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 V. Matricide: Orestes
 {{ :glory_of_hera-_chapter_5_matricide.pdf |}}
+Orestes' matricide is the most fully elaborated. It has often
+been pointed out [cf., e.g., Bunker, 1944, p. 198; Friedman
+and Gassel, 1951, p. 424] that while Oedipus is the concern
+of only three surviving Greek tragedies, Orestes is in seven,
+and is treated by all three of the great dramatists. It could in
+fact be said that the Orestes myth was the most popular sub
+ject in Greek drama, and that the theme of matricide was
+one with which the Greeks were peculiarly preoccupied.(162)
+The immediate issue of this war between the sexes is whether Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon or her own
+death at the hands of Orestes was the more heinous crime.
+A modern jury would have had difficulty in convicting
+Clytemnestra,3 but the Greeks were terrified of the statu
+esque, passionate women they portrayed so effectively—
+Medea, Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Alcmene—and this fear obliged
+them to exaggerate and punish Clytemnestra's guilt. (164)
+Why, then, is Medea spared and Clytemnestra murdered
+for her crimes? Clytemnestra kills only her husband and his
+concubine, and cannot bring herself to do away with her
+dangerous offspring; while Medea, with far less provocation,
+slaughters her brother, her children, two kings, and a princess,
+and attempts the life of Athens' most famous hero. Does the
+murder of one's husband, then, outweigh all of these crimes?
+The answer is, of course, that it did. The marital bond was
+the weakest point in the Greek family, and the murderous
+hatred of a wife for her husband was felt to be the greatest
+potential danger and had therefore to be guarded against with
+the most rigid care and punished with the most compulsive
+severity.
+Confirmation of this idea may be found in the horror with which Greeks regarded the myth of the women of Lemnos,
+who murdered all their husbands and ruled the island by
+themselves. To modern readers this is an amusing fancy—one
+which, after all, ends happily with the pleasant sojourn of the
+Argonauts and subsequent repopulation of the island [Apol-
+lonius Rhodius: Argonautica i. 606-909]. Certainly it cannot
+compare in luridness with the cannibalistic and incestuous
+doings of Atreus and Thyestes, with the hideous deaths of
+Pentheus and Heracles, with the crimes and sufferings of
+Procne and Philomela, of Oedipus, Cronus, and a dozen
+others. But how the Greeks themselves felt about it may be
+judged from the following passage:
+But the summit and crown of all crimes is that which
+in Lemnos befell;
+A woe and a mourning it is, a shame and a spitting
+to tell;
+And he that in after time doth speak of his deadliest
+thought,
+Doth say, It is like to the deed that of old time in
+Lemnos was wrought
+[Aeschylus: The Choephori 631-34.
+Morshead trans.]4 (164-165)
+None of the modes of
+response we are examining (with the possible exception of
+Apollo's, with which it is closely allied) will be quite so
+close to the classical Greek norm as this one; and there is no
+character in Greek mythology who seems to epitomize the
+fifth-century Athenian as fully as does the hero of Euripides'
+Orestes. Whatever kind of run-of-the-mill swashbuckler he
+may have been in earlier days, the dramatists molded Orestes
+in their own image, and with his tribulations the Athenians
+must have experienced an emotional empathy unmatched
+even in so powerful a repertory.(192)
 VI. Self-Emasculation: Hephaestus

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