So that
the question was not so intricate in him as in Hamlet, he was not nearly
so conscious. The whole Greek life was based on the idea of the
supremacy of the self, and the self was always male. Orestes was his
father's child, he would be the same whatever mother he had. The mother
was but the vehicle, the soil in which the paternal seed was planted.
When Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, it was as if a common individual
murdered God, to the Greek.
But Agamemnon, King and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible. He
had sacrificed Iphigenia for the sake of glory in war, for the
fulfilment of the superb idea of self, but on the other hand he had made
cruel dissension for the sake of the concubines captured in war. The
paternal flesh was fallible, ungodlike. It lusted after meaner pursuits
than glory, war, and slaying, it was not faithful to the highest idea of
the self. Orestes was driven mad by the furies of his mother, because of
the justice that they represented. Nevertheless he was in the end
exculpated. The third play of the trilogy is almost foolish, with its
prating gods. But it means that, according to the Greek conviction,
Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong.
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