Essay on The Role of the Chorus in Ancient Greek Tragedies

Retribution is a monster of appetite, eternally bloodthirsty and never filled. Rage, resentment and envy does not change the heart of others. A massive success is the best revenge for a woman. It is the only way to get back at someone for a pain they have caused. In Euripides’ Medea and Ovid’s’ Metamorphoses, Medea and Juno exhibit vengeance to defend their dignity.

Justice in the Oresteia Justice is often taken for granted in the world we live in today with a judicial system that gives fair punishment for most crimes. In the Oresteia justice works much differently, where there are no judges or a court system to resolve disputes, instead there is revenge. Revenge is very messy because somebody will and has to get hurt first to desire revenge, and it leads to a cycle that cannot and will not end until everybody is dead. Justice does not and cannot only be revenge because in the end nobody would be left in that system. Aeschylus' Oresteia focuses on revenge as justice, with the old system that no longer works and that someone must fix, and a new system that has

Have you ever acted out in retribution for something done to you? Some examples could be if you punched someone for intentionally kicking you, or if someone deliberately hurt the feelings of someone you love and you retaliated in kind. You probably thought the punishment you received for your actions was too harsh or lenient. Many factors went into the decision of what discipline you received for this act and some were fair while others probably were not. This is true for the actions of many people in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. In each of the three plays, someone is seeking vengeance for a wrong done unto them, someone they know/love, or both. For this paper, I will be focusing on the vengeance enacted by Clytemnestra, Orestes, and the Fates. The vengeance that each person enacted was deemed just or unjust depending on many factors including the people who were doing the judging. Vengeance in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is viewed through the social lens of the society that it was enacted in. This lens is made up of the popular values, beliefs, and social conventions of the period as well as the judge’s personal views and/or experiences. These factors (such as gender and relation to the victim, as well as the presence or absence of transgressions on the characters part) lead to different opinions about the guilt of the accused individual and the individual themselves. The view of vengeance in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is very subjective.

In Aeschylus' trilogy, the Greeks' justice system went through a transformation from old to new ways. In the beginning of the trilogy, the characters settle their matters, both personal and professional, with vengeance. Vengeance is when someone is harmed or killed, and either the victim, or someone close to them takes revenge on the criminal. This matter is proven in the trilogy numerous times.

Greek tragedies Oedipus the King and Euripides’ Bacchae are both timeless stories in Greek literature. The engaging plot of both is what is most rememberable however the significance of the chorus is overlooked. The chorus can be defined simply as a group of dancers and singers that participate in dramas by singing poetically and lyrically in certain pauses of the play. The music, movements and gestures of the chorus symbolically define the mood and the themes of the play as the story line develops. The flow of Oedipus the King and Bacchae are dependent on the chorus, proving their significance.

Another component that changes the view of vengeance is what situation the character is in; meaning how the murderer is related to the victim and the position they are in at the time or before. Clytemnestra is in a situation where her husband kills their daughter and she can either retaliate or live with the fact that Iphigenia is dead. She chooses to kill her husband and she does not have any support other than that of Aegisthus. Orestes is basically forced into killing his mother and Aegisthus by Apollo and people around him like his sister Electra and the Chorus as well as his friend Pylades. In the beginning of Liberation Bearers, Orestes comes back and encounters his sister Electra at their father’s grave. During their reacquaintance, Orestes tells Electra that he has been ordered to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus by Apollo, “…if I failed to kill my father’s killers…….to kill the two of them as they killed him, in the same way. He said that otherwise I’d pay the debt with my own life, and it would be a life of torment that would never end” (Aeschylus, Liberation Bearers lines 307-313). He has this threat hanging over his head and any time he starts to waver, his friend Pylades, his sister, and the chorus encouraged him. “the third and last storm battering their house. In the end, Orestes does in fact come third and as a saviour. Before entering the palace he rehearses the piece of deceit by which he wraps his mother and Aegisthus in their own toils. As he puts it before his sister and the confederate chorus of Trojan captives, he will not give Aegisthus time to ask from where he has come”, this shows that he has a lot of support behind him in this endeavor in addition to the support of Apollo (Clay, 4). After he kills his mother and her lover, he has to wash his hands of the blood and, “to be cured, he must journey to the oracle of Delphi” (Burke, 382). Orestes kills his mother, subsequently he begins to see the furies that are coming after him (Burke, 382).

Unfortunately, the same fate awaits him if he commits matricide, thereby avenging his father. Orestes chooses the latter and is besieged by 'the hounds of mother's hate.' (Lib: 1055-6). Through this sequence of murderous events, Aeschylus demonstrates the complexity and futility of the blood feud as a system of justice. There are no winners, and the cycle of violence does not end. Thus, this cycle of vengeance is not justice.

ultimate act of revenge towards Jason. She is so set on getting back at him that she commits the most heinous of acts. She murders her two children. Jason's acts may have pushed her over the edge of sanity, but one can argue that even an insane person would take their own life over the lives of their own children. This brings the insanity to a whole new level.

“If you want peace, work for justice.” – Pope Paul VI. The Oresteia trilogy, which contains the plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Furies, uses justice as its dominant theme. Aeschylus wrote these plays sometime after the end of the Persian wars, around 449 BC, when the star of Athens was on its superiority. It was the commencement of a new era, marked by the establishment of a new social and political order built on democracy and the rule of law. The rule of law designed the institutionalization of justice. Justice was not a personal responsibility to be handed out according to the rule of family dispute of blood for blood anymore. It was now a state responsibility representing the community as a whole that the law was set down. It was an advancement in the direction of realizing a more peaceful and orderly existence. Though, this institutionalization of justice was also an advancement in the

There are also parts in the play where one may begin to have an understanding of Jason’s motives. In Jason’s first argumentative speech to Medea, he claims that money, possessions and social status is of no importance to him. He declares that his choice to marry the royal Glauce is of good intention, not merely because he is bored with Medea’s bed. Later, when Medea begs Jason to forgive her for her foolishness, he shows kindness and understanding towards her. After all that Medea said about him and his new wife-to-be, Glauce, he states that he is still willing to provide Medea and their sons with anything they may need. Medea pleads for Jason to convince Creon to let their sons stay in Corinth and Jason agrees to try to convince both Creon and Glauce to allow the boys to stay. Jason is still compassionate, showing at least some loyalty to Medea and his family. At the very end of the play, after Medea has killed Glauce, Creon and their two sons, Jason admits that she has ‘destroyed’ him. Jason is completely shattered; everything has been ripped away from him. It’s also unfair when Medea refuses to let Jason bury and mourn the bodies of their sons. Some may feel it is impossible to feel no sympathy for him.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice. Throughout many texts, the notion of justice has been debated on whether it is an act that vindicates those who have been wronged or an excuse to pursue revenge. Through Medea, Medea’s actions have been judged and criticised whether her murders are an act of justice that she deserves or simply the idea of inflicting pain on those she loathes.

Medea was a troubled soul once Jason left her for a younger princess. When the nurse says “Rulers are fierce in their temperament; somehow, they will not be governed;”, it rings very true of Medea (Puchner 531). Someone so accustomed to getting her way will by no means let anyone, including her beloved Jason, treat her with any disrespect. She not only felt dejected by Jason, but she felt she could do nothing to change her circumstance but take out deadly vengeance against those that committed such a hiatus act towards her. With all things considered, Medea felt Jason took everything from her when he left. Jason became her everything. When she

The pursuit of justice is an endeavor that many find to be challenging and a quest itself, as one will come across various trials and complications that may stop them in their pursuit or may mislead them. As humans, we find moral correctness and righteousness a very appealing state to be in, as justice will act as a platform to satisfy the desire for this correctness. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, we meet our miserable anti-hero, Oedipus, in his pursuit for truth and righting the wrong of the plague that is affecting his people of Thebes. As he makes efforts to solve this problem, he comes to find out that he is the source of the issue, thus exposing the tragic flaw of Oedipus and effectively making this play a very effective Greek tragedy. This pursuit of righteousness ends up being the downfall of Oedipus. In Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, Oedipus pursues justice through his realization of his past, his interactions with various characters in the play, and comes to understand more of justice in his situation through his reactions to adversity in this play, in order to portray a questionably successful pursuit of justice.

        However, in addressing the role of the Chorus in this play, I think it is vital that one decides whether the role of the Chorus is and objective role, inserted in to the play by Sophocles and unaffected by the audiences perception, or whether the role is subjective, and the

Conversely, as the play continued and Medea’s hatred began to uprise, the loyalty of the chorus began to shift. When Medea began to express the idea of slaughtering her children the chorus told her to stop. This inhumane act was against the views of their community, hence the chorus was now against Medea. However, as Medea was in the process of killing her children the chorus did not act but rather stood outside yelling for help. Their inactions displays that while the chorus is a part of the play they’re rather not a character, but a device to display the societies and the readers