A Binge For Revenge

    Don’t you just hate family problems and squabbles? They’re no fun and they can come in all different shapes and sizes. The cousins don’t share their games very well. The uncles get into arguments whenever they get together. The brother and sister can’t agree on where to spend the afternoon. The mother greets her husband when he gets back from war and then murders him later in the bath. They’re the worst. In The Oresteia by Aeschylus, one family in particular seems to have a lot of problems, and these problems affect a lot of people since the father happens to be a king. The problems started a long a time ago, but one thing led to another and eventually it culminated into multiple murders. Things might not have gotten so bad if the events had been handled differently, but once the pain had been caused, it grew and spread and eventually incited revenge. This revenge then led to more revenge and started the deadly cycle of “getting even”. Throughout the story, the characters claim that the actions caused by their anger are acts of justice, but if everybody thinks that they are doing what is right, then how can we tell what is truly justice and what is just revenge? There is a fine difference between the two, but it is often hard to determine what that difference is. In this story, the characters seem to have quite a problem confusing justice for revenge and this causes many of their issues.

    The problems have been going on for awhile, but one of the big ones occurs when Agamemnon is going off to war. His fleet is attempting to leave the harbor, but there is a fierce storm with strong winds that is threatening to crash their ships. They are trying to figure out what to do when a prophet named Calchas states that in order to calm the storms, “....Artemis must have blood!” (Ag., 201). Agamemnon sorrowfully volunteers his daughter to be the sacrifice and kills her so that his ships can leave the harbor and go to war. This event is tragic for the whole family, but it affects Clytaemnestra deeply. She is so outraged at her husband for killing their daughter that the anger stews inside her the entire time her husband is at war. She has an affair with Aegisthus (Ag., 1272-1273), and they begin to hatch a plot for Agamemnon’s return. When he returns from the war she greets him warmly and waits for a moment he is vulnerable, then when that moment comes as she is bathing him she stabs him with a sword. As she defends her actions to the chorus, she says, “Here is Agamemnon, my husband made a corpse / by this right hand - a masterpiece of Justice.” (Ag., 1429-1430). In her mind, the murder of her husband was justifiable because she was repaying him for killing their daughter. She states, “... his flocks were rich, teeming in their fleece, / but he sacrificed his own child, our daughter, / the agony I labored into love…” (Ag., 1441-1443). The pain of losing her daughter caused a twisted anger in her that eventually expressed itself in an act of revenge by killing her husband, and the outrage affected her so much that in her mind her husband deserved the death and she was entitled to give it to him.

    This murder was an act of revenge because it came from a well of pain and anger inside Clytaemnestra. It was not an act of justice because Clytaemnestra uses a double-standard when listing the reasons that Agamemnon deserved death. Among the reasons for her anger, she makes this statement:

“Here he lies. / He brutalized me. The darling of all / the golden girls who spread the gates of Troy. / And here his spear-prize … what wonders she beheld! - / the seer of Apollo shared my husband’s bed, / his faithful mate who knelt at the rowing-benches, / worked by every hand. // They have their rewards.”        (Ag., 1465-1472).

She claims that an affair between her husband and Cassandra is one of the reasons for her anger, but she has had an affair going with Aegisthus since Agamemnon went off to war (Ag., 1272-1273). This reasoning portrays a double standard and a double standard can never be classified as justice. A two-sided reasoning like this fits much more easily under the umbrella of revenge, which causes us to be so wrapped up in our own self-pity and victim mentality that we often fail to see that we begin to commit the very wrongs that caused so much pain and indignation when committed against us. Actions that are motivated by anger and hatred will always fall under revenge rather than justice because justice is impartial and the feelings that motivate these actions are not.

    Another problem with revenge is that once it starts, it typically spreads, grows, and spawns retaliation. That is exactly what happens when Clytaemnestra seizes revenge on Agamemnon. Years later after he has grown up as an exile away from home, Agamemnon’s and Clytaemnestra’s son, Orestes, blames his mother for the painful life he has lived so far and hates her for murdering his father (Lib., 253-258). He is not alone in this mentality, many others such as his sister and other household servants share the same feelings of resentment and blame toward his mother. The cycle of revenge has set in and continues with Orestes as he vows to avenge his father when he says, “Dear god, let me now avenge my father’s murder- / fight beside me now with all your might!” (Lib., 21-22). He kills his mother and proclaims, “... I pursued this bloody death with justice, / mother’s death.” (Lib., 980-981). He seeks “justice” for the murder of his father, but is motivated by the pain and anger that his mother has caused him, so therefore his actions can no more be categorized as justice than Clytaemnestra’s. Both of these murders are acts of revenge confused with justice and they both inflicted serious harm on everyone involved. That is one of the destructive properties of revenge, it causes a person to close their ears to the perspectives of others and focus only on their own point of view. Because they only listen to views that agree with their own, they act in damaging ways that inflict harm on everyone involved and this hurt then spreads to others.

    Revenge and justice can often become confused if not handled with care and when they do, it causes problems for everyone. When revenge masks itself as justice, it only ever results in pain. When Clytaemnestra was hurt, revenge took root inside of her and festered. As it grew, it caused her more turmoil and motivated immoral actions such as an affair and a plot against her husband. When the time came that her revenge finally revealed itself fully in murder, it had a ripple effect on everyone around her. This ripple effect caused pain in others that smoldered inside of them, inflicted them with turmoil of their own, and eventually manifested itself in the murder of the person who had previously been the one seeking revenge. This destructive cycle did not benefit anyone, accomplished no good, and instead inflicted a fair amount of harm on everyone involved. These characters, instead of seeking true justice apart from their feelings, allowed their search for justice to become adulterated with their emotions. This event, in turn, did not produce any good or beneficial results, but instead set them all on a binge for revenge.