Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps
the loss they had suffered.”17 Blood vengeance reestablished the balance lost as a result of the initiating harm; the revenge balanced the natural order and put the world back on the right track: “the balance of restorative transactions … explains [s] the rhythmical exchanges of natural events.”18 This balancing should not be seen as actual, of course; even the life of another, taken in precisely the same way, in no way equals the life of a loved one. Nonetheless, the metaphor of balancing to restore a kind of natural order informs most of the discourse concerning revenge. Many Greek myths and legends express the idea that order rested on vengeance, and the Homeric poems of the heroic age for the most part reveal an undisputed approval of the right to revenge.
In the Odyssey (ca. 700 B.C.), for example, Odysseus’ revenge on the suitors of his wife Penelope, which comprises the last eleven books, possesses no ambivalence. Odysseus does not suffer the tribulations of later revengers: he does not hesitate or fear for his life or his soul. He does not die or go mad or even require any sort of purification. He even seems to have heavenly approval as the goddess Athena serves as his ally while he wreaks his bloody revenge. And after the suitors are killed, Athena steps in to prevent their relatives from continuing the revenge cycle, which would be unending without divine intervention.
The Iliad, as well, is filled with stories of blood-for blood retaliation that are generally dealt with approvingly.19 In some ways, the Iliad is all about revenge in its broad sense, that is, anger and resentment for even minor wrongs, slights, and insults. The great hero Achilles pouts in his tent, refusing to fight, because his slave girl was taken from him. Beyond relating these smaller acts of getting even, the Iliad explicitly celebrates blood revenge; in a gruesome scene, Patroclus makes the Trojans “pay in blood.”20 After Patroclus himself is killed, Achilles, his friend, takes specific payment for the slaying: “When Achilles’ hands were sore from killing, / He culled twelve boys live from the river / To pay for the blood of dead Patroclus.”21 We are meant to recognize Achilles’ great love for Patroclus in his act of revenge for Patroclus’ death; we are also meant to admire Achilles’ virtue in his willingness to so act.
Interwoven with these scenes, however, are intimations of the ultimate incommensurability of great loss and the necessity of accepting less than adequate recompense (because “adequate” is impossible). Ajax, in an attempt to convince Achilles to return to fight the Trojans, portrays a model of human behavior that involves self-restraint and acceptance of loss:
A man accepts compensation
For a murdered brother, a dead son.
The killer goes on living in the same town
After paying blood money, and the bereaved
Restrains his proud spirit and broken heart
Because he has received payment.22
This reference to “blood money,” although arguably atypical for the Achaean society of both Ajax and Achilles,23 foretells the gradual giving way of the custom of blood revenge that prevailed at the time. This very giving way occurs in the character of Achilles, who, initially unmoved by Ajax’s story, apparently learns about restraint and forgiveness when he later bows to Priam’s entreaties to return Hector’s body for burial. Earlier, when Hector has suggested that the winner of their combat shall return the slain to his family, Achilles refuses the bargain, comparing himself to lions and wolves, wild creatures that would not observe such niceties. By the end of the Iliad, we see a slightly more compliant Achilles. When Priam comes as a suppliant to Achilles to get Hector’s body, saying, “I have borne what no man / Who has walked this earth has ever yet borne. / I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son,”24 Achilles surrenders his overwhelming need further to avenge the death of his friend, Patroclus, even upon Hector’s corpse. Instead, he opens himself to share with Priam the human experience of shared grief. In one of the final scenes of the Iliad, archenemies Priam and Achilles weep together, and the warrior Achilles promises Priam a temporary truce to give him time to bury his son properly.25
As the Iliad so movingly depicts in this surprising scene, although revenge was acknowledged as the hero’s right, a true hero recognized limits. The unabashed acceptance of unlimited bloody revenge had dire consequences. Even small disputes could require families and clans to enter into blood feuds that continued indefinitely in a state of vendetta, thereby weakening the clan by the loss of most men of fighting age. Blood revenge was among the most common causes of war among primitive people, with “mutual extinction” a likely outcome.26
The utter destructiveness of unrestrained blood feuding gave rise to certain variations to bring about closure. By the time of the great Attic tragedies in the fourth century B.C., the natural right to revenge was clearly ambiguous27 and the moral status of an act of revenge depended upon the individual context.28 This ambiguity and contextuality become apparent through the contrast between the Odyssey’s version of the story of Orestes, who kills his mother and her lover in revenge for his father’s murder, and the versions presented by Aeschylus and Euripedes some three centuries later. In the Odyssey, Zeus relates the tale of Orestes’ revenge on Aegisthus with approval: Zeus told Aegisthus “not to kill the man [Agamemnon] and not to woo his wife, / Or payment would come through Orestes.”29 Orestes is described as “godly,”30 and his act of revenge is viewed as expected, fully justified, and unambiguous. Orestes’ revenge strictly accords with the operative Achaean system of vendetta: “Blood has been shed; blood is avenged by blood.”31
Euripides, depicting the same story centuries later, makes Orestes an entirely different character—a revenge-seeking thug dispossessed of any nobility, let alone any godliness. In so doing, Euripides transforms vengeance into an evil impulse. What the Odyssey described as Orestes’ duty to take revenge becomes in Euripides’ drama a character flaw, a selfish emotional need. But in order to characterize Orestes’ act of revenge as a failure of character, Euripides must offer an alternative to personal revenge and thereby indulge in an anachronism. He creates in his play a system of state punishment that did not actually exist when Orestes, according to legend, killed his mother. Of course, the system of state judgment and punishment did exist for Euripides’ audience, so they would have fully comprehended the consequences of Orestes’ repudiation of state retribution in favor of taking personal revenge.32 Equally understood would have been Euripides’ argument against Orestes’ act of revenge as he presents it through the judgment passed by Tyndareus, Orestes’ grandfather and Clytemnestra’s father. Tyndareus claims that Orestes acted “stupidly” and outside the boundaries of the law or accepted custom:
What should he have done? When his father died—killed, I admit, by my own daughter’s hand, an atrocious crime which I do not condone and never shall—he should have haled his mother into court, charged her formally with murder, and made her pay the penalty prescribed, expulsion from his house. Legal action not murder. That was the course to take. Under the circumstances, a hard choice, true, but the course of self-control and due respect for law, the better choice of two evils.33
Orestes, in Euripides’ version, has demonstrated a lamentable lack of self-control and respect for law, traits that the audience would quickly condemn. His passion for revenge is given no place; it is unequivocally the foolhardy alternative to a court of law.
Aeschylus’ more nuanced treatment of the Orestes story is situated, on the other hand, between the outright praise from Zeus found in the Odyssey and the condemnation found in Euripides. Aeschylus and Euripides differ critically in the role they accord to vengeance in relation to any system of state punishment. For Aeschylus the desire for revenge is an understandable, although problematic emotion. Instead of condemning it, he creates a complex compromise that includes a system of state punishment within the polis of Athens, but this system incorporates a responsibility to the human desire for revenge.
Aeschylus presents Orestes as trapped between Apollo’s mandate that he avenge his father’s murder and the inevitability that the Furies will relentlessly pursue him if he does kill; Orestes cannot do the right thing. In the second part of Aeschylus’ trilogy, The Libation Bearers,