#eumenides

Underworld Gods: Greek 🏛️ ⤷ Hades ⋮ Part 1

Photo taken from Aeschylus' Eumenides, performed at Le Théâtre du Soleil, Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris. 1992

One of the saddest parts in Eumenides is how much Orestes has erased Clytemnestra from his identity to survive.

In Libation Bearers, he was repeatedly told from Elektra, Pylades, and the Chorus to emotionally disown his mother to kill her, which makes his later "victory" more tragic; but by Eumenides, he argues that she was never really his parent at all:

"But do i share my mother's blood myself?" - Line 606

And he's backed by Apollo, his lawyer, who argues that children get everything from their fathers, with their mothers being well...:

"The person called the mother’s not the parent. She only nourishes the embryo planted by mounting her, and for a stranger she keeps the shoot alive—if no god blights it. And I can prove my claim: without a mother there can be fatherhood. For this we have proof here…the offspring of Olympian Zeus, not nurtured in the darkness of the womb: No goddess could give birth to such a child." - Line 658-665

He used Athena as an example—to which she agrees on later—that she sprang from Zeus motherless, but this ultimately erases Metis from her life.

Even more so that Apollo is diminishing his mother Leto after everything she's gone through for him and Artemis. Heck, Apollo is called the son of Leto several times in the Homeric works.

While the trilogy resolves the cycle of vengeance, something is lost in the transition from the old order to the new one: