That whole debacle of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Electra, and Orestes leaves no one looking like the good guy. The moral message of that story is extremely muddled to me.
In the Euripides play, I think the moral message is fairly clear: sacrificing an innocent for the greater good (as Agamemnon wants to do) is a vile, cowardly act, but sacrificing yourself for the greater good (as Iphigenia volunteers in the end) is heroic.
I think this a quite good and maybe nontrivial moral message, but I wouldn’t classify a play written by a professional playwright in the highly civilized Athens as a myth. And I don’t know if we have good records of what the older, folk version of the myth said, and whether it had a positive message.
That’s also the thing, myths like these are often canvases that get riffed on for various purposes. It’s hardly a new thing, their own cultures were doing it already from the get go. “Myths” aren’t singular monolithic things, they’re pieces of culture that can be rearranged in many ways.
But the Oresteia of Aeschylus, as far as I remember, very clearly implies that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were wrong to try to punish Agamemnon. I do not think Aeschylus concedes that Agamemnon did anything wrong.
Euripides was famously more “progressive” than Aeschylus, to the point of getting mocked about it by the more conservative Aristophanes IIRC. Athens had its own politics (lots of it!) and while history may not be an exact circle, sometimes it rhymes pretty hard.
Maybe it’s just like modern soap operas or reality shows, and the point is just schadenfreude. “Man I am sure happy I’m not any one of those horrible people”.
That whole debacle of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Electra, and Orestes leaves no one looking like the good guy. The moral message of that story is extremely muddled to me.
In the Euripides play, I think the moral message is fairly clear: sacrificing an innocent for the greater good (as Agamemnon wants to do) is a vile, cowardly act, but sacrificing yourself for the greater good (as Iphigenia volunteers in the end) is heroic.
I think this a quite good and maybe nontrivial moral message, but I wouldn’t classify a play written by a professional playwright in the highly civilized Athens as a myth. And I don’t know if we have good records of what the older, folk version of the myth said, and whether it had a positive message.
That’s also the thing, myths like these are often canvases that get riffed on for various purposes. It’s hardly a new thing, their own cultures were doing it already from the get go. “Myths” aren’t singular monolithic things, they’re pieces of culture that can be rearranged in many ways.
But the Oresteia of Aeschylus, as far as I remember, very clearly implies that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were wrong to try to punish Agamemnon. I do not think Aeschylus concedes that Agamemnon did anything wrong.
Euripides was famously more “progressive” than Aeschylus, to the point of getting mocked about it by the more conservative Aristophanes IIRC. Athens had its own politics (lots of it!) and while history may not be an exact circle, sometimes it rhymes pretty hard.
Maybe it’s just like modern soap operas or reality shows, and the point is just schadenfreude. “Man I am sure happy I’m not any one of those horrible people”.