Episode 2: Oresteia

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Welcome to Ancient Greece today. My name is Naomi Weiss. I’m a professor of classics at
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Harvard University and I am your host for this podcast series which brings together scholars,
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artists and practitioners to think about the ancient Greek world and its afterlives. Each
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episode we first look at a piece of ancient literature and then at an example of how it has
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been used and reimagined in the present day, especially in the US. This season is tragedy
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today. Last episode I simply introduced ancient Greek tragedy as a genre. With the help of
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professors Rosa Andújar and Josh Billings, we approached the question of what is Greek tragedy
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in several ways. Its religious, political and cultural intellectual context, the ideas it explores,
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aspects of its performance, especially the role of the chorus, and a few examples of how it has lived
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on into the present. Today we are turning to the ancient material itself. In subsequent episodes
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we’ll talk about single plays. So next up is Prometheus Bound. We have Oedipus the King, Medea,
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Antigone. Today is a bit different because we’re discussing not one but three plays, a trilogy,
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The Oresteia by Aeschylus. The second half of the episode is a little different from what’s to come
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too. And I’ll get to that when the time comes. So why begin with the Oresteia? And why all three plays
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that make up this trilogy? Well, they are the oldest plays we’re going to look at in this series. And
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quickly in antiquity, they achieved a canonical status, with many other plays subsequently referring back
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to these ones. And actually in episode one, we already mentioned Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Orestes,
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both of which very much deal with Aeschylus’ Oresteia. But there are many other examples too.
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They are also our only surviving trilogy. But remember, originally they were a tetralogy,
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meaning there were four plays, but we’ve lost the fourth. That was a seta play. It was called
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Proteus. We have to look at these three tragedies together because the trilogy is so connected.
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The narrative follows through from one play to the next, and that is not a given. In fact,
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as far as we can tell, many trilogies later on in the fifth century didn’t have this kind of
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narrative through line at all. Before we talk about the Oresteia, I need to introduce you to the playwright,
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Aeschylus. Already by the end of the fifth century BCE, Athenians had a very clear idea of who their top
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three tragedians were. They were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aeschylus was the oldest.
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He started producing plays in the 490s, but the oldest fully surviving play of his is the Persians
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from 472 BCE. And that is also a very interesting tragedy to think about. It’s unusual for being a
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so-called historical tragedy. It’s about a recent event in Athenian history, the Battle of Salamis.
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Other plays that survive in full of his are Seven Against Thebes, Suppliant Woman.
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Prometheus Bound is Aeschylean, but as we’ll see next episode, the question of authorship is complicated
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for that one. And then there’s the Oresteia. The Oresteia is the play Agamemnon, followed by
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Libation Bearers, and then the Eumenides. These three are Aeschylus’ latest surviving plays. He won
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first prize with this tetralogy, so including that fourth play, at the City Dionysia, the big festival
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for Dionysus in Athens in 458 BCE, and he died a couple of years later. Before I tell you what happens
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in these plays, let me give you their mythical background. The Oresteia, the name Oresteia,
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could be translated as “the Orestes cycle,” “the Orestes story.” We’re dealing with the house of
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Atreus. That’s the name we give to this family, and it’s a pretty messed up family. Orestes’ grandfather
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was Atreus, king of Mycenae slash Argos. The two cities are merged here. That’s a really interesting
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thing in and of itself. Atreus has a brother, Thyestes. Thyestes slept with Atreus’ wife and
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temporarily claimed the throne, and this involved taking the golden fleece. In revenge, Atreus
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killed Thyestes’ sons, so his nephews, and fed them to Thyestes. So that is Orestes’ grandfather.
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Orestes’ father, Atreus’ son, is Agamemnon. Agamemnon, who sailed to Troy with his brother
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Menelaus. Agamemnon and Menelaus married sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen. Sometimes we forget that
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Clytemnestra and Helen are sisters. The two, Agamemnon and Menelaus, the two Greek men,
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go and attack Troy because a Trojan prince, Paris, has stolen Helen or Helen has run off with Paris.
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It depends how you want to tell that story. But initially they’re unable to set sail from Greece
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to Troy. The winds are too still and they’re stuck at a place called Aulis. The Greek prophet
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Calchas tells Agamemnon that he has to appease the goddess Artemis to be able to go, and he has to do so
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by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia. He does this and off they go. But the war takes much longer than
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expected. Ten years. The first play of the Oresteia is the Agamemnon. It is ten years since Agamemnon left
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for Troy. During that time, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, gets a lover, Aegisthus. Aegisthus was another
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son of Aegisthus. So Aegisthus is Agamemnon’s cousin. Clytemnestra is now getting on with Aegisthus. And Clytemnestra, who at one point is called a woman with a man’s mind, is in charge. This is a tyranny. A woman in charge. A household and city where no one dares speak their mind. The play begins with the watchman on the roof of the palace, looking out as always.
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And suddenly he sees a beacon fire, which is announcing the long-awaited news. Troy has fallen. Agamemnon is on his way home.
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There follows a long and extraordinary choral song that I’ll come back to in the second half of this episode. And Clytemnestra’s famous beacon speech, when she imagines a downfall of Troy and that series of beacon signals making their way to Argos to announce it. Agamemnon arrives with his, we could say, concubine, his female captive, Cassandra.
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He goes into the house. Cassandra stays on stage for a while longer. She knows exactly what’s going to happen to her, although of course nobody will believe her. That’s Cassandra’s fate.
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Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill them both. Agamemnon has been utterly reduced, killed in a bathrobe. Clytemnestra has had her revenge for the death of her daughter, Iphigenia.
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Argos is in chaos, but Clytemnestra establishes control. The play ends.
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Then we have the Libation Bearers. Named for its chorus, these are a group of women who are bringing offerings, libations, to the tomb of Agamemnon.
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Clytemnestra and Agamemnon had other children, not just Iphigenia. And the names and numbers of them vary across tellings.
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But here there are two, Orestes and Electra. Orestes went into exile after Agamemnon’s murder.
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And now, years later, he’s back with his friend Pylades. Apollo has told him to avenge his father by murdering his mother and Aegisthus, his mother’s lover.
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He reunites with Electra, who is delighted to see him.
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Orestes tricks Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by pretending to be a herald, giving a false report of his own death.
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Aegisthus goes into the house to talk to him, and there he meets his bloody end. We hear his offstage cries.
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Clytemnestra realizes this is Orestes, and she pleads for mercy in a really moving scene, bearing her breast.
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But he forces her into the house. The two bodies are brought out.
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And then Orestes starts behaving oddly, thinking that Furies or arenas, avenging deities, are attacking him.
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He actually thinks the chorus are Furies, which is very clever on Aeschylus’ part, since the chorus of libation bearers in this play will become, in the next play, a chorus of Furies or Erinyes.
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And finally, we have the third play, the Eumenides.
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We’ve moved here from Argos to Delphi, where Orestes seeks help from Apollo.
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He’s being tormented by these Furies, his mother’s Furies.
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And we actually have here the ghost of Clytemnestra, waking the Furies up and urging them to attack her son.
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This chorus is a terrifying group of chronic female beings.
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The Delphic priestess who begins the play is so horrified by them that she comes out on her hands and knees, unable to adequately describe these snaky, oozing, bloody monsters.
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The action then moves to Athens, where Orestes addresses Athena, the goddess Athena, the goddess of Athens, for help.
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Athena puts him on trial and in doing so establishes the first law court at the Areopagus, which could just be translated as the Hill of Ares.
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The Furies are the prosecutors, Apollo gives the defense.
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Votes are equal, but Athena casts the deciding one in Orestes’ favor.
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And the argument?
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The father is more important than the mother.
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In fact, the mother isn’t a true parent at all.
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Athena gradually mollifies the Furies and they turn into the kindly ones or the Eumenides.
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And so the play is called the Eumenides, after what these Furies finally become, the kindly ones promising to benefit Athens.
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And the play, and therefore the trilogy, ends with a procession as the Eumenides are escorted, as they say, to their place below and beneath the earth.
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Civic order is restored.
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How should we understand all of this?
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Well, we could have a whole podcast season just about this one trilogy, but let me make just a few observations.
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And I’ll say at the outset that some of what follows is informed in particular by Froma Zeitlin’s classic work on the trilogy.
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And you can find more information about that on the podcast website.
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First, remember that this is a performance.
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So let’s think about it as a performance.
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I’ve given you the bare bones of the plot, but all these events happen between and are filtered through choral song and dance.
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Also solo song and dance.
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Cassandra initially only sings as the chorus responds in speech, never quite understanding what she means.
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Then they actually get caught up in her performance and they start singing too.
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A long and complicated song and dance are performed by Electra, Orestes and the chorus in the Libation Bearers.
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And that leads up to Orestes formally taking on the act that is to come, the killing of his mother.
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It seems to generate the action.
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As for the Eumenides, well, there was an anecdote in antiquity that the chorus of this play was so terrifying that the woman in the theatre miscarried right there and then.
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I mean, we don’t need to believe that anecdote, but it says something about how this chorus was presented, not just in terms of their words, but in terms of other aspects of their performance.
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And the words of their songs certainly suggest especially energetic dancing.
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And we can only guess about their costumes and their masks.
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But the staging of this trilogy also is interesting.
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A lot of bad stuff happens inside the house.
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The house, the palace, was represented by a stage building called in Greek the skene.
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Older tragedies don’t seem to make use of this, but it’s clearly very important in the Oresteia.
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The house is the domain of woman.
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Yet in the topsy-turvy world of the Agamemnon, a woman, Clytemnestra, is out and about beyond the house.
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People are murdered inside.
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We’ll find these spatial dynamics coming up again at several points, especially in the Medea.
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That’s a couple of episodes away.
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The point here is that the skene seems to be a new piece of theatre technology, perhaps even used here for the first time.
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And actually at the start of the Agamemnon, it’s like Aeschylus really wants us to notice that he’s using this skene, this new theatre technology.
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The watchman is lying on the roof and he’s talking about how he’s lying on the roof, on this house, pointing to this roof right here.
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Please, audience, see what we’re doing that’s new in this performance.
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Second, another way of thinking about this trilogy.
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Remember the title, the Oresteia.
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One way to interpret the trilogy is to really think about Orestes and to do so through an anthropological lens in terms of a rite of passage, an initiation ritual.
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So if we look at the trilogy in this way, we can think how in the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides, Orestes undergoes a rite of passage of sorts and has a sort of symbolic rebirth in the Eumenides and returns to society.
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We could think of him like Telemachus in the first part of the Odyssey.
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If you’ve read the Odyssey, Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, who leaves home, he faces various challenges, he matures, he grows up and he returns home.
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A classic journey of maturation.
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But that, Telemachus’ journey, is more normal.
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Orestes’ journey is twisted.
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It’s inverted.
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He’s exiled for his whole childhood.
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And then on the brink of manhood, he returns home to wildness and disorder.
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His special case transforms his act and his journey into the ultimate transgression, a transgression resulting from the house he’s born into.
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Third, myth is flexible.
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This is something that I’m going to emphasize in every episode.
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Myth is flexible.
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And Aeschylus seems to have made some changes, as every playwright did.
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In earlier traditions, like the Odyssey, it seems like Aegisthus was the prime mover.
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He was the one who seduced Clytemnestra, who killed Agamemnon.
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And the sacrifice of Iphigenia doesn’t seem to come into the foreground so much.
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Aeschylus, in contrast, emphasizes the child sacrifice and makes Clytemnestra the most powerful figure by far in the Agamemnon.
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And the result?
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The whole trilogy is constructed around family violence or intrafamilial violence, a favorite topic of tragedy.
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And the conflict is also to do with gender, to do with scary women.
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And finally, and relatedly, one powerful frame for thinking about the trilogy is the democratic city.
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As I’ve already said, this trilogy was, or tetralogy, was produced in 458 BCE.
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At this time, after the Persian Wars, Athens was an expanding empire, an increasingly wealthy empire.
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And democracy was becoming more radical.
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The assembly and the law courts were open to all male citizens, and the assembly was increasingly important.
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The archonship, there was this system of rotating archons who had a lot of power in the city.
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And the archonship had just become open to all three of the upper property classes.
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This is also a restrictive democracy, however, since citizenship was restricted.
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And we’ll talk about this more when we get to Medea.
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For now, I’ll just point out that many in Athens were not citizens.
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There were medics, there were slaves, and women had very little autonomy.
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A couple of decades later, Pericles, the great Pericles, would deliver a famous speech recorded by Thucydides on Athens as the ideal democratic city.
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And he says in that speech that, and I quote, the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men.
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So female glory is not to be heard about at all, to be zeros, to be non-entities.
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How does the Oresteia fit within this political context?
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Well, we can answer this in a broader way and in a much more specific way to begin with.
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In the broader sense, we could think about the entire arc of the trilogy as going from tit-for-tat violence,
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an endless cycle of retributive justice that goes back multiple generations, to legal justice, a case decided in court.
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And in tandem, an arc that goes from matriarchy to patriarchy, from what you could say is woman on top to containing woman.
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Clytemnestra remains present in the third play.
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She’s a ghost, but then she recedes, and she’s replaced by a different sort of female body, the Furies.
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And they are scary, these female, chthonic, monstrous figures.
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But then they are transformed into the kindly ones, the Eumenides, supportive but seemingly ineffective within the male-dominated polis.
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So this is an arc that goes from vengeance and the power of the female to civic courts and the power of the male,
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which is a key part of classical Athenian democracy.
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The specific connection is to do with the Areopagus, that hill of Ares where Orestes is put on trial in the third play.
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The Areopagus was a real place, and you can actually visit the site today, the hill of Ares, the Areopagus in Athens.
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It was the name, not just of the place, but of the council, the Areopagus council, which began as an aristocratic council before the advent of democracy.
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It’s not clear what its role was in the mid-5th century BCE.
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It’s generally referred to in the texts that we have in terms of guarding the laws, which is very general.
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That probably involved punishing offenders, watching over magistrates, impeaching people who might damage the state.
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But it was also, it was always also a homicide court.
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And it was still an elite body.
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Now, apparently, the power of this council, of the Areopagus, increased following the Persian Wars.
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And in 462, 461, a democratic reformer called Ephialtes attacked the Areopagus.
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He expanded the classes from which members could be drawn.
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He removed many existing members of this elite council.
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And he deprived the council of various powers, although we don’t really know what they were.
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He seems to have paid the price for these democratic reforms.
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He was assassinated.
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The murderer was never found.
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The Oresteia was produced just four years later in 458.
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There were clearly still raw reactions to these reforms, whatever those reforms exactly were.
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It’s difficult to know if Aeschylus is trying to say anything particular about the Areopagus with his trilogy.
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The Eumenides as a play seems ambivalent.
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The Areopagus heralds a new form of justice.
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It upholds laws.
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But its main role here is still as a homicide court.
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Is Aeschylus allowing for a full political range in his audience from the more oligarchy-leaning ones to those who are super pro-radical democracy?
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What is important is that the Areopagus is a complicated symbol of the democratic city.
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Now, I want to dwell a bit more on the idea of the Oresteia as essentially political theatre and how else we might approach it in this way.
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So, in the next segment, I’m going to ask Professor Afroditi Angelopoulou of the University of Southern California to help us think through the politics of the trilogy.
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And in particular, her concept of embodied ethics in relation to its political narrative.
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So, stay with us.
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I’m delighted to be joined now by Afroditi Angelopoulou, who is an assistant professor of classics at the University of Southern California.
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And is emerging really as a foremost scholar of Greek tragedy, but also as a scholar of Plato and the reception of tragedy and Homeric epic too, especially in modern Greek poetry.
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Her monograph, entitled The Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy, was published just earlier this year by Oxford University Press.
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It’s a really important book.
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And she is working on a book, which I believe has a provisional title of Taste and Its Discontents in the Time of Plato.
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A wonderful title.
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Welcome to Ancient Greece Today.
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Afroditi, thank you so much for being here.
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Thank you for having me, Naomi.
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I’m really happy to do this with you.
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And I’m very honored and flattered, actually, with this wonderful introduction.
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Very generous.
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No, not generous at all.
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So, as you know, we are talking about Aeschylus’ Oresteia today.
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I have just given a brief introduction to this trilogy, our only surviving tragic trilogy.
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Its plot, its mythic background, its staging, which is something I’m especially interested in.
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And I’ve mentioned just a couple of quite traditional ways to understand it.
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First, as a rite of passage for Orestes.
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That’s one way.
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And secondly, as a form of political theater.
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But that second, the political theater, we need to unpack a bit.
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There’s a lot that could be said there.
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And that’s why I’ve asked you to join us to do just that, to think about the Oresteia as political theater.
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So, thank you for joining me in this endeavor.
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One way to approach this question is to really emphasize the end point of the trilogy, right?
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To think about how it leads to the foundation of a homicide court, the Areopagus, and how it leads to a democratic system.
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Not just for deciding whether someone is guilty, but for dealing with civic strife more generally.
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Do you think that’s the message of this trilogy?
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Is that how you would read it too?
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Yes, this is definitely, it has been well shown that one of the things when we’re thinking about the political message of the Oresteia is about, you know, the foundation of the Areopagus, the whole trilogy as a political etiology of this very court, the trial of homicide cases and the importance of democracy.
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One of the things that, for me at least, comes across very, with some emphasis in the end of the Oresteia is what Athena says when she’s talking about the Furies who have been tamed at that point,
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that “I see a great prophet for the citizens from these terrible faces,” and how she’s talking about the importance of this inbuilt, fearful respect of the citizens for the Areopagus.
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So that, you know, what she says, she calls it the “terrible,” the deinon, which has so many different meanings, the Greek term.
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That this is in some way constitutive of a just society, that we need these emotions to harness them in order to practice governing and stabilization and all these things that are at stake in Athens at the time.
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So the last part of the Oresteia is very much a message about what is going on in the city-state at the time, I guess.
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That’s one of the messages.
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But there’s so many, right?
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There’s so many other meanings.
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Yeah, there are so many.
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There’s no one way to understand this very complicated, complex trilogy.
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But that is really interesting, that particular way, because we can think of this in terms of the foundation of the Areopagus,
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which itself was clearly much talked about at this time in terms of how much it should be doing in the democracy as originally quite an aristocratic court.
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But what you’re getting at, and you talk about in your book too, is something bigger, a sort of form of strife, a form of violence in the city that is,
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has to be absorbed for democracy to work.
29:08 –> 29:16
And you’re suggesting that there is that through the course of this trilogy in various ways.
29:16 –> 29:18
Yeah, yes, it’s true.
29:18 –> 29:40
And of course, the violence, which is such an important theme in the Oresteia, the violence of retributive justice, is very much connected to anger, which is one of the predominant political emotions that we see in the Oresteia that initially is embodied in the female characters.
29:40 –> 29:52
Clytemnestra and through her, the Erinyes, the Furies, and how that eventually that emotion does not go away, but becomes institutionalized.
29:52 –> 29:55
It becomes part of the court.
29:55 –> 30:03
I think there is at some point, Athena tells the jurors that you have to be quick to anger, to support, to defend justice.
30:03 –> 30:23
So all these emotions that, when uncontrolled, when they’re not governed, and especially, you know, what better way to show the dangers of uncontrollable affect and emotion than having female characters transgressing all these norms and boundaries.
30:24 –> 30:32
They do not go away, they just become part of the civic architecture, I guess, of the polis, right?
30:32 –> 30:34
So anger is one of them, for instance.
30:34 –> 30:38
That is very much the motivator of violence, right?
30:38 –> 31:01
Right, and that provides a new way of thinking about the transition that has long been noticed in this trilogy from matriarchy, scary woman on top, Clytemnestra in control, to very clear establishment of patriarchy by the end.
31:02 –> 31:22
But what I think is really nuanced about what you’re saying is that, yes, there is that transition, but at the same time, this trilogy is making clear that you still need these scary emotions, these scary affects like anger within the city.
31:22 –> 31:26
They just have to be absorbed in a certain stable way.
31:26 –> 31:36
Yeah, one could argue whether this is an optimistic vision of the Oresteia and how it concludes and all that.
31:36 –> 31:38
That’s, I guess, a whole different rabbit hole.
31:39 –> 32:05
But the movement, this transformation of emotional states from this very visceral embodied psychological state to a more sublime and institutionalized and political tool that can be used for establishing group identity and civic collective group identity and all those things.
32:06 –> 32:15
So that’s one of the ways you can see there is that, for better or worse, but these become powerful tools we see.
32:15 –> 32:17
Fear is another one.
32:17 –> 32:41
And one of the other emotions that I argue in the book that I talk about more because this was less talked about is this very visceral and very physiologically oriented emotion of disgust that is also very sensory that becomes, in the end, when the Furies that have been now transformed tell the citizens,
32:41 –> 32:53
you should all loathe with one mind or one heart, it’s going to be directed against anyone who engages and indulges.
32:53 –> 33:07
And the word there very much evokes these feelings of greed that have been so prominent throughout the trilogy, political greed, material greed, physical gluttony, all these things.
33:07 –> 33:12
Now they’re being directed against anybody who is greedy for violence and for civil strife.
33:12 –> 33:22
So everything kind of becomes neat in the end, but maybe not so much.
33:22 –> 33:27
There’s so many other problems, of course, that remain unresolved.
33:27 –> 33:30
But I guess that’s the optimistic reading of the Oresteia.
33:31 –> 33:34
Yeah, well, there’s certainly tensions at the end, too.
33:34 –> 33:42
Could you give a sense of how you imagine an audience to experience this?
33:42 –> 33:59
So it’s one thing talking about language that expresses disgust or is focused on the belly and greed, the sort of bodily language that you explore.
33:59 –> 34:06
So, but it’s perhaps another thing to go from that to how an audience receives such imagery.
34:06 –> 34:10
How far do you think this affects them?
34:10 –> 34:21
I mean, this is, again, because you cannot really, I guess, one of the main things when somebody is talking about audience engagement and audience response,
34:21 –> 34:25
you cannot really claim to be able to reconstruct the experience.
34:25 –> 34:42
You can only see what’s there in the text and imagine, reconstruct the performance and think how it could have affected them based on what we know about our senses and our conceptual architecture and how we respond to performances or any other types of,
34:42 –> 34:47
of not only artistic, but any sort of embodied performance.
34:47 –> 34:59
But we do know that the sensory stimuli would provoke the audience’s gut, could have that potential to provoke their gut reactions.
35:00 –> 35:07
And of course, Froma Zeitlin was one of the first scholars who noticed the motif of the sacrifice,
35:07 –> 35:09
which is such an important ritual.
35:09 –> 35:15
And it’s such a charged imagery throughout the Oresteia and how it’s being perverted as a ritual.
35:15 –> 35:26
But at the same time, if you think about all this language of perversion, this somatic and sensory language being within the context of a festival,
35:26 –> 35:40
which had its own sacrificial smokes and libations and all these steam of the corpses and the animal sacrifice and all that interacting in real time with this language.
35:41 –> 35:51
I think that would be one way to engage the audience, not only intellectually, but also on a more subliminal, visceral level.
35:51 –> 35:58
So that’s one way to think about how an audience would be part of this whole experience in the theater,
35:58 –> 36:06
especially in the theater of Athens with what we know, given the context that we know, the festivals and the feasting and everything.
36:06 –> 36:10
Yes, I agree.
36:10 –> 36:17
I also agree on how difficult it is, impossible, to reconstruct any audience response.
36:17 –> 36:25
What we’re left is the words of the play and how they can model certain forms of affect.
36:25 –> 36:30
But taking into account that broader context is absolutely vital.
36:31 –> 36:41
You have thought a lot also about the pervasive motif of suffering or suffering and doing in the Oresteia.
36:41 –> 36:50
And this comes up with its most quoted phrase, which we’re going to be talking about later in this episode, learning by suffering.
36:50 –> 36:58
But it’s also there throughout as you show.
36:58 –> 37:06
You have approached this in terms of physical and metaphysical weight, the burden of suffering, the body under pressure.
37:06 –> 37:12
And again, in relation to this different approach to political theater.
37:12 –> 37:15
Could you elaborate on that idea?
37:16 –> 37:36
Yeah, while I was reading the Oresteia, I was very impressed by this recurrence of terms that had to do with what we would say, metaphorically, the concept of weight and how they kept coming up.
37:37 –> 38:01
And I don’t want to get, of course, into too much detail, but the terminology in Greek that has to do with weight has this passive and active component to its meaning that is very much essential to this understanding of suffering in the Oresteia, which is not only learning through suffering, but it’s also he who the doer suffers, right?
38:01 –> 38:22
This active and passive component. And then I started noticing how it’s not only, it’s just a pattern that permeates all three plays, not only in the language, but also corporeally in the movements, at least from what we can see from the text and what we are allowed to understand about the gestures and the performance.
38:22 –> 38:46
And of course, you know, the weight. So there is this concept of weight, which on the one hand has to do with this very metaphysical sense of suffering, but also there is this physical component of yes, the body is oppressed and all that, but also it appears as this weight of, of that has to do with greed and being overstuffed.
38:46 –> 39:09
And this, this surplus of wealth and violence that is in this instance, the house of Atreus, this aristocratic household that is full of full, like a body full of, um, uh, how, how should we call it? Um, greedy lust for blood and violence, I guess.
39:09 –> 39:22
And these two things coexist throughout the trilogy until in the end we get to these very hefty bodies on the stage of the Furies who materialize on the stage.
39:22 –> 39:34
And they, they incorporate all these different sensorial understandings and their, their movements and the way they dance on the stage and the way that they’re saying that they’re striking down.
39:34 –> 39:45
I don’t exactly remember the words there, but they’re oppressing essentially those who are king killers in this instance, those who, who violate, um, the rules of nature.
39:46 –> 40:05
And, and, and, and they become this interesting weighty bodies that because they have, they feel that they’re losing of their authority because we have this new young Olympian gods who represent Orestes via Zeus.
40:05 –> 40:13
And they, um, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re falling from their heaviness from, from this authority, from their status.
40:13 –> 40:21
Um, and in the end, this suffering that they feel, this, um, loss of honor that they feel.
40:21 –> 40:34
There, there appears Athena, who is very famously very disembodied, disembodied and very rational and has all this capacity to use persuasion to mollify them.
40:34 –> 40:38
And she tells them, I will share that burden with you.
40:38 –> 40:40
I will suffer with you.
40:40 –> 41:02
And we have this transformation against the sympathetic suffering that Athena embodies that has this more rational component rather than this more empathic, um, affective, contagious kind of pain that Clytemnestra felt for her daughter when she was sacrificed.
41:02 –> 41:10
And the Erinyes feel as representatives of Clytemnestra, they feel her dishonor and they suffer because of that.
41:10 –> 41:10
They suffer.
41:10 –> 41:14
They feel that they are dishonored, um, in turn.
41:14 –> 41:16
And Athena comes and redresses the balance.
41:16 –> 41:22
And she says, I will, I will, I will, I will bear this, I will, uh, sumfero, right?
41:22 –> 41:31
I will co, um, what’s the, what’s the word I’m trying to use in, like in English that, um, I will bear with you.
41:31 –> 41:32
Bear it with you.
41:32 –> 41:33
Yeah.
41:33 –> 41:33
Yeah.
41:33 –> 41:33
Yeah.
41:33 –> 41:33
Yeah.
41:33 –> 41:33
Yeah.
41:33 –> 41:37
The, the, the heaviness of your anger and your suffering.
41:37 –> 41:44
So everything, um, in the end, um, becomes resolved in some ways again.
41:45 –> 41:49
And what about the, the ways in which it doesn’t become resolved?
41:49 –> 41:52
How, how weightless is the end of the, the trilogy?
41:52 –> 41:53
Yes.
41:53 –> 41:59
Because you have, you have this very interesting, uh, idea.
41:59 –> 42:04
Again, another metaphor that scholars have, have noticed of descent, of going down.
42:04 –> 42:17
So if, if you, if you understand everything of these bodies, how they’re, they’re, they’ve appeared on the stage and the way they move and they dance, that they’re heavy and they’re, um, falling literally because they’re heavy.
42:17 –> 42:24
Well, I mean, in the end they descent, they go underneath the city, underneath the Acropolis.
42:24 –> 42:26
So outside civic space.
42:26 –> 42:32
And in that way, it reinforces all these hierarchies that there’s so much.
42:32 –> 42:38
It’s, it’s one of the, I think it’s one of the most important things that the Oresteia talks about, right?
42:38 –> 42:42
This notion of who is more important.
42:42 –> 42:44
Zeitlin has also talked about that, right?
42:44 –> 42:45
Democracy is more important.
42:45 –> 42:47
The father is more important than a mother.
42:47 –> 43:01
And of course, men are, are doing the, the, the democracy and women are just there to do their religious and civic duties, religious roles and duties and, and be tamed.
43:01 –> 43:06
And then just go underneath sustaining hierarchy, I guess.
43:06 –> 43:07
Yes.
43:07 –> 43:08
Yeah.
43:08 –> 43:11
No, I think that that’s true.
43:11 –> 43:12
Much though I love this trilogy.
43:12 –> 43:17
That does seem to be the overriding sense by, by the end of it.
43:17 –> 43:39
I will just say for, for listeners, one of the parts of the third play that Afroditi was referring to, which has this great sense of weight and of heaviness is a passage of Greek tragedy that I come back to over and over again, because I have long been interested in music and dance.
43:39 –> 43:49
And it’s this incredible so-called binding song that the Furies perform around and on Orestes.
43:49 –> 43:53
And they’re singing and dancing about how they’re stamping their feet.
43:54 –> 44:04
And yeah, there’s, as you say, there’s sort of over, the words of the song have this sense of overbearing weight, really terrifying weight.
44:04 –> 44:15
And then we can think of that in terms of the performance, too, really amplifying that effect, these many bodies bearing down.
44:15 –> 44:18
Female bodies, primordial bodies.
44:19 –> 44:30
And it’s interesting how, in the end, when we have the procession, there are some references as to the way they move, that somehow their movement is now lighter.
44:30 –> 44:32
They delight along their way.
44:32 –> 44:40
There’s a different, like, it’s a lighter sense that we have of these creatures that are going down, nevertheless.
44:40 –> 44:41
Yes.
44:41 –> 44:42
Yeah.
44:42 –> 44:42
Yeah.
44:42 –> 44:43
That’s great.
44:43 –> 44:45
Thank you.
44:45 –> 44:49
I have to draw this, begin to draw this wonderful conversation to a close.
44:49 –> 44:53
But first, I actually wanted to ask you something completely different.
44:53 –> 44:56
Actually, two things.
44:56 –> 45:01
The first is, because I know that you have been teaching this trilogy just recently.
45:01 –> 45:09
When you’re teaching it, what part of it tends to grab your students’ attention the most?
45:10 –> 45:31
They are very, very—so let me start by saying that it’s harder for them to make sense of the third part because there are so many—because the Oresteia is such a political—it’s a political—it has a political dimension that other plays not that much.
45:31 –> 45:35
It’s Athens, it’s democracy, it’s everything that’s happening.
45:35 –> 45:41
So the hardest time is to understand exactly what’s at stake with this kind of ending.
45:41 –> 45:57
But the thing that really captivates them, of course—and I say, of course, because I’m also thinking that every time I teach this play, there’s going to be at least one student after a couple of semesters who emails me and tells me about Clytemnestra.
45:57 –> 46:17
Clytemnestra. That is, to them, the most—and it’s usually the first play we read, and you have this formidable female character with this kind of masculine—a woman with a man’s heart, right?
46:17 –> 46:33
Clytemnestra. And Clytemnestra is the one that always captures their attention, and they’re really fascinated by her and what she’s doing and the way she directs everything—speech, the stage, the movements, everything in the Agamemnon.
46:33 –> 46:40
So I would say that this always is what fascinates them, Clytemnestra, and what she does in the Agamemnon.
46:40 –> 47:02
Clytemnestra. Yeah, I think that’s the case with my students, too. I often try to make sure they notice Cassandra as well, who can go in a class on the Oresteia, or if someone is just reading the Agamemnon very quickly, can go almost unnoticed.
47:02 –> 47:22
But that is the other scene for me that is really affecting and incredibly moving as this figure faces her continued rape and death in a song that nobody understands.
47:22 –> 47:33
It is true. And I mean, even in antiquity, right, this is the scene that it was famously said to cause explixis, this astonishment, because it was just so powerful.
47:33 –> 47:45
And the whole—her language and the visions it has and the way she interacts with the house that becomes like another actor, another body on the stage is just magnificent.
47:45 –> 47:58
And, of course, her silence before she—when Clytemnestra tries to control her, and she’s the only female—the only character, actually, who she cannot control, she cannot persuade.
47:58 –> 48:08
The antithesis there is just wonderful. And I do try to—because they tend to, yes, ignore Cassandra a little bit.
48:08 –> 48:29
So at least I make sure to point out that aspect. Like, look at Cassandra, how she’s the only one with her silence that is able to—I guess Clytemnestra gets her way in the end, but she’s able to not be controlled. She walks inside the house willingly and knowingly.
48:30 –> 48:56
Yeah, absolutely. And finally, this really is finally. I know that you have especially recently done work on modern adaptations, especially in poetry of tragedy. Do you have a favorite modern adaptation of the Oresteia or part of the Oresteia?
48:57 –> 49:11
Well, so maybe this will change. It’s because recently, in the last few months, I have been reading the poetry of the so-called new Oresteia of the modern Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos.
49:11 –> 49:36
And I was fascinated to see what he did, especially two poems that I’m really interested in, his Agamemnon and the Orestes, and specifically the Orestes. But the Agamemnon, too, those are dramatic monologues. And Ritsos himself has been—he studied theater. He was aspiring to become an actor.
49:36 –> 50:00
And it is just fascinating to see what he does, first of all, with Agamemnon and the way that he’s Agamemnon. When he enters the palace, he removes the military uniform and he covers his ears and tells Clytemnestra, who is silent all throughout. We never hear her voice.
50:00 –> 50:15
And he has this—he has this—he just keeps on going and talking and talking about his—the past in Troy and all that. But he begins by saying, what are they shouting for? They’re executioners. There’s the crowd cheering with the return of the king.
50:15 –> 50:38
And he feels nauseated by the smoke of the king. And he feels nauseated by the smoke of sacrifices that were performed in his honor. And I found this connection so interesting that Ritsos somehow picked up on that. Or it’s just—it was just subliminally. He didn’t even—it was, you know, he was not reflective—reflecting on that actively.
50:38 –> 50:56
But it was there that Agamemnon feels this nausea from all this celebration of the return that he sees now. It means nothing. It’s just everything was—the whole quest for glory and power and all that is meaningless to him now.
50:56 –> 51:05
And he just feels this—I just—I don’t want to hear anything. I don’t want to smell anything. I don’t want to use my senses.
51:06 –> 51:17
Which to me was very, very interesting with the kind of Agamemnon that we see in the Aeschylus’ play, where he enters on the chariot.
51:17 –> 51:25
And he talks about these fumes, these blasting fumes of wealth that are fat and they’re coming from Troy.
51:25 –> 51:38
And he’s using this very sensorial language about—that is full of greed and he’s completely unaware of the cost of the war to his wife, to his people, all the dead.
51:38 –> 51:58
And this Agamemnon is completely different. So it was really fascinating for me to read. And of course, Orestes is a whole other—we could have a session on Orestes, what Ritsos is doing and, you know, his understanding of Orestes and the relationship between Orestes and Pilates, the two friends, the two companions.
51:58 –> 52:15
It’s just—it’s very fascinating to read both these poems. I really, really think that he has a very meaningful response to the past, which is ancient Greece for him, but also to the messages of the trilogy.
52:15 –> 52:27
That’s fantastic. And that’s a powerful note to end on. So, Aphrodite, thank you so much for talking to me. I’m sure my listeners will be grateful, too.
52:28 –> 52:34
I am grateful to be here and have this conversation with you. It’s always a pleasure to talk about the Oresteia. It’s an exciting play.
52:34 –> 52:35
Thank you.
52:35 –> 52:57
So, now we’ve thought about the Oresteia itself, the ancient trilogy. At the end of the interview with Afroditi Angelopoulou,
52:58 –> 53:07
you heard about one modern example of drawing from and adapting these plays. There are many, many others we could discuss.
53:07 –> 53:20
When I am teaching the Oresteia, I often focus on Molora, for example, a play by the South African playwright Yaël Farber, which was first performed in 2003.
53:20 –> 53:33
This takes the Oresteia, as well as versions of the story by Sophocles and Euripides, and sets it in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work in post-apartheid South Africa.
53:33 –> 53:44
One of the most incredible aspects of this play is how Yaël Farber weaves together so-called classical material with indigenous South African performance traditions, especially through the chorus,
53:44 –> 53:49
a group of Xhosa musicians from the Ngqoko Cultural Group.
53:49 –> 54:02
I think the chorus’s musical performance both brings this play amazingly close to its ancient Greek sources, and also veers sharply, triumphantly away from them.
54:03 –> 54:07
But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today.
54:07 –> 54:18
Because the Oresteia itself is so big, there’s so much to grapple with here across all three plays and their many adaptations through time,
54:18 –> 54:24
I thought we’d just focus on a small part of the first play, the Agamemnon.
54:24 –> 54:26
In fact, just a few lines.
54:26 –> 54:37
So this is where this episode is also different from the ones to come, where we talk about reworkings of whole tragedies and artistic reworkings across different media, mostly very recent.
54:37 –> 54:43
For the Oresteia, I instead want to think about a single stanza of the opening choral song.
54:43 –> 54:46
As I said, a very long song, a tour de force, really.
54:46 –> 54:56
It takes us back in time to the horrific sacrifice of Iphigenia before we come forward again with great trepidation about what’s to come.
54:57 –> 55:04
Halfway through the song, just as they reach the moment of Calchas’ prophetic instructions to kill Iphigenia,
55:04 –> 55:09
the chorus break off to address Zeus for a few stanzas.
55:09 –> 55:15
And one of these stanzas goes like this, and this is Anne Carson’s 2011 translation.
55:15 –> 55:22
“Zeus put mortals on the road to wisdom when he laid down this law.
55:22 –> 55:24
By suffering, we learn.
55:25 –> 55:30
Yet there drips in sleep before my heart a grief-remembering pain.
55:30 –> 55:33
Good sense comes the hard way.
55:33 –> 55:38
And the grace of the gods, I’m pretty sure, is a grace that comes by violence.”
55:38 –> 55:41
Now, these are difficult lines.
55:41 –> 55:45
Aeschylus was famous even in antiquity for being difficult.
55:45 –> 55:47
But they live on today.
55:48 –> 55:50
I’ll give you two recent examples first.
55:50 –> 56:01
In April 2025, Walter Goggins, star of season three of The White Lotus, posted on Instagram his love and thanks for the filming experience, the cast, the crew.
56:01 –> 56:04
And he quoted these same lines of Aeschylus.
56:04 –> 56:06
Another example.
56:06 –> 56:15
In fall 2024, Mark Zuckerberg started wearing T-shirts with, as he put it, “some of my favorite classical sayings” on them.
56:15 –> 56:26
One of these, which he wore at a taping of the Acquired podcast at the Chase Center in San Francisco, had the Greek words pathe mathos on it.
56:26 –> 56:28
“Learning by suffering.”
56:28 –> 56:31
The phrase Aeschylus uses in these same lines.
56:31 –> 56:36
I’ll refrain from speculating on what learning by suffering means for Zuckerberg.
56:38 –> 56:43
Why do these guys know about this stanza of Aeschylus?
56:43 –> 56:51
Well, to answer this question, we need to go back to the 1960s and to the most famous use of Aeschylus in the U.S.
56:51 –> 56:55
and to a profound moment in American history.
56:55 –> 56:57
This is also Aeschylus as political.
56:57 –> 57:02
The quotation of these verses by Robert Kennedy Sr.
57:02 –> 57:11
When announcing to a mostly Black crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated.
57:11 –> 57:25
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news for all of you.
57:27 –> 57:29
Could you lower those signs, please?
57:29 –> 57:43
I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world.
57:43 –> 57:50
And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”
57:54 –> 57:57
That is how Kennedy begins.
57:57 –> 58:01
And he goes on to say that this is a moment of reckoning for the U.S.
58:01 –> 58:08
More violence and more polarization or, inspired by Martin Luther King, quote,
58:08 –> 58:11
“an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
58:11 –> 58:15
At this moment, he suddenly quotes Aeschylus.
58:17 –> 58:22
“My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus.
58:22 –> 58:23
He once wrote,
58:23 –> 58:32
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget,
58:32 –> 58:36
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
58:36 –> 58:39
Until in our own despair,
58:40 –> 58:45
Against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
58:45 –> 58:49
What we need in the United States is not division.
58:49 –> 58:53
What we need in the United States is not hatred.
58:53 –> 58:58
What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness,
58:58 –> 59:04
But his love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.
59:04 –> 59:11
And a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country,
59:11 –> 59:14
Whether they be white or whether they be Black.
59:28 –> 59:32
So I ask you tonight,
59:32 –> 59:37
To return home,
59:37 –> 59:42
To say a prayer for the family Martin Luther King.
59:42 –> 59:43
Yeah, it’s true.
59:43 –> 59:47
But more importantly, to say a prayer for our own country,
59:47 –> 59:49
Which all of us love.
59:49 –> 59:54
A prayer for understanding and that compassion,
59:54 –> 59:56
That of which I spoke.
59:57 –> 59:59
We can do well in this country.
59:59 –> 01:00:01
We will have difficult times.
01:00:01 –> 01:00:04
We’ve had difficult times in the past.
01:00:04 –> 01:00:07
And we will have difficult times in the future.
01:00:07 –> 01:00:10
It is not the end of violence.
01:00:10 –> 01:00:12
It is not the end of lawlessness.
01:00:12 –> 01:00:14
And it’s not the end of disorder.
01:00:14 –> 01:00:17
But the vast majority of white people,
01:00:17 –> 01:00:21
And the vast majority of Black people in this country,
01:00:21 –> 01:00:24
Want to live together.
01:00:25 –> 01:00:27
Want to improve the quality of our life.
01:00:27 –> 01:00:32
And want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
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And what dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago.
01:00:46 –> 01:00:49
To tame the savageness of man.
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And make gentle the life of this world.
01:00:53 –> 01:00:55
Let us dedicate ourselves to that.
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And say a prayer for our country.
01:00:58 –> 01:00:59
And for our people.
01:01:00 –> 01:01:00
Thank you very much.”
01:01:00 –> 01:01:10
It is a very powerful speech.
01:01:10 –> 01:01:12
Before we talk about it further,
01:01:12 –> 01:01:16
I’ll just say that the passage of Aeschylus that Kennedy quotes,
01:01:16 –> 01:01:20
is a translation by the writer and classicist Edith Hamilton.
01:01:20 –> 01:01:25
Published in 1930 in her best-selling book, The Greek Way.
01:01:25 –> 01:01:29
At the end of his speech, as you heard, he also quotes “the Greeks.”
01:01:29 –> 01:01:32
The phrase here was used by Hamilton, too.
01:01:32 –> 01:01:37
And she eventually published it in a book called The Ever-Present Past in 1964.
01:01:38 –> 01:01:40
It’s not an original Greek quotation.
01:01:40 –> 01:01:42
It’s a mash-up.
01:01:42 –> 01:01:46
A combination of an inscription at Delphi, praising Athens,
01:01:46 –> 01:01:53
and a description of the Athenians by the Greek writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BCE.
01:01:53 –> 01:01:58
But it became a powerful Greek saying through Hamilton.
01:01:58 –> 01:02:01
And then, above all, through Kennedy.
01:02:02 –> 01:02:09
Now, you may have noticed that the quote of Aeschylus by Kennedy sounds rather different from what I read out earlier.
01:02:09 –> 01:02:14
Goggins, by the way, used the same one as Kennedy for his Instagram post.
01:02:14 –> 01:02:23
These are famously enigmatic lines, and how we translate them profoundly affects what meaning we get.
01:02:23 –> 01:02:28
The Greek is actually very ominous, as we might expect this early on in the Agamemnon.
01:02:28 –> 01:02:32
I mean, you’ve just heard what happens in these three plays.
01:02:32 –> 01:02:37
And, of course, also just preceding an account of a child’s sacrifice.
01:02:37 –> 01:02:42
In Anne Carson’s translation, which I quoted earlier, we have,
01:02:42 –> 01:02:46
“There drips a grief-remembering pain.
01:02:46 –> 01:02:52
And the grace of the gods, I’m pretty sure, is a grace that comes by violence.”
01:02:53 –> 01:02:59
It’s not just ominous, the drip, drip, drip of pain which can burst into terrible violence.
01:02:59 –> 01:03:01
These lines are also unsure.
01:03:01 –> 01:03:04
Will the grace of the gods, plural, come?
01:03:04 –> 01:03:13
I wanted to understand better the significance of that moment in 1968 when Kennedy quoted these lines of Aeschylus.
01:03:13 –> 01:03:17
So, I went to talk to Larry Tye, his biographer, about it.
01:03:17 –> 01:03:19
Stay tuned for that interview.
01:03:23 –> 01:03:37
So, I’m joined by Larry Tye, a New York Times bestselling author.
01:03:37 –> 01:03:43
He’s written an amazing range of biographies, from Satchel, The Life and Times of an American Legend,
01:03:43 –> 01:03:48
about the baseballer Leroy Satchel Page, to most recently The Jazz Men,
01:03:48 –> 01:03:53
How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America.
01:03:53 –> 01:03:54
That came out in 2024.
01:03:54 –> 01:03:57
He’s now working on a book about the Holocaust.
01:03:57 –> 01:04:03
But I’m talking to him because of his expertise on Robert F. Kennedy Sr.,
01:04:03 –> 01:04:10
the subject of his 2016 biography entitled Bobby Kennedy, The Making of a Liberal Icon.
01:04:10 –> 01:04:12
Larry, welcome to Ancient Greece Today.
01:04:12 –> 01:04:14
Thank you so much for talking with me.
01:04:14 –> 01:04:15
Great to be with you.
01:04:15 –> 01:04:20
So, in this episode, I have been talking about Aeschylus’ Oresteia,
01:04:20 –> 01:04:25
which was first produced in 458 BCE in Athens.
01:04:25 –> 01:04:31
The three plays that make up the Oresteia, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides,
01:04:31 –> 01:04:37
were incredibly influential in antiquity, and they continue to be used and adapted in the present,
01:04:38 –> 01:04:43
not just as full plays or a full trilogy, but in parts and sometimes very small parts.
01:04:43 –> 01:04:49
And I’m focusing on just one very small part, one stanza of one song from the Agamemnon,
01:04:49 –> 01:04:53
where the chorus sings about learning by suffering.
01:04:53 –> 01:04:59
And I’m turning to you because probably the most famous use of this song, a quotation from this song,
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and maybe of Aeschylus in general, was by Bobby Kennedy in 1968 on the night when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
01:05:07 –> 01:05:08
was assassinated.
01:05:08 –> 01:05:16
So, I wondered first if you might be able to give us a little bit of background before we talk about that speech.
01:05:16 –> 01:05:22
As you put it, Kennedy had been reading the Greeks for several years by this point.
01:05:22 –> 01:05:27
Why was that, and what do you think that reading did for him?
01:05:27 –> 01:05:36
So, I think more than any figure in recent American history, Bobby Kennedy’s life was built around tragedy.
01:05:36 –> 01:05:45
It was built around the tragedy of the loss of his oldest brother and his oldest sister when he was a boy.
01:05:45 –> 01:05:55
It was built around the tragedy of the loss in 1963 of his best friend and his boss and his brother, Jack Kennedy.
01:05:55 –> 01:06:03
And it was coalesced in terms of his understanding of tragedy and understanding of Greek tragedy
01:06:03 –> 01:06:11
when his sister-in-law, Jackie Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s widow, gave him a book about Greek tragedies.
01:06:11 –> 01:06:18
And he saw the life of the Kennedy family, which has continued to have a series of tragedies over the years,
01:06:18 –> 01:06:25
as something that, going back to the ancient Greeks, helped him make sense of it.
01:06:25 –> 01:06:33
It also helped remove him from the immediacy and see his whole situation in the context of a larger world history.
01:06:33 –> 01:06:36
That’s really interesting.
01:06:36 –> 01:06:44
You’ve written about how he was reading a lot in the years prior to this moment in 1968,
01:06:44 –> 01:06:48
not just Greek tragedy, but all kinds of authors.
01:06:48 –> 01:06:53
How did that reading, do you think, come through in his public life?
01:06:53 –> 01:07:04
It made him more of an intellectual and more of an understander of history and of context.
01:07:04 –> 01:07:09
He was a mediocre student when he was in prep school, and he went to several prep schools
01:07:09 –> 01:07:14
because he couldn’t seem to stick around and avoid controversy at any one.
01:07:14 –> 01:07:21
He graduated without a whole lot of honors or distinction from Harvard.
01:07:21 –> 01:07:25
He graduated smack in the middle of his class from the University of Virginia Law School,
01:07:25 –> 01:07:38
and he didn’t have much use for academia or for things that he thought were overly remote, namely intellectual things, until later in life.
01:07:38 –> 01:07:41
And he was somebody who got better with age.
01:07:41 –> 01:07:44
He got more reflective.
01:07:44 –> 01:07:48
He got more sensitive to people’s problems.
01:07:48 –> 01:07:57
He had grown up in the lap of not just luxury, but the lack of true American wealth,
01:07:57 –> 01:08:09
with his father having earned a very large fortune and Bobby never having to worry about money or worry about just about anything in his youth.
01:08:09 –> 01:08:15
And the more he experienced life as he went along, the death of his brother Jack Kennedy,
01:08:15 –> 01:08:19
the civil rights movement, which he started out not understanding at all,
01:08:19 –> 01:08:23
and ended up understanding better than just about anybody.
01:08:24 –> 01:08:33
And the notion that that night when he was called on to give this speech at one of the most tragic moments in American history,
01:08:33 –> 01:08:36
the assassination of Martin Luther King,
01:08:36 –> 01:08:40
if he had given that 15 years earlier in his career,
01:08:40 –> 01:08:45
it would have been a speech that you and I wouldn’t be here half a century later talking about.
01:08:45 –> 01:08:49
But he was up to the moment, and we can talk about what he did that night in that speech.
01:08:50 –> 01:08:52
Yeah, thank you.
01:08:52 –> 01:08:54
I would love to talk about what he did that night.
01:08:54 –> 01:09:03
So, yeah, maybe you could give us a quick snapshot of what he is doing at this point in April 1968.
01:09:03 –> 01:09:19
He is now on the campaign trail after deciding to run for president and is heading to a rally in the heart of Indianapolis’ African-American district when he hears of MLK’s death, right?
01:09:19 –> 01:09:26
Right. And he was due to give a speech, as you mentioned, in that Black community.
01:09:26 –> 01:09:36
He was running for president after having waffled for months and watching all of the A students, as he called them, in colleges around the country,
01:09:36 –> 01:09:38
who were very upset about the Vietnam War.
01:09:38 –> 01:09:47
They all rallied around a guy named McCarthy, not Joe McCarthy, but Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war senator from Minnesota.
01:09:47 –> 01:09:50
And Bobby got in late.
01:09:50 –> 01:09:56
He had lots of people who would have supported him, not just on college campuses, but in the political world generally,
01:09:56 –> 01:10:01
having decided they had to make a choice before he decided to get in.
01:10:01 –> 01:10:05
And so he was running for his political life at that moment.
01:10:05 –> 01:10:09
He was running for the honor of the Kennedys who weren’t used to losing.
01:10:09 –> 01:10:15
And Indiana was a critical state for him to prove himself.
01:10:15 –> 01:10:22
He hears the news when he gets off a campaign plane and lands in Indianapolis.
01:10:22 –> 01:10:25
He hears the news that Martin Luther King has died.
01:10:25 –> 01:10:29
And his aides are saying, you shouldn’t give this speech.
01:10:30 –> 01:10:37
The mayor of Indianapolis, a guy named Richard Lugar, who would go on to become a long-serving senator from Indiana,
01:10:37 –> 01:10:44
says, Bobby, you will not go into Indianapolis tonight in the middle of the ghetto and give this speech because there’ll be a riot.
01:10:44 –> 01:10:46
And I don’t want to be responsible for that.
01:10:46 –> 01:10:48
And Bobby listens to his aides.
01:10:48 –> 01:10:50
He listens to the mayor.
01:10:50 –> 01:10:53
And he does just what he wanted to do, which is contradicting both of them.
01:10:53 –> 01:10:58
He takes all the notes that his aides have given him.
01:10:58 –> 01:11:01
They’ve cobbled together this speech in case he was going to give it.
01:11:01 –> 01:11:05
And he tosses those in a garbage can.
01:11:05 –> 01:11:15
And he goes in and speaks not just from the heart, but from the heart of a man whose heart has been broken himself.
01:11:15 –> 01:11:25
And he could understand better than just about anybody in America, as he told everybody that night, what it was like to lose someone they love.
01:11:26 –> 01:11:41
And he basically said to this crowd, who were 99% Black and 98% skeptical of a white man coming into their midst to give a speech on the night that they had lost their cherished Martin Luther King.
01:11:41 –> 01:11:47
And some of them only found out about Martin Luther King’s death at the beginning of Bobby’s speech when he told them about it.
01:11:47 –> 01:11:59
And he could speak to them about broken hearts and about anger that one felt more credibly than anybody I can think of in the political world at that moment.
01:11:59 –> 01:12:14
But he went on to say, we could lash out essentially with anger or we could lash out with empathy and understanding the way Martin Luther King would have wanted people to do.
01:12:14 –> 01:12:26
And he was so compelling that Indianapolis was almost alone among major American cities that night that didn’t have a riot.
01:12:26 –> 01:12:30
And there’s one reason it didn’t riot, I’m convinced.
01:12:30 –> 01:12:42
And that is because Bobby Kennedy went in and told them about another way to respond to this tragedy, about a way that didn’t involve violence, about a way that centered around love.
01:12:42 –> 01:12:57
And from that night on, and this is a claim that I can’t back up with statistics, but I believe to my core, Bobby Kennedy was the most popular white man in Black America.
01:12:57 –> 01:13:09
When he held rallies across the country after that night, in every rally, there would be at least one version of a sign that said, “White, but all right.”
01:13:09 –> 01:13:24
And that may not sound like much of a compliment, but at that moment of racial tension in America, the idea that any white man, and especially a white politician, was all right in the eyes of Black America was really saying something.
01:13:24 –> 01:13:26
Yes, indeed.
01:13:27 –> 01:13:49
So in this extraordinary, heartfelt speech that tries to center attention on love at a moment of extreme shock and suffering, what do you think it was about these words of Aeschylus that he quoted that seemed right for him in that moment?
01:13:51 –> 01:13:58
I think it was borrowing words of Aeschylus, but it didn’t matter almost what the words were in the speech.
01:13:58 –> 01:14:07
The point was that he was the guy giving the speech who had suffered in a way that he didn’t have to tell anybody in that audience.
01:14:07 –> 01:14:29
And so he was the one who could understand what Aeschylus was saying, what Black America was feeling, and what the people in that audience, who we learned later, many of whom had Molotov cocktails, and ended up going there not intending to listen to the speech, but intending to foment some sort of riot like was happening in other American cities.
01:14:29 –> 01:14:52
He basically said, we ought to learn from history, both ancient Greek history and modern American history, that when we lash out with violence in reaction to horrible things that happen, it begets more violence, and that love, as corny as it may sound, especially in today’s America, can beget more love.
01:14:52 –> 01:15:04
And I think that speech was not just the best speech of Bobby Kennedy’s career, and one of the best speeches an American politician has delivered in the 250-year history of this republic.
01:15:04 –> 01:15:28
But I think that speech has a moment again that I am delighted that you are refocusing on it, because I can’t imagine a moment in American history when, with the polarization that we’re experiencing, and with the hate, and with the lack of empathy and understanding and a sense of history that politicians are conveying in their speeches,
01:15:29 –> 01:15:38
Revisiting that speech and the height of oratory that we can reach in American politics, this is the moment.
01:15:38 –> 01:15:54
Yes, I think it is. I’m really struck by what you say about how, in a way, it didn’t matter what the words of Aeschylus exactly were, but that by quoting them,
01:15:54 –> 01:16:07
He showed the reach of humanity and his understanding of it and his empathy that goes across time. That’s incredibly powerful.
01:16:07 –> 01:16:23
That same quotation was, after Kennedy’s own assassination, several years after, was chosen as one of the three quotations by him for his memorial in Arlington Cemetery.
01:16:24 –> 01:16:36
So it seems like that speech, but also the use of Aeschylus in that speech, quite quickly became regarded as one of the most defining things he said.
01:16:37 –> 01:16:44
Do you have any more thoughts about why it was chosen for his memorial?
01:16:44 –> 01:16:52
Because those were among the most moving words of his most moving speech, so what more appropriate?
01:16:52 –> 01:16:59
But I can’t prove again what I’m about to say, but I bet if we scoured every grave at Arlington National Cemetery,
01:16:59 –> 01:17:08
the only grave where a Greek philosopher was quoted would be Bobby Kennedy’s grave.
01:17:08 –> 01:17:24
And it’s just the idea that I just love the notion that this guy, in his later years, understood that history mattered, understood that the Greeks mattered,
01:17:24 –> 01:17:34
and understood that he could make a political speech at a moment like that and quote an ancient Greek and not be laughed off the stage.
01:17:34 –> 01:17:42
And it’s just the, this was who Bobby Kennedy was, this was the perfect moment, and this was his having matured to the extent,
01:17:42 –> 01:17:52
and I don’t want to get overly political here, but to the extent that I can’t help but wonder if he had lived,
01:17:52 –> 01:17:55
whether America would be different, not just then, but today.
01:17:55 –> 01:17:58
That’s great. Thank you so much.
01:17:58 –> 01:18:06
You’ve really helped to clarify for me, and I hope also for our listeners, the importance of this speech then and today,
01:18:06 –> 01:18:15
and what we might make of his use of this ancient Greek text so many years later.
01:18:15 –> 01:18:18
Thank you so much for joining us and for speaking to me.
01:18:18 –> 01:18:20
It was fun. Thank you, Naomi.
01:18:21 –> 01:18:32
So there you go. I went into that interview wanting to press Larry on how we might also think of this quote of Aeschylus as inappropriate,
01:18:32 –> 01:18:39
in part because it comes in a trilogy that is not about love at all,
01:18:39 –> 01:18:44
but about imposing order on disorder in a way that quashes the disenfranchised,
01:18:45 –> 01:18:48
in the case of the Oresteia woman.
01:18:48 –> 01:18:54
I was also thinking about Aphrodite’s comments on emotions like anger through the trilogy,
01:18:54 –> 01:18:57
and the degree to which they are contained by the end.
01:18:57 –> 01:19:07
But I see now how, in a way, it didn’t necessarily matter exactly what those lines were about in that moment.
01:19:07 –> 01:19:10
It didn’t really matter what they originally meant.
01:19:10 –> 01:19:17
And this is an important lesson in how meanings change through translation and context and use.
01:19:17 –> 01:19:22
Well, that is all we have time for in this episode.
01:19:22 –> 01:19:26
A long one, but the length suits the material, I guess.
01:19:26 –> 01:19:30
Thank you for joining me on this journey through time,
01:19:30 –> 01:19:34
from Aeschylus’ Oresteia and various ways of understanding it,
01:19:34 –> 01:19:35
especially political ways,
01:19:35 –> 01:19:39
through to Bobby Kennedy’s famous speech.
01:19:39 –> 01:19:43
Please join me for episode three on Prometheus Bound,
01:19:43 –> 01:19:45
from Aeschylus to AI,
01:19:45 –> 01:19:47
with Professor Mark Griffith
01:19:47 –> 01:19:51
and theatre director and innovator, Annie Dorsen.
01:20:09 –> 01:20:13