The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #22 ｜ The Eumenides With Stelios Panagiotou

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Chronicles, where today we're going to be discussing the Eumenides by

00:00:19.400 Aeschylus, not Eeschylus, as I was saying it previously, and joining me for wrapping up

00:00:27.100 this grand trilogy of Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and now the Eumenides, is Brother 0.99

00:00:33.000 Stelios. Thank you, Brother Luca, and thank you, everyone. We're going to have a great discussion

00:00:37.960 today. Thank you for inviting me back. And I will say that this is, hands down, my favorite part of

00:00:44.640 the trilogy. Same. And it's probably my favorite play by Aeschylus. Maybe this and Prometheus Bound.

00:00:50.760 I oscillate between the two of them. But this is really good. This is where we sort of see the

00:00:57.780 climax of the Orestia, because you can say that relative to the Eumenides, the previous two plays

00:01:04.840 aren't that impressive. Yeah, I can certainly understand that. And one of the things that I

00:01:10.320 found was when we were discussing the Libation Bearers, although it is a very good middle, 0.98

00:01:16.180 it's a very good second act, it does retread a lot of the themes and a lot of the moral conflicts

00:01:24.500 that Agamemnon, the first play, was going through. Whereas this one, you see the actual

00:01:29.600 where Aeschylus is driving the entire narrative, the payoff. You're getting all of the payoff

00:01:35.560 as to what it was all for, what all the suffering meant in the end. And what's more as well,

00:01:42.180 it's a fantastic play, because it's finally, in the third act, we bring in some of the actual gods

00:01:48.740 as characters. And, you know, they get speeches, and they get, and, well, they're the most important

00:01:55.940 characters within the entire play. And so it's wonderful to see Athena and Apollo laying down the

00:02:03.840 law. Yeah, in their element. Yeah, absolutely. So it's great fun. Before we start talking about the

00:02:11.940 third play, shall we just begin by talking about recapping what briefly happened in parts one and

00:02:18.200 parts two? Sounds like a great idea. Okay, so in part one, which I'm sure you've watched by now,

00:02:24.560 Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan War, 10 years at war, and is confronted by his wife,

00:02:31.900 Clytemnestra. And she basically, the entire play is just him arriving home, and her murdering him

00:02:40.460 in his own house, in Argos, in his own bath, for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia,

00:02:50.200 for favorable winds to carry his fleet over to Troy, and begin the war.

00:02:56.380 And this was divine command. I think it was Artemis who commanded him to do so. So it isn't just that

00:03:05.480 he woke up one day and said, right, let me slaughter my daughter in order to have favorable winds. He was

00:03:12.840 ordered by the goddess Artemis to do so. And you just don't disobey the gods in the Greek mythology

00:03:22.480 setting. And what's more as well, of course, so our second play, The Libation Bearers, begins exactly

00:03:29.380 with that, the son of Agamemnon, Orestes, returning home after long exile. And he too has been given

00:03:38.060 a command by the gods, because he has been told by the Oracle of Delphi, that, you know, this conduit

00:03:47.380 through which the will of Apollo speaks, that he has to avenge his father, right? And it's very

00:03:54.460 important that that is the phrasing of it. You must avenge your father. It doesn't expressly say,

00:04:00.320 go and kill your mother. But of course, in order to avenge your father, that is implicitly what you

00:04:07.340 have to do. Here is where you see a theme that is really important in philosophy. You have the very

00:04:15.880 general statement or injunction in this case, avenge your father. And you have the application of it

00:04:22.280 because it varies across settings. You could avenge your father by killing a stranger who killed your

00:04:31.580 father, or you could do so in terms of killing your mother like Orestes did. So what is really

00:04:38.320 interesting is to see that we have a sort of massive conflict between the injunction, the moral

00:04:46.700 commandment by the gods to human beings, and its application into the particular concrete

00:04:53.840 circumstances each person finds himself in. And this is what generates one of the main tensions,

00:05:01.780 the moral dilemma of the play. It's just, on the one hand, he has to avenge his father,

00:05:08.320 on the other hand, it's his mother we're talking about. And this is what is the sort of foundation

00:05:15.980 for the massive moral rivalry between two distinct worldviews that Aeschylus is going to talk about

00:05:26.620 throughout the entire play.

00:05:28.380 Right. And even though after the death of Agamemnon and the rise of Caiotin, Nestor, and Egyathus,

00:05:36.300 Argos comes into this kind of arbitrary tyranny, particularly from Egyathus, who is just not a 0.99

00:05:47.600 philosophical man and just believes in raw power and domination, right? There's no actual nurturing

00:05:54.440 kingship within him. He's a man without really any qualities. And even though Argos falls into this

00:06:00.800 tyranny, though it is just and right, of course, that Orestes, as the son of the true king,

00:06:08.160 returns to Argos and reasserts the proper order, the play really drives at the fact that first and

00:06:15.500 foremost, before anything to do with the wider polity of Argos, really, this is a matter of an

00:06:22.640 honor killing, right? It really is just about blood and revenge. And the fact that in this old world,

00:06:30.440 where the old ancient primal laws of the earth govern humanity, justice and revenge are one in the

00:06:40.020 same. And what we see here in this third play is the divergence of those things into something where

00:06:46.840 justice becomes something actually imbued with wisdom as well. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. All right,

00:06:53.660 then. So let's begin talking about the third play. So can you, for someone who is obviously not a

00:07:01.660 native Greek speaker, just perhaps explain what the Eumenides means at the title of the play?

00:07:08.020 Right. So, right. So humanides means essentially good spirits or something of the sort. We are talking

00:07:17.220 about the Furies, who are the spirits of vengeance, who are named at the end of the play, humanides.

00:07:24.940 So what is really interesting here is that we have a sort of trajectory that will take us from

00:07:32.880 viewing the spirits of vengeance to viewing them as good spirits without that meaning that justice at

00:07:44.900 the end is going to be equated with vengeance. So essentially, we are talking about the Furies

00:07:52.880 or the Erineas, as we're called in Greek. Most probably the audience knows them by the name Furies.

00:08:00.500 Right. And they were essentially the spirits of vengeance that were haunting people who committed

00:08:07.820 a particular crime that had to be avenged. Yeah. I believe the term that's often described to them

00:08:17.300 is something along the lines of like Chthonic, right? They're creatures of an underworld. They're from 1.00

00:08:22.980 the darkness. Yes. And Chthonic means spirits of the earth. And when we are talking about

00:08:30.360 spirits of spirits of the earth in this context, we're not necessarily speaking of spirits of Gaia,

00:08:36.680 who is considered to be relatively speaking a good goddess. It's the grandmother of Zeus and the Olympians. 0.60

00:08:43.800 Sure. It's more like spirits that are titanic. So the Furies in Greek mythology were born when

00:08:54.360 Cronos chopped his father's balls off. Uranus. Yes. Sorry. It's funny every time. We all know it.

00:09:09.160 Right. So let me be very, very brief about it. The first order of the gods was governed by

00:09:17.080 by the first deities who were Uranus and Gaia. These were the two supreme deities. There were more,

00:09:30.040 but these were the entities that governed the universe. There were more like, you know,

00:09:36.120 knight, nix, you know, you have all sorts of, I think Oceanus. Right. Pontus. You have all sorts of

00:09:44.840 interesting deities. People who want to find out more about the names, they should read the Hesiod's

00:09:50.120 Theogony, who did try to bring them together somehow and systematize them. Or I think by Apollodorus,

00:09:57.400 the ancient Greek mythology, he was a mythographer. Right. So what happened was that at some point,

00:10:03.400 they gave birth, Uranus and Gaia gave birth to the Hecatonchorus means 100 handed beasts.

00:10:11.480 And they had 50 heads and 100 hands and they were complete chads. And Uranus was a bit emasculated

00:10:20.120 by them and was afraid of them and tried to banish them in earth, within the earth. And Gaia didn't take

00:10:28.840 that well. She thought that Uranus was the first who committed shameful acts and devised a plot with

00:10:38.680 the Titans. And she took an adamant sickle and told the Titans who were their children,

00:10:47.080 you need to avenge your brothers because your father's the first one who committed shameful acts

00:10:53.160 and take this adamant sickle. No one was after the task except for Kronos. So he took it. He did the job.

00:11:00.600 And as he threw the... Yes. The thing. Yes. The testicles. Yes. The testicles at the sea.

00:11:10.840 There were two things that happened. The blood of the testicles gave birth to the Furies.

00:11:16.920 Hmm. It's one of the most outrageous backstories I've ever heard. Yes.

00:11:24.840 Yes. Character origin story. Yes. And then when the other, the other part was,

00:11:31.720 fell down near the island of Kythira and it, uh, the winds and the waves took it to Cyprus.

00:11:38.840 And there was foam close to it, forming around it. And essentially they, it gave birth to the,

00:11:46.840 the goddess of love that was Aphrodite. Right. And, uh, there is also this interplay that

00:11:54.200 love and hatred and revenge are frequently linked together. Right. So then we had

00:12:01.000 Kronos who was just another, uh, tyrannical figure in the gods. He was just representing brute force.

00:12:09.320 He overthrew his father because he could not because he had some actual better order. Yes.

00:12:15.400 To replace his father. Yes. And then he was, uh, you could say tyrannical to his sons, the Olympians

00:12:22.040 and Zeus teamed up with Rhea and Gaia. Uh, and, uh, basically they had the Titanomachy and completely

00:12:33.400 overturned the Titans. They banished Kronos into Tartarus as well as the Titans, I think there. And, um,

00:12:42.440 then Zeus swallowed Metis, who was the goddess of wisdom, was also one of her, one of the, his many

00:12:50.440 wives. And then two things happened. His order then was just because he combined force, supreme force

00:13:02.200 with wisdom. And he gave birth to Athena and Athena is going to talk about it. Yes. Because

00:13:08.120 towards the very end of the humanities. So Athena is essentially one of the, one of the goddesses that

00:13:15.000 oversee that order with Zeus. She's very, she has an easy way to convince him with things. Yes. She's

00:13:23.000 very persuasive. She was very, she can be very persuasive. And, um, when it comes to the Furies,

00:13:28.440 the Furies essentially are spirits of vengeance and they're ectonic in the sense that they are not

00:13:34.120 Olympian. They are representing the old Titanic way. So when they're called chthonic spirits of the

00:13:42.920 earth, it doesn't mean spirits that relate to the grandmother of Zeus. Yes. Who he loved and,

00:13:49.480 and she loved him. We're talking about the Titans. It's the old order that was won by Zeus and the

00:13:57.400 Olympians. But because this is the message of mythology, I think it's cross-cultural when we're

00:14:04.920 talking about mythology, there is such a thing as a just and providential order in the world that can

00:14:11.320 be momentarily disrupted by the forces of chaos that can win the day, but eventually they're going

00:14:17.800 to lose the war. They may lose battle. They may win battles, but essentially the heroes and the gods

00:14:25.320 are going to redress, readdress the imbalance from them. So when we're talking about the spirits of

00:14:32.760 spirits of vengeance, the as chthonic, we're talking about spirits of vengeance that are representing the 0.81

00:14:39.240 old Titanic way. Right. And what's more as well, they have a particular, uh, vendetta against Orestes

00:14:49.320 because he killed his own mother. They represent kind of feminine chaos, right? The chaotic feminine 1.00

00:14:55.880 of, of nature. Yeah. Um, you know, all those things, vengeance, fertility. Um, and what you have is when

00:15:03.480 you, Orestes obviously murders Clytemnestra at the end of the second play, he immediately flees

00:15:10.600 for the sanctuary of, um, um, Delphi and the temple of Apollo. Which is about 200 miles from Argos.

00:15:20.760 Right. Okay. He really ran. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Orestes is going to run a lot in this play.

00:15:27.000 Let's put it that way. Yeah. Um, he puts marathon runners to shame. Uh, and so Orestes is fleeing to

00:15:34.280 the temple of Apollo and the play begins with the priestess basically actually talking exactly about

00:15:41.000 this order, about continuity. First, there's a, there's a prayer for Gaia and then for, uh,

00:15:48.280 is it Thetis? I, I can't remember. Yes. Yeah. Themis. Themis. That was the goddess of justice. Yes.

00:15:54.040 And then to Phoebe and then to Apollo. And so you see this continuity of, uh, the people,

00:16:00.840 the gods who have basically been empowered and had this temple in their trust, uh, down the,

00:16:07.240 down the ages, of course. And then you get this remarkable moment where, because obviously the

00:16:13.080 oracle is there to speak on behalf of Apollo. Um, so it's just getting ready for the daily goings on

00:16:21.000 and then goes immediately inside the temple in that classic ancient Greek, uh, tragedy goes in,

00:16:27.880 i.e. off stage. And then immediately runs out, runs back out onto the stage to tell the audience

00:16:34.680 the horrors that, um, she has seen in there. And I wanted to start with this part because it's our,

00:16:43.080 we get a very, very vivid depiction of the Furies themselves. Also on top of the shrine in the middle

00:16:50.920 is Orestes himself. So the entire scene that this priestess sees is Orestes sat dripping with blood

00:16:58.760 on top of the shrine and asleep at the side of the shrine are the Furies who have been pursuing him

00:17:07.960 ever since he murdered Kyta Nestra. And so our priestess says,

00:17:11.880 But worse, I cannot describe it. Around him, on the stone benches, strange sleeping creatures.

00:17:18.680 I would call them women, but they are not women. Gorgon-faced, yet not Gorgons. Black, 1.00

00:17:24.920 like the rags of soot that hang in the chimney, like bats yet wingless. Each of their faces a mess of

00:17:31.960 weeping ulcers, the eyes, the mouth ulcers. Their bodies exhale a stench like maggoty corpses.

00:17:40.040 Their cloaks are saturated and stained with their own putrescence that oozes from them into the stones.

00:17:47.880 Who are they? What are they? Some other kind. Inhuman. Monsters from a different world. To be cursed

00:17:56.280 by God and men. Apollo is powerful. And this is his temple. All human pollutions await his cleansing

00:18:03.560 touch. Priest, prophet, healer. I leave the stranger to him. And so enter Apollo after that. But so it's a

00:18:12.600 really monstrous depiction of the Furies. They don't seem particularly nice or likable. No.

00:18:17.720 Yeah. No, they are. And what's more as well, the fact that they are already, the fact that Orestes is

00:18:24.840 sat on the shrine and they are just waiting for him to step off of it. Yeah. Right. So they can get

00:18:31.720 him. That's really what's going on here. As long as Orestes stays on this sacred spot that has Apollo's

00:18:39.080 protection, they can't touch him, but he can't stay there forever. Yeah. And so they're just waiting for

00:18:46.600 this moment. One thing I want to say about this for people who are going to read this is that you hear

00:18:52.440 the priestess referring to Apollo as Loxius. And there were many names that were given to the gods

00:18:59.480 that were essentially functioning as epithets, as adjectives. They were trying to refer to the

00:19:07.880 gods in their capacity as something. And they had many capacities. And Loxius essentially refers to the

00:19:15.400 ambiguous nature of Apollo. And what he mentioned here has nothing to do with gender. It means that

00:19:21.800 he frequently communicated his, let's say, the oracles, communicated the commandments of Apollo

00:19:31.800 or the prophecies in highly ambiguous language. You could almost say it was in language where they

00:19:37.720 couldn't be disconfirmed somehow. Yeah. Plausible deniability. Yes, exactly. It's what Apollo has.

00:19:47.720 Yes. Yes. All right. So Apollo comes out with his bow and arrow, doesn't he? Well, he immediately comes in

00:19:56.360 to basically bolster Orestes because Orestes is under his protection. And one thing that I find

00:20:05.480 interesting and the play doesn't really give any dialogue to address this fact. And I understand

00:20:11.800 that Aeschylus is telling his own version of an origin story really for civic law in Athens. However,

00:20:20.840 I do find it interesting that of all of the gods to champion Orestes, it's Apollo that does it,

00:20:28.600 given that Apollo was, of course, on the opposite side to arrest his father, Agamemnon.

00:20:34.840 It's Apollo's redemption.

00:20:36.120 In the Trojan War. And now you see him just going gun for leather to protect his son out of the sense

00:20:44.040 of justice for him. And so, like I said, the play doesn't really address that, though it does later

00:20:49.240 address the fact that Athena fought on the same side as Agamemnon at Troy. So that obviously, I know

00:20:56.760 Athena's obviously your favourite, given that she is the protector of your city still to this day.

00:21:05.240 So you get this moment where Apollo says to Orestes, flee whilst they're still asleep, and basically just

00:21:14.840 run as fast as you can to Athens, to the temple, to the statue of Athena, and pray for her assistance.

00:21:23.000 Yeah. Because the thing is, as well, that whilst he's been in this temple, Apollo has tried to cleanse

00:21:32.360 Orestes of the actual sin itself. He's tried, but it's interesting to note that even he as a god,

00:21:40.120 as an Olympian, cannot entirely cleanse Orestes of what he has done, right? He is still,

00:21:48.680 that the blood works as almost like a homing beacon. Because he has done something. Yes, he has.

00:21:54.920 That is, you know, it's not the easiest thing to explain or to justify. Well, no, absolutely not,

00:22:04.680 of course. No, what he did was a terrible thing. And the point that the Libation Bearers makes 1.00

00:22:11.480 so well, of course, is that Orestes is given an impossible choice. Yeah. Right. He's given an

00:22:17.320 impossible choice where there is no good outcome. Exactly. But he must choose. Exactly. And that is

00:22:22.760 why Apollo tells him, when you go to Athena in Athens, tell her that I made you do it. I told you to do it.

00:22:32.360 Yeah. It's like getting a written note from your doctor to say, no, no, it's fine. I authorize this.

00:22:41.400 Yeah. And so Orestes pelts it as fast as he possibly can. And then we get to my favorite part

00:22:49.960 of the entire play, which is ridiculous, given that it's got gods. But I just love the fact that

00:22:55.320 you get this one brief little cameo in the play from Clytemnestra's ghost. The fact that we're

00:23:03.240 making her, I believe, the only character to be in all three plays of this trilogy.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - November 15, 2025

PREVIEW： Chronicles #22 ｜ The Eumenides With Stelios Panagiotou

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