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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
This note argues that two passages are worthier of the dramatist if the audience has seen the furies than if it has not. Orestes sees the furies (Choe. 1048–50, 1053–4, 1057–8); the chorus (1051–2, 1055–6,1059–60) does not see them. Does the audience see them? K. O. Müller, on philosophical and antiquarian grounds, thought so. Nearly all scholars today believe not. I agree with Miiller from what Orestes now says to the chorus: ὑμεῖς μν οὐφ ρτε τσδ', γὼ δ' ρ (1061). If the chorus does not see the furies and the audience does not see them either, the ὑμεῖς μν οὐχ ρτε τά7sigma;δ' lacks moment; the chorus cannot find those words of any use and the audience (from what it has heard in the ten lines preceding) cannot find them of interest. There is value in the words only if the audience, seeing what Orestes sees, is being reassured that the chorus does not. Line 1058, κξ μμτων στζουσιν αἷμα δυσφιλς, may be regarded as saying something the audience did not know from its own senses, and the same is true for ὑμεῖ μν οὐχ ρτε τσδ' in 1061 if it says once more that the furies, though real to Orestes, and to the audience as well, are not real to everyone. The opposite reasoning—that if the audience has seen the furies the γὼ δ' ρ (at the close of the line) is unneeded after Orestes has already said three times that he sees them—is not countervailing. For those words are in the less emphatic position, are fewer, and are of less doubtful usefulness, since they lead to λαὑνομαι δ κοὐκτ' ἄν μεναιμ' γώ.
1 Dissertations on the Eumenides, English trans. (Cambridge, 1835), section 3 (pp. 50–52)Google Scholar. His argument is philosophical in its premise that the furies are not mere phantoms of a deranged mind but, for those who have rapport with the supernatural world, are truly as present in this locale as in the one of the play to come. The argument is antiquarian in its reference to Pollux (4.132), who remarks that the furies—somewhere, and where else so well as here?—appear from beneath the earth. Gottfled Hermann—in his Wiener Jahrbücher, vol. 64, review, reprinted as vol. 6, part 2, of his Opuscula (Leipzig, 1835)—impugned but did not refute the testimony: ‘Pollux ist ein sehr unzuverlässiger Compilator, der ohne Kenntniss der Sachen seine Nachrichten aus allerlei Schriften zusammengetragen hat…Doch er moge Recht haben’ (pp. 133–4). Wilamowitz, , History of Classical Scholarship, trans. Harris, Alan (London, 1982), p. 129Google Scholar, judged that Hermann, though successful in construing, ‘either failed to understand, or rejected as uninteresting, Müller's profound observations‘.
2 For one, Lloyd-Jones, H., in his translation of the Oresteia (London, 1979)Google Scholar, n. on Choe. 1048. Whether the trilogy is more effective if the furies are not seen by the audience until the third play, is moot. To my mind, the whole would be not diminished, but enhanced, if the audience straightway shared in the vision, rather than merely looked upon the visionary.
3 The audience of Macbeth 3.4.40–107, similarly, sees the ghost of Banquo, while those on stage, except for the thane of Glamis himself, do not. So Brown, A. L. in JHS 103 (1983), 13–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, though he holds to the contrary for Choe. Compare Hamlet 3.4.102–136.
4 The question ‘Why does the dramatist tell us this?’ leads to many a useful judgement. Since no one would ever say ‘I hold her head in my left hand’, we conclude from ‘en impudicum crine contorto caput/laeva reflexi’ (Seneca Hipp. 707–8) that the ‘audience’ was reading, not watching; the dramatist was telling what should be ‘seen’.
5 A Commentary on the Surviving Plays of Aeschylus (Amsterdam, 1958), v. 2, p. 114Google Scholar. As an alternative explanation of the π, Neitzel, H.— Hermes 113 (1985), 369Google Scholar —suggests that Aegisthus, in swaddling clothes (line 1606), was borne upon (the back of) his father into exile.
6 In the note on the line in his edition, E. Fraenkel cites quite a few like instances, and LSJ s.v. π+dat. adds Plu, Publ. 20, τρισχιλουζ π μυροιζ. PV 774, τρίτος γεγνναν πρς δκ' ἄλλαισιν γοναῖς, also means thirteenth in a roundabout way; the scholiast lists the thirteen generations.
7 To the contrary see A. F. Game's notes on lines 713 and 675 in his edition (Oxford, 1986). The plural rather than a dual at 668 and 734 may be remarked.
8 West, M. L., Studies in Aeschylus (Stuttgart, 1990) 293CrossRefGoogle Scholar, would have the torches borne by the Areopagites; I believe the Areopagites are old men—the chorus of Ag. and the citizens who stretch out the murder robe at Choe. 983.
9 Cassandra too is εὔρις…κυνς δκην (Ag. 1093) and the watchman has been reposing κυνς δκην (3).
10 See Walton, F. R., ‘A Problem in theIchneutae of Sophocles’, HSCP 46 (1935), 167–89, esp. 167–9Google Scholar.
11 On the groups throughout the trilogy (tetralogy) see my Problem and Spectacle (Heidelberg, 1980), pp. 88–98Google Scholar.
