etc. If you don't carry it. Right. So if the Blood Avenger says, I'm not going to do this, then he is also cursed. And I took this as. Basically, there's two curses. One is sickness, there's a plague, and then also exile. Right. That you yourself will become an exile. So there's these punishments if the Blood Avenger does not take up the mantle of enacting revenge upon whoever killed his family.
- [63:48]
Adam
I mean, there's a strong sense in which Orestes and Aeschylus is just brilliantly woven into this tale, that he really is in these damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. Right. There is. He doesn't seem to have a course before him that leaves him unscathed.
- [64:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What do we think Apollo's motivation is?
- [64:07]
Adam
I'd like to think that there's at least also some sense of Apollo seeking justice for Cassandra, of all things.
- [64:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's good. I, I thought my brain just went more broad of just like he has a vested interest in, in kind of seeing these things carried out because of his, you know that his original emphasis is for Troy. Right. And so he's, he's still kind of carrying this out. And so, yeah, Cassandra would then be kind of the last remnant of that.
- [64:33]
Adam
That he's overseeing, if there's any reason to look at it that way. And I admit that there, there could be complaint about that, but if there is, I think you could also make a tension here between the primordial gods, the furies, which are not particularly concerned with justice. They simply, it's. They're more elemental. Blood was shed, therefore blood must be repaid. Versus Apollo, who might be a move towards something at least closer to justice. But it's still partial. And I mean that actually in both senses of the word partial, it's not a full and perfect justice, but also that it's, it's not objective. It would be still vengeance.
- [65:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
One thing too, maybe to bolster the idea that it's Cassandra that's actually on the mind of Apollo is. And this is a raw thought, but if you look at 2:80, Apollo says Gore them like a bull, he called, or pay their debt with your own life, one long career of grief. That gore them like a bull is almost a direct quote from Cassandra when she is in the kind of her ecstasy of prophecy, of seeing what's going inside the house. She talks about Agamemnon being gored like a bull. And so I just made a little note to the side that this is what Cassandra says of Clytemnest. Hmm. And so at least. At least it looks like Apollo is using that to say, you know, what happened to them, or, you know, what they did to another needs now to happen to them. But it's interesting that it has the Cassandra layer to it. Well, let's look at the invocation. So the next scene here, after Orestes kind of tells his story, is the invocation at the grave, which is kind of a very long passage, but very beautiful. So this starts around. Or so it starts with a chorus. The chorus gives us another insight into this primitive justice, right? Justice turns the wheel, word for word, curse for curse be born. Now justice thunders, hungry for retribution, stroke for bloody, stroke be paid. The one who acts must suffer. Which is not the first time I think we've seen that line.
- [66:46]
Adam
And I think that as Aeschylus continues to wrestle with this justice, he's intentionally putting this sort of deficient or unsatisfying version of justice into the perspective of the chorus. I think the chorus here is not meant to be the final answer, right?
- [67:04]
Thomas Lackey
What did you guys make of. Of line three? The ruthless. The ruthless jaws of the fire. My child can never tame the dead. His rage inflames his sons.
- [67:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I took that as that. That goes back to the. The earlier quote we saw in which, you know, the dead rage against those who have wronged them. But here it makes it more clear, you know, his rage inflames his sons, that the rage of the dead is personified in the blood avenger, right? Who then in a certain way is. Is tortured themselves, if they don't go and do this, right? They. They suffer the rage themselves. Because I think that that's what this invocation is really showing is that Orestes is asking his father Agamemnon to bless him, to go and be his blood avenger, right? To be that kinsman, redeemer. And so that's how I took it, right, is that basically the rage of Agamemnon is the fuel for Orestes.
- [68:08]
Thomas Lackey
Okay, good.
- [68:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The other thing that caught my attention, this line or this passage was three, only at Troy, right? Would you have been cut down, my father? Because that's actually very similar to when Achilles and Agamemnon, or reflecting on their own lives in Hades, remember that? And this is like one of Agamemon's point is like, well, you're actually better because you died in battle at Troy and got this huge funeral rite, whereas I got murdered in my bathtub. Right? And so actually it's interesting here that Orestes is actually saying the same thing. Like it might have been better if you actually just simply would have died, you know, a hero at Freud.
- [68:46]
Adam
Elektra has a line just before that. That again, I think shows her insight into the, the sort of, the depth of the problem. She says, what here is good and what without evil is not the ruin beyond reversal with three throws. I mean, this idea, again, like she, she seems to, you know, perceive kind of their course ahead of them, but how can they actually accomplish it without bringing further harm? And I think that's where this, this. We've talked a lot about the cycle. I think if you. The cycle of violence and things. And I don't want to backport just, just a Christian perspective into it, but I think even est. Listen, this pre Christian way is wrestling with this. Isn't justice supposed to make things right somehow? Isn't it supposed to right the wrong? At least, at least in, to the extent that it can be done? And if every act that is supposed to bring about justice just in fact creates a further need for vengeance and more bloodshed? And is justice even an achievable thing? Is it even justice?
- [69:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. No, I, I think, I, I think you're correct. No, I think this is. I don't think you have to have recourse, you know, to divine revelation or even to the Hebrew tradition, you know, broadly speaking. Because I think Aeschylus is very much pointing this problem out. I think this is, I think this is at the heart of the whole Orestaya. Because the thing is, is that it's not this primitive. Justice is a form of justice. And I, I want, I, I want to lean into this. An eye for an eye is a form of justice. An eye for an eye is supposed to keep things from becoming disproportionate, right? Because the thing is, is that typically if someone murders your father, you don't go and murder them, you go and murder them and you murder their whole family. Right? Like the, the vengeance and justice are not really known for being rational and having a whole lot of temperance on how they're carried out, if that makes sense. And so we have to understand that the eye for the eye is an actual form of justice, right? It's a limitation that the blood vengeance can't go past what was taken. And so But I think Aeschylus though is brilliantly pointing out that unless there is a standard by how this cycle works, then it just never stops. Because, you know, if you come in and you're Orestes and you kill your own parents, you know, or you kill your mother, then obviously there's going to be some blood avenger there who can come in and claim on you and it just doesn't stop. Same problem we saw at the end of the Odyssey. So no, I think this is the question. I think the question of the cycle of violence raises the question of we need a standard. Like justice has to be some type of standard that can be judged, you know, from like a third party standpoint as opposed to the cycle just continuing on.
- [71:39]
Adam
And obviously we'll get into more of the latter and the Eumenides. But I think just even as we look in the libation bearers, we have the idea that. So when Clytemnestra and Aegistis revenged themselves on Agamemnon and Cassandra, but Agamemnon isn't the one that killed Thyestes brothers, or Atreus was. And Cassandra didn't kill anyone, didn't kill Iphigenia. Right. So there's a sense in which justice exercised itself on the wrong targets in some capacity. Not that Agamemnon wasn't guilty of some things, but Cassandra wasn't guilty of any. And certainly as far as Aegis goes, should have been Atreus, not Agamemnon, on whom he revenged himself. And now we see that it Orestes the actual guilty parties. So he does stand a little bit differently than the, you know, the previous, previous violence. His violence is different. And I think we're going to see that marked out a little bit.
- [72:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. No, and I think last time on the podcast we talked about the fact that I think the killing of Cassandra shows that a lot of what Clytemnestra was doing was a pretense that it actually she wasn't overly interested in justice. It was a pretense for her seeking power in the throne. And that might be why Aeschylus emphasizes her so much over Aegistus. Right. That she, she's really doing this as the mastermind behind it all. She really is the anti Penelope, Right? She's the matchless queen of cunning that kills her husband and takes the throne and, you know, does all these things. But I think that this, this passage, the chorus gives us another real snapshot here of this primordial justice. This is that it is the law. When the Blood of slaughter wets the ground. It wants more blood. Slaughter cries for the fury of those long dead to bring destruction on destruction churning in its wake. And I mean, you can critique this a lot, but I, you know, the thing I wrote next to my notes here was Noah, because after the flood, I mean, basically this is what God says, isn't it? I mean, obviously there's details that we could parse out here, but there's a parallel of, you know, if man sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Right.
- [74:05]
Adam
Well, he like further in the. So that's Genesis 9. And then later in Genesis, I believe also in Exodus, there's reasons this is brought out. There's a sense in which the land itself is said to be polluted if murders and murderers go unpunished. That there's a kind of pain that draws from un. Unpunished crime. I mean, the flood itself would be a good example of. Of a kind of idea of cleansing from unpunished. From at least previously unpunished crime. Now, I mean, obviously this is a severe justice, but it isn't, it isn't unjust.
- [74:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Which is really interesting because it runs so parallel and give some credence to the idea of the. Of what Apollo said, you know, through Orestes, which is basically the Blood Avenger does not do what he's supposed to do. Then it brings plagues in exile, right? Which are societal destruction. And actually this one even talks about destruction, right? Destruction upon destruction. So there is a sense in which the Blood Avenger does not do what he's supposed to do. You start to have societal breakdown, which.
- [75:14]
Adam
Makes perfect sense if you think about it in their context as well. Again, there's no standing police forces or anything like that. What you have here is the idea that that crime shouldn't be let to go unchecked. I mean, that's not a. That shouldn't be a terribly controversial statement in and of itself.
- [75:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's. I mean there's. It's funny that you mentioned that because. Yeah, that's the whole problem. There is no actual police force. Right. It's not the state that enforces what is just. Right. It's the families. It's still very somewhat tribalistic and police there, right? The etymology there comes from polis, right? It's the force of the polis. It's the force of the state. That's what the police are, right? They're the force of the city. The polis to do something. And they don't exist right Now.
- [75:58]
Adam
The reason aeschylus is beating this drum so, so fully. And what he brilliantly crafted this tale to do is to say that the, the flaw here is not that thing that that justice is, is not something to be valued. It's something though that is so valuable it can't be left to partial judgment. You can't be the judge in your own cause. And there these sorts of. This situation is, is, is the, the worst case scenario. And he's drawing out of this great mythological tale that they all know some the. The very worst possible scenario that perfectly illustrates the point he wants to make about the route to take to a justice that is truly just and truly fair, at least as far as human agents are able to do things that are that. That can at best still only kind of type and shadow of, of perfect justice.
- [76:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I would say, I guess one way to phrase it is that the primitive justice is a good. We're not moving from bad to good here. We're moving, I think, from good to better. Right. The primitive just is a justice. And I think, I think, I feel very strongly about pushing on that. It is a justice and it's a good. But I think what Aeschylus is pointing out here is that just like we matured into understanding an eye for an eye which mitigates disproportionate revenge, we need to have another maturation, we have another step up to understand, well, can we have a justice that is even more perfect or better than what we know now? And I. That's the arc that I see throughout the whole Oresteia.
- [77:35]
Adam
Yeah, I absolutely agree and I think we need to push on that in a couple of senses because not just in the classical Greek sense, but since we've made so many Old Testament analogies in a classical Hebrew sense as well, or ancient Hebrew, because the. Otherwise you, I mean, obviously you run the great risk of actually saying that, you know, the Ten Commandments themselves are unjust or something like that, which is pretty dangerous territory to tread on.
- [78:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean there's a, there's an analogy there, right, between the Old Testament and New Testament itself. Right. The Old Testament is a good, but the New Testament is a perfection. Right. You're moving, you know, broadly speaking from external acts like don't murder to internal acts don't hate. And that doesn't mean the Old Testament was bad, it's good. But there was something better. But we had to mature. Right. They're just like we see Athens is maturing in its understanding of justice, so too do the Hebrews moving from Old Testament to New Testament have to mature in their understanding of what God is asking them to do. And so I think this is, again, going back to our mantra on the podcast. You see these two cultures maturing in these understandings until finally Providence decides that Christ can come in the fullness of time, that the world's been cultivated to a degree, that they can actually contemplate Christ in his incarnation. And so I think that Aeschylus here is giving us something, even if he doesn't understand what it is, that really does actually help us understand the justice of a cross in a certain way. Right. Yeah.
- [79:04]
Adam
And I mean, you've already mentioned Aquinas earlier, so I'll bring Aquinas in here that he talks about. There's so many truths that are often that are revealed that are also available to natural reason, but only through, in the case of reason, a great admixture of error and trial. And I think what Aeschylus is doing in this narrative is intentionally advancing that motif of trial and error. I mean, so his errors aren't accidental. He is, you know, pushing forward one thing and saying, and showing how that falls short within the context of a narrative, and then pushing forward another alternative and showing how that, too, doesn't quite seem to reach the justice that we'd all like. It's. It's not. It's not perfect. It's imperfect justice, but it's not the perfect justice we would hope for. It didn't right the wrong the way we wished it had been righted. And. And I think he's. He's. He's really. And I think it's beautifully done to. And because it's so subtly done, and yet we grasp it step by step. Yeah, that was. That was close to justice, you know, and we're like. But there still seems to be a piece missing, and it's just one step forward.
- [80:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yep, very good. Let's. Let's push it forward a little bit to the dream. And so we get this dream, which I think, in short, if I can just summarize it as I understood it, is basically that Clytemnestra has a dream that she gives birth to a snake, a viper, and then the viper basically attacks her. And this is a very clear foreshadowing to Orestes. Right. He will be her son who ends up attacking her. And then we find, which I think both Thomas and I danced around at the beginning so as not to jump ahead. We realize that, like, this is actually the particular reason that she sent the libation bears Right. This is that, this is the actual agitation that is bothering her. This is what's actually been haunting Clytemnestra is that she had this dream which seems to be an omen or a portent that the serpent is coming. And so she sent the libation bearers that said like 5, 10, right. It shook her and she sent these.
- [81:13]
Adam
Cups, you see here, right in this same section where rest season Electra are going back and forth. And they seem to be actually trying to call up the bodily resurrection essentially of their father, which doesn't happen, obviously. I don't, that's a strange scene, but I don't think it's accidental because I think it's actually still trying to tell us something about justice. Because what I think the kind of, the point of this other trial and error, if you will, is that the most just thing would be for Agamemnon to repay his murderers, right? The, if you want, what would be the most just outcome is that the injured party simply revenged them himself on his, on his injurers. And I, and in the very fact that they tried to call him up and it does and it fails is, I think, something you're trying to, he's trying to bring out again about this kind of imperfect analogy of justice that the, the true victim can't avenge themselves. Someone else has to do it. So I, I think that's the, I, I, I just want to bring that out because I think it is a, it's an issue and I think he, he does it in the, you know, the, the most dramatic way possible.
- [82:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But the, the, the imperfect way of that playing out is what Adam brought up earlier and asked a question about, which is. So the most, you know, the imperfect, but the most perfect you can get is that then the spirit of the dead, the actual victim, is what then burns and animates the Blood Avenger. Right. So then he becomes that avatar of the actual victim. Right. I mean, am I reading that correctly? So that's, I mean, that's how that works. That's why this is the most perfect system that we have, because the Blood Avenger becomes the agent of the victim.
- [83:04]
Adam
Which I think we're going to see explicitly later. Right. I think Orestes makes explicit mention to what you just said.
- [83:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let's, well, let's look at, speaking of Orestes, let's look at his plan. So this is five, you know, 41 or so. His plan is simple. My sister goes inside and I'd have her keep the bond with me a secret they killed an honored man by cunning, so they die by cunning, caught in the same noose. So he commands Apollo, the seer, who's never lied before. And so a few things about this one. It's interesting that the eye for the eye becomes this granular. Right. Well, how did they kill my father? Well, they killed him through cunning, so let's kill them through cunning, right? There's just layers of how much this mirrors, you know, the particular actions. Two, his plan is basically a violation of guest friendship, right? So he's going to show up as a guest, as a stranger in need to the house and ask basically to be taken in, and then he's going to kill his host. And I think that this raises, not for this podcast, because we're kind of almost right here at the end of the first half, but on next week's podcast, this really, I think, raises the question of what is the actual difference between Orestes and Aegistus? Because Aegistus had also a blood right, if you will, to go in and murder Agamebenmon because of what had happened to his siblings. Right. And so, because I think very clearly, this is always intergenerational. I know earlier, Thomas, you talked about, you know, is it fair for Agamemnon to suffer the sins of Atreus? I think, I think very clearly in a lot of the Greek plays, and not even in the Hebrew culture, the answer to that is yes, right. The sins of the father are upon the son. And so I am really interested in playing this out of like, well, why is. Why is Aegistus not a hero? Because Orestes comes in and kills his own mom. But he also violates guest friendship. And there seems to be all the reasons in the world for him to be cursed and then killed by someone else as well. Right. In this kind of cycle of violence. And maybe this is why we have to have the Eumenides. We have to have the third one to actually have, you know, someone come and play this out according to justice. But I think there's a lot of parallels there that we can't simply discard. You know, we can't simply discard a justice as like the bad guy, but we actually probably need to see him in his own motivations within the cycle of violence.
- [85:37]
Adam
Yeah, I think goes for Clytemnestra too. I mean, I think we actually have to give Clytemnestra her due, that there is no one here that can't make some plausible argument for why they need to do what they've done. Now, I I don't think that we need to credit all of those arguments, but they're not baseless. I think the. The last kind of footnote I'd add is is it possible to argue that arrest. That this is truly Orestes house and that he's cleaning out the usurpers.
- [86:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because also Aegistus is also his family member. We also forget that. Yeah.
- [86:11]
Adam
His uncle. But I mean, now that he's of age, I think that we might find that he's the true heir.
- [86:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Who's the true heir?
- [86:22]
Adam
Orestes. I mean. Right. I mean, it wouldn't this. If it was in the Telemachus analogy. As we see Telemachus and he comes of age and he starts directing Penelope. Right. Instead of the other way around because he's now, you know, this is his house. I think it. The.
- [86:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The.
- [86:40]
Adam
Obviously the Telemachus to arrest. These analogies are pretty tight. And I think Orestes might make a plausible claim within the culture that this is his house, which he's been banished from.
- [86:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. Yeah. Because Aegistus would have been Agamemnon's cousin. Right. Because Agamemnon's father and Aegistus father were brothers. Correct. So let's look at this final chorus as we kind of move into the last part of this first part of the libation. Bears to me. My. My quick take on this is. You know, this tells. Anytime you see these Greek plays to start listing places in rapid fire. There's always some theme behind this. You know, Thomas, I think when we talked about the. When we talked about the beacons of ministers, they're lit.
- [87:31]
Adam
Right.
- [87:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Gone to our calls for aid. What was that, you know, from the. You know what I'm talking about for the. At the beginning of the. Agamemnon. Right. The beacons are lit. When Clytemnestra tells like this whole list of cities.
- [87:43]
Adam
Yeah. You had Ida and Limnos and Arachne and all the. Yeah.
- [87:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So you have another thing going on here, but this one lists female betrayers. So this is like a list of female betrayers that kind of the chorus references. I. The thing I think about this, when they have all these historical claims which are also, I think, mythological, but they're really, again, calling to mind the story of a people. Right. We have to keep in mind how thick the political and spiritual ramifications are of these plays for the Athenian people. And so I always noticed that they have these times in the play in which they just rapid fire call back all of these stories, which I'm assuming In a lot of ways, keeps a lot of these stories alive. It also shows their moral right because, like, oh, here's how they're thematic to what you're watching now.
- [88:34]
Adam
Yeah, we get the mention of Limnos again, specifically.
- [88:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And this. Yeah, that one in like, 677 or so. But our 6:30 is right in the middle of. And how this section ends, which I love it. It says, the anvil of justice stands fast and fate beats out her sword. Tempered for glory, a child will wipe clean. Right. The inverted stain of blood shed long ago. Fury brings him home at last. The brooding Mother Fury. I just love that line. The anvil of justice stands fast and fate beats out her sword. Any other kind of thoughts? As we wrap up part one of the Libation Bearers, part two, we'll look at Orestes actually being as the House of Agabin Mon in the guise of a stranger, which should sound familiar.
- [89:26]
Adam
I think if you take that very last line, there's a kind of poor Orestes moment where you see that he seems to be, at this moment, destined to be chased by the Furies that are driving him to this. Here. It's not mentioned Apollo, but the Furies. And yet we know that if he does it, the Furies will come after him still.
- [89:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You think that's clear to him at this point?
- [89:50]
Adam
I think so. I think he feels like he's constrained.
- [89:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It wasn't clear to me whether he really understands the ramifications. I mean, I think he understands the tension. It wasn't clear to me whether he actually understands, like, the deep ramifications. He definitely understands the tensions there. But if he understands ramifications, I mean, that's. That's even more sacrificial on his part. Right. Because he's going to know if he does this act, then he'll be haunted.
- [90:16]
Adam
Yeah, I think. I think he does. I really do. I know. I also think he does have some hope that Apollo will protect him, but I don't think that. I think he knows that they're coming.
- [90:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think I do lean into that. I think he. Very clearly afterwards, whether he knew or not, once he realizes what's happening, he calls out to Apollo as a defender. Okay, Very good.
- [90:37]
Thomas Lackey
Well, very good. Well, Thomas, as always, it's great to have you on the podcast. We appreciate you taking the time and kind of walking through this with us. Make sure to go check us out on patreon.com thegreatbooks we have a list of all of our show notes. We have a list of the guides that Deacon Harrison Garlick has put together. The Iliad one. If you have not gone through the Iliad yet, I highly recommend you doing that and downloading it for free. We give you a guide for the Iliad for you to sit down with your friends and read through the Iliad together. And we provide the question and answer form for you to kind of talk through. So we've had a lot of positive feedback on the guides. It's very thorough, it is all very well documented. And Dean Garlic has spent a lot of time citing everything for the for the guide. So make sure to go check that out. It's patreon.com thegreatbooks you can go check out all of our other episodes on the Iliad, the Odyssey. As we're going through, we'll be going through, like I said, the Oresteia right now. We'll be going through the year of Homer, or, I'm sorry, the year of Plato coming up as well. So you're not gonna wanna miss that. So make sure you subscribe to our podcast. You check out every single episode that comes out, follow us on X and MySpace, and we'll see you guys next week.