Missing Iphigenia: misogyny in the tragedies of the Agamemnon-Clytemnestra-Orestes-Electra cycle

[cimorene]

At about age 10 I learned the outline of the story of the series of revenge murders in the family of Agamemnon - a sort of footnote to the story of the Trojan war - from Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which I was a fangirl of for some years.

The series of revenge-murders in the family of Agamemnon¹

1. All the armies of Greece gather to depart for the Trojan war under the command of King Agamemnon of Argos, brother of Menelaus who is the husband of Helen who has run away (or been abducted) to Troy. Artemis won't let them leave (fucks with the wind) in anger at Agamemnon. The seer Calchas reads omens and interprets that Artemis requires the sacrifice of Agamemnon's eldest daughter, Iphigenia. Agamemnon tricks his wife and daughter into coming by claiming he's going to marry her off and has her carried struggling to the altar, where she has to be gagged to prevent her from cursing them. And it works! The winds change.


2. While he is in Troy at war for 10 years, his wife, Clytemnestra, takes his greatest enemy (and first cousin) Aegisthus as a lover, and when Agamemnon comes home from the war, the two of them kill him together.


3. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's youngest son, Orestes, who was sent away from Argos before Agamemnon's return and raised by an ally, comes and kills his mother and Aegisthus in revenge when he reaches adulthood on the direct orders of Apollo (and on pain of death and torture if he didn't do it).


4. The Furies, who prey on people who murder members of their own families (I can find no explanation for why they didn't care about Agamemnon killing Iphigenia...), drive him mad and hound him across Greece until Athena, as the Olympian appellate court, rules in favor of Apollo, absolving Orestes.

It wasn't my favorite; my takeway as a child was just "I hate Agamemnon." But I only started reading some Greek tragedies in the last few months (after Emily Wilson's Iliad and Odyssey). And just like in reading the Iliad and Odyssey, I became fascinated by the cultural perspectives revealed by the characters and about the writers.

In Iphigenia among the Taurians by Euripides (trans. Anne Carson), Iphigenia has been whisked away by Artemis at the moment of death to become her priestess in a remote land. In this rather silly fixit, everybody in Greece thinks she has been sacrificed according to the myth. During the play her brother Orestes is shipwrecked on her island, where the Taurian tribe sacrifice any Greek men who arrive to Artemis (forcing Iphigenia and any Greek women they catch to act as priestesses). She and Orestes escape together, but before that they discuss Agamemnon's murder of Iphigenia and Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon and Orestes' murder of Clytemnestra. And even here in this play about Iphigenia - even Iphigenia herself barely mentions the murder of Iphigenia! Here's all she says:

IPHIGENIA: Is there not some tale of another daughter, sacrificed?

ORESTES: None except she’s dead and looks no more upon the daylight.

IPHIGENIA: Pity that girl, pity the father who slew her.

Now, this absence isn't just remarkable because it's the original cause of these cascading dominoes.

From my cultural perspective, Iphigenia's murder by her father is by far the most heinous crime in this cycle: child murder! Yet this inciting event, part of the canon (Homer) of which the tragedies are derivative works, is nearly invisible in all of the tragedies. Through all three of the tragedians' works, through all seven² of the plays I read and all the long conversations and debates about justice and revenge, Iphigenia and her murder are glaringly absent, even though it's the cause of the whole domino chain!

It's so glaringly absent that it started to remind me of asomatognosia, the neurological condition in which patients are unable to perceive a part of their own body: they may chronically forget it exists, or even obstinately deny that it's theirs in the face of visual proof. The more I read, the more I noticed this glaring absence, and the more I kept reading - I was gripped as if by a thriller, trying to figure out if this was an intentional absence meant to say something, or if it was truly a blind spot so large it encompassed the entire culture, writers and all.

• The next plays I read were Aeschylus's famous Oresteia (trans. Sarah Ruden), a trilogy comprising Agamemnon (Clytemnestra's killing of him) (also trans. Anne Carson³), The Libation Bearers (Orestes' killing of Clytemnestra), and Eumenides (Athena's appeals court considers if Orestes, represented by Apollo, will be tormented by the Furies for all time). I found a few glimmers of acknowledgement in Agamemnon. The Chorus of old men of Argos do view the murder of Iphigenia as shocking and worthy of condemnation:
  
  

  Then he put on the yoke of Necessity.
  His mind veeered toward unholiness, his nerve turned cold.
  It is delusion makes men bold, knocks them sideways, causes grief.
  [...]
  Her prayers and cries of Father! her young life they reckoned at zero, those warloving captains.

  
  
  and it gives Klytaimestra this speech, which is the only time the parallel is pointed out anywhere in the plays I read:
  
  

  Oh now you pull out your code of justice—call me accursed, demand my exile!
  What about them? What about him?
  This man who, without a second thought, as if it were a goat dying, sacrificed his own child, my most beloved, my birthpang, my own — and he had flocks of animals to charm the winds of Thrace!
  Isn’t it this man you should have sent into exile, to pay for that polluted deed?
  Instead you pass judgment on me!

  
  
  (translations from Anne Carson), but I looked in vain for more in the remainder of the trilogy. From most of the dialogue, the next two plays seem to be set in an AU where Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon out of nowhere, or from sexual jealousy. Clytemnestra doesn't bring it up when begging for her life; it doesn't come up at Orestes' trial⁴. Overall Aeschylus seems to give exponentially more weight to the murder of Agamemnon than that of Iphigenia - like his Chorus, who felt the latter was appropriately punished by judgy faces behind his back, not lessening their reverence and respect, but that for the former Clytemnestra is an abomination whom they want to exile.



• Sophokles' Elektra (trans. Anne Carson) is basically a remix of The Libation Bearers, in which Orestes is sent to Argos to kill his mother and meets his sister Elektra, who eggs him on, but with Elektra foregrounded and her rage and resentment (and her suffering, and her enemies' loathesomeness) dialed up to hysterical levels. It does give Klytaimestra a speech:
  
  

  KLYTAIMESTRA: It was Justice who took him, not I alone.
  And you should have helped if you had any conscience.
  For this father of yours, this one you bewail, this unique Greek, had the heart to sacrifice your own sister
  to the gods.
  And how was that? Did he have some share in the pain of her birth? No - I did it myself!
  Tell me:
  Why did he cut her throat? What was the reason?
  You say for the Argives?
  But they had no business to kill what was mine.
  [...]
  
  ELEKTRA: Let's talk facts: there was only one reason you killed him.
  You were seduced by that creature you live with.
  [...]
  Open your eyes: the claim is a fake!
  Tell me:
  Why do you live this way? Your life is filth.
  You share your bed with a bloodstained man:
  once he obliged you by killing my father, now you put him to use making children.
  Once you had decent children from a decent father, now you've thrown them out.
  Am I supposed to praise that? Or will you say you do all this to avenge your child?
  The thought is obscene - to bed your enemies and use a daughter as an alibi!
  

  
  
  , but Elektra maintains her father's innocence and the monstrosity of Klytaimestra's actions, a view endorsed by the Chorus. The best reading is that Klytaimestra misguidedly sought revenge for the murder of her daughter (which she had no right to demand) in defiance of gods and society, sacrificing all other morality, and over time became twisted by her evil actions into a monstrously unmotherly tormentor to the daughter whose life she has unjustly ruined. To Elektra her dead father symbolizes the glorious life she would have led as daughter of the most respected King in Greece; and by associating his death with the loss of this life she mourns, she has made her mother into the murderer also of the glorious future she believes she was owed. Whether Klytaimestra's motive was vengeance, as she contends, or lust, as Elektra implies, is open to interpretation; but her behavior towards Elektra can't be read as anything but abusive. She treats her daughter as a servant in her own household, berating and mocking her, and denying her the brilliant marriage expected for a princess, while her children by Aegisthus are honored. Neither Elektra nor the Chorus concede even the possiblity of Klytaimestra's right to vengeance for her daughter, though most of the play is dedicated to endorsing the glorious holiness of vengeance for Agamemnon; but at least the question is discussed. And in spite of Elektra's defense of her child-murdering father and misogynist villification of her mother, her defiance and refusal to submit to power are themselves transgressive.



• Euripides' Electra (trans. Emily Wilson) is a dark, erratic, gruesome play, that seems like nothing so much as a biting parody of Sophocles' Electra (although they might just both be riffing on Aeschylus; dating is uncertain): here Orestes and Electra are more concerned about their loss of wealth and status than about piety and honor. Clytemnestra gives what amounts to a villian monologue, recounting the murder of Iphigenia and saying she could have tolerated it but decided to kill Agamemnon in jealousy because he brought home a sex slave. Implications in Aeschylus and Sophocles are magnified: Orestes and Electra's bloodthirstiness, the nonsensical interventions of the gods. Electra insists lust for Aegisthus was her mother's real motive and that if she had wanted revenge she wouldn't have remarried - which itself, in the eyes of Electra and Orestes, constitutes "stealing" and "selling" their inheritance. (However, it's highly unlikely that Clytemnestra could have gotten away with the murder of her husband, preventing the citizens from exiling or killing her, without Aegisthus's help. She would not have been allowed to rule as regent for her baby son; Aegisthus would have been the next in line after Menelaus - then missing - in any case. Thus their marriage isn't proof of motive so much as a necessary consequence of a society where women are chattel. If she sacrificed her children's wealth/honor/status by remarrying because this was the only way to achieve Agamemnon's death without risking her life, her choices are coherent and comprehensible, though hardly excusable, in Classical and Ancient Greece.) This play is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of Clytemnestra of all of them, yet she seems to think the problem with Agamemnon kidnapping and making a sex slave out of a virgin priestess of Apollo is that he was cheating on his wife, and that this sexual infidelity is comparable to murdering his daughter. (Ancient and Classical Greece did not consider the enslavement and abuse of women captured in war to be abuse, but Euripides' body of work makes clear that he did - his Hekabe contains a gruesome scene of Cassandra hysterically 'celebrating' her impending 'marriage' to Agamemnon while her mother points out this is defilement of a virgin priestess). Towards the end, Orestes and Electra, after incongruously gleeful speeches and a graphically grisly murder scene, both experience sudden regret as if a madness has lifted. The cherry on top is the appearance of the deus ex machinas - their mother's twin brothers, the gods Castor and Pollux - to pronounce that "her death was right, but you were wrong to do it. Apollo [...] gave you bad advice" and explain that Orestes will be tortured with madness by the Furies before being saved and Electra will be married to Orestes' foster brother Pylades; they will never see each other or Argos again.



• Euripides' Orestes (trans. Anne Carson) is even darker - it seems absurdist, a play about the meaninglessness of everything. Orestes and Elektra are pawns of the gods, but they're not noble, pure, or heroic; this is a play about foolish, bloodthirsty, irrational people in a violent, inconsistent, unjust society ruled by chance and fate and unsympathetic, petty, sadistic gods. It begins after the murder of Klytaimestra, when Orestes is sick due to the persecutions of the Furies, and the elders of Argos are getting ready to vote whether to stone him and Elektra to death. Menelaos arrives just in time to intervene, but is too cowardly and self-serving to do anything; Klytaimestra's father, Tyndareus, arrives from Sparta only to campaign for their execution, even though he also condemns his daughter for disobedience to her husband. Orestes and Elektra discuss killing themselves before they can be executed; then Orestes plans to murder Helen in revenge for the Greek soldiers who died in the Trojan war; and he's about to kill Helen's daughter Hermione, still a child, when Apollo appears at the end, but cheerfully agrees to marry her instead. Anne Carson says in her introduction, "Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic. Saw the gods as ironic. Saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. A frightening idea. But at least it entails the assumption that Euripides himself was not playing. That he was a serious playwright who knew his target and took aim." In stark contrast to the triumphant victory of Olympian justice and trial by jury over the old gods and blood feuds in Aeschylus's Eumenides, Euripides has Orestes pleading for his life from another assembly of citizens - also gathered on a hill in mockery of the jury in Eumenides - on the grounds that "If murder of husbands is granted to women who'll escape death? Should we be their slaves? It's all upside down!" The hero's argument isn't justice or the commands of the gods, but misogyny; and the assembly vote to kill him and his sister anyway. Iphigenia is never mentioned or implied in the whole play, but their grandfather, Tyndareus, invokes the argument that revenge-killing can't go on forever or else where will it end - the very argument for Olympian justice and trial in Eumenides - as a justification for executing Orestes. He answers Orestes' defense that "the orders [he] followed were Apollo's", in his very next speech, with "[Orestes] is an enemy of the gods, let him be stoned." Trial by jury is no shield in this play. The gods are no shield. Olympian justice is a joke.

And given that Euripides saw all of that, it seems that he must have seen Iphigenia. Isn't it significant that in Iphigenia among the Taurians she, the missing human sacrifice at the bottom of the entire cycle, is extracted by the hand of god[dess], transposed to an isolated location away from Greek society and morality and families, into an isolation almost like a laboratory experiment, where every other factor is controlled for and her entire purgatorial existence has become a philosophical exercise about human sacrifice? It's difficult to imagine that the play's thoughts on sacrifice, murder, and revenge are insignificant.

When Iphigenia hears that her mother killed her father, she responds with tears for both, without asking (or ever learning) that her murder was the reason (when she asks later, Orestes refuses to tell her). But even though she is apparently absent even from her own internal explanation of events, she isn't without anger for her fate. Early in the play she opines that unjust and murderous commands don't really come from the gods: "The people here are murderous themselves, this is my opinion, so they ascribe base behavior to their deity. No god is evil, I do not believe it." However, she doesn't ascribe her father's murder of her to his murderousness, but to others'. In fact, Iphigenia's attitude is one of empathy and pity for all the members of her immediate family, murdered and murdering; she probably has to redirect this anger to maintain that. Blame is displaced onto Helen, who never asked to be pursued by a Greek army; Menelaus, who asked Agamemnon to go to war to steal back his wife; and Calchas, who told her father the only way to appease the goddess was to kill her. She celebrates Calchas's death and mourns that "no ship [has] brought Helen [...] with her Menelaus to pay back what they did to me - they murdered me! - to make an Aulis here for that Aulis there where Danaans laid their hands on me as if I were a sacrificial calf and my own father was the sacrificing priest!" Interesting construction, given that she is acting as an unwilling sacrificing priestess.

With Iphigenia's interpretation, then, what we have in this play is a bloodthirsty society who cloak their butchery in piousness by dedicating the human sacrifice of an entire race - really just a long series of murders - to Artemis, with the aid of a coterie of abducted and enslaved women who are forced to perform the sanctifying of the mass murder of their innocent countrymen. Iphigenia, as head priestess, is the instrument of this river of blood, to her sorrow. These sacrifices mirror the deaths of her family which followed her death; they also mirror the fate of Troy; even, perhaps, all the human sacrifices and all the murders committed under the guise of commands from the gods. And on the explicit textual level, the play has Apollo sending Orestes to rescue [the holy statue of] Artemis from being misused [in association with Iphigenia] for human sacrifice, founding a new cult temple where they will hold a blade against young men's necks and then not sacrifice them. When she appears at the end of the play, Athena commands the Taurians to stop doing human sacrifice and their chief agrees. This is perhaps as close as Euripides could get to saying "Artemis did not stop the ships and did not want Iphigenia sacrificed. If men sacrificed a young girl, it was an expression of their own evil, and sacrificing her to a god was an insult to that god."

I still don't know for sure if Aeschylus and Sophocles were aware that Iphigenia was missing. On the whole, I think probably it's a blindspot the poets share. I see a few inklings that they might have an occasional glimmer of a clue, however, if only a repressed one. For one, there's the compulsion to give Clytemnestra other motives. Perhaps the motive of revenge for the murder of your child was too relatable: after all, revenge killings are endorsed by the gods throughout the cycle. To be the villain, Clytemnestra had to be violating gender norms (disobeying her husband and ruling Argos) and a bad mother who hates her surviving children. And motivated by sex. (In Euripides' Electra, the Chorus tells us that Clytemnestra has vetoed killing Electra because "killing children might, she feared, look bad". Given that it's Euripides, the irony is probably deliberate.)

; for another, Sophocles' Electra is a mirror of Clytemnestra, and one who is for the most part portrayed as heroic and sympathetic. Sophocles' Electra is a woman worn down by despair, hate, and abuse, who can't stop grieving her losses - not just the loss of a family member but the loss of their future; who unceasingly argues, laments, and harangues; who is willing to sacrifice her own life in an attempted revenge she expects will be futile when she thinks that Orestes is dead; who is unmoved by opposition, disdain, and dismissal from everyone around her; who, because she is a woman, is manipulated and ignored by those with power over her; whose character has been deformed by oppression, hate, grief, obsession, and her suffocating circumstances, the victim of an injustice ignored; who is even explicitly positioned as a mother to Orestes by Sophocles, who introduced the idea that it was she who cared for and raised him as an infant, not their mother. In all of these she echoes Clytemnestra. Their determination, their refusal to abandon their own moral judgement and their own justice even if they stand alone, are also alike. Electra and Clytemnestra don't doubt their own righteousness; they refuse to bow to male judgement, to powerful judgement, to what they are told is the gods' judgement. I don't think this mirroring is intended as a subtle vindication of Clytemnestra, although it can be read that way; more likely it is constructing the virtuous anti-Clytemnestra: unlike Electra, Clytemnestra dares to seize worldly power, even to commit adultery - deeply "unfeminine" actions.

And at the end of all this, I sat back and asked myself what the answer was. What is the blind spot composed of? First, child murder isn't a uniquely horrible crime in the world of these plays; children are not conceived as sacred, innocent, or especially worthy of protection, but instead as extensions or property of their parents. Even Clytemnestra in Sophocles speaks of Iphigenia's murder in terms of ownership: Agamemnon took what was hers. The Chorus in Aeschylus's Agamemnon condemn the murder of Iphigenia, but seem to regard it not as a monstrous crime, but as a lamentable lapse in judgement. Modern popular opinion might assign this level of severity to, for example, an actor signing the Roman Polanski letter (only in progressive spaces); or, in less enlightened circles, a guy who is "great" but unfortunately verbally abuses his wife, or unfortunately is a negligent dog owner. In Euripides' Hekabe, Agamemnon decrees that it's just for Hekabe to punish a man who murdered her son by murdering his sons in front of him. But what's going on after that? I think that it's this, from Euripides' Electra:

CLYTEMNESTRA: How was your father's death not just and fair?

CHORUS: You’ve spoken fairly, with an ugly fairness. Wives should obey their husbands all the time, if they are sensible. Or if a woman thinks differently, I put her out of mind.

It is obviously Clytemnestra's crime, not Agamemnon's, that is qualitatively different from the others for the world of the tragedians. That's not because revenge killing is bad or because Iphigenia's murder wasn't wrong. No, it's because of two things: (1) Kings are worth more than other people and (2) Wives are not permitted to disagree with their husbands. This murder is different: it's the killing by a woman of "a nobleman, who's honored with the scepter Zeus bestows" (Aeschylus, Eumenides), not in combat but in his bath, wrapped in a cloak so he couldn't escape. It's not just that he was killed by a woman (an embarrassing fate only okay for commoners) using trickery (also only okay for commoners): it's that he was killed by his wife. Being chattel, women don't have the right to decide that their husbands deserve death; their judgment, like their persons and their property, is subordinate. A wife killing her husband is the ultimate transgression of this holy law attributed to Zeus: by placing her judgment above his, she illicitly assumes an aspect of masculinity.

Clytemnestra's monstrosity lies in daring to value her daughter's life equally with the life of a King, in daring to value her own moral judgment over that of her husband.



1. The tragedies in this cycle actually are rife with references to the earlier unclean and unholy blood crimes of this family, riffing on the completely legitimate concept of inherited guilt (by which Aegisthus has every right to kill his cousin because his cousin's father murdered his brothers).

1. Agamemnon's great-grandfather was Tantalus, who killed his own son Pelops and served him to the Olympian gods at a feast to test their omniscience, a crime for which he is tormented for eternity.


2. Pelops was restored to life and won the hand of his wife, the princess Hippodamia, by bribing her father's charioteer to sabotage his chariot in a chariot race and then reneging on his bargain and murdering him.


3. His sons Atreus and Thyestes were exiled by Pelops for murdering their half-brother Chrysippus in pursuit of the throne of Olympia.


4. Atreus gained the throne of Mycenae on the death of its king. Thyestes had an affair with Atreus's wife and tried to trick him out of the throne, and Atreus retaliated by killing Thyestes' sons and serving them to him.


5. Thyestes, on the advice of an oracle, raped his daughter in order to father Aegisthus on her specifically so that he would grow up and kill Atreus.


6. He did, and Thyestes assumed the throne of Mycenae, driving out Atreus's sons Agamemnon and Menelaus. They married the daughters of King Tyndareus of Sparta (Clytemnestra and Helen, who were either 'actually' daughters of Zeus or half and half or else fraternal twins with multiple fathers). Menelaus inherited the Spartan throne and used the army of Sparta to reconquer Mycenae, drive out Thyestes and Aegisthus, and place Agamemnon on the throne.

2. There is one extant play associated with this cycle that I have yet to read, Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis. This one is entirely dedicated to Iphigenia's murder, so it's probably safe to exempt it from this list of suspicious absences. And yet, the void in Iphigenia's viewpoint in Iphigenia among the Taurians was still telling! So I am interested to see what happens. I haven't read it yet because it hasn't been translated by Anne Carson or Emily Wilson, so I anticipate enjoying it less.

3. Carson's An Oresteia comprises Aeskhylos's Agamemnon, Sophokles' Elektra, and Euripides' Orestes.

4. Even though it disproves the Furies' claim that they never make exceptions in haunting people who kill blood relatives: they didn't haunt Agamemnon, and they clearly confirm at the trial that their definition of "blood relative" definitely means parents and children. ETA: However, it's possible they just didn't get around to it yet, as conuly pointed out in a comment; it took them like twenty years to get around to coming after Oedipus for killing his father.

Comments

[msilverstar]

Your post is really interesting. I'm still getting my head around Ancient Greek stories where characters have no good choices, but somehow bear responsibility. Your analysis helps.

[conuly]

I can find no explanation for why they didn't care about Agamemnon killing Iphigenia

They may have just not gotten around to it yet. I mean, look at Oedipus - by the time the gods bother to punish him for killing his father and marrying his mother, he already has grown children!

[stranger]

Guessing and speculating about Ancient Greece vs. Classical Greece:

In the Trojan-War era stories, the Olympian gods were overall the main players, using humans for their amusement or score-settling. By the Classic era, humans in these plays have their own motives, some very complex but not related to what the gods might want, even when the gods could come around afterward and punish them. The Oresteia is crossing a cultural divide between gods as puppetmasters and gods as after-the-fact judges. This could be why the sense of parody and irony shows up, in expressing human emotions for human reasons, without quite erasing the tradition of divine interventions.

Not that I disagree with misogyny as the basis for showing Clytemnestra as a villain and Agamemnon less of one. Both eras apparently regarded women as chattel. Augh.

[cimorene]

Well, I do think the irony is unique to Euripides and a feature of his viewpoint. I've read in a whole sheaf of introductions and afternotes about him that historians tend to view his pessimism as linked to his time of life, when Athens was mired in a forever war with Sparta that they were on the verge of losing, while the other tragedians wrote in periods of territorial expansion and patriotism. Though it is expressed partly in mundane and practical motives in contrast to the deliberately unrealistic high-minded piety in Aeschylus, I believe. Several of the essays talk about this issue, which Aristophanes mocks him for, I think. I have a memory that Sophocles was supposed to have said something like, "I write about people as they should be and Euripides writes about them as they are."

The sense of parody, on the other hand, arises from a plethora of noticeable borrowings from Aeschylus's innovations, exaggerated or undermined. He might have been the only tragedian with extant examples of this (I haven't read all the rest of the tragedies though), but given the overlap and how many plays are lost, it's possible the others might have done it at some point, even if they would have approached it with less pessimism...

[cimorene]

Oh, that's true. I was going to say they showed up almost right away for Orestes, but Clytemnestra's ghost is shown herding them like a sheepdog. Maybe their action is mostly dependent on the victim registering a complaint, so his escape could be due to Iphigenia's failure to do so.

[cimorene]

There's a good analysis of this in the General Introduction to the book I bought to get Emily Wilson's translations of Euripides, The Greek Plays ed. Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm (it also includes Aeschylus' Oresteia and a translation of Sophocles' Electra that I didn't like as much as Carson's, but it was useful to read more traditional translations of the plays Carson translates because the other translators are always more literal).

Most dramas involve a reversal of expectations and of fortune, a shift either from prosperity to disaster or from misery to happiness, as Aristotle saw (see appendix D). More often than not, good fortune is the result of divine rather than human action. But humans bear some measure of responsibility in the case of changes for the worse, usually because of a misjudgment on the part of some individual. Aristotle called such errors in judgment hamartia. That word is often mistranslated as “tragic flaw,” which suggests that the mistake arises from a character fault on the part of the hero of the tragedy. A person with a calm temperament might not have struck the old man who roughly pushed him off the road, but Oedipus’ quick temper led him to strike back and kill the old man who (unknown to him) was his own father. Oedipus’ hamartia, however, was not his violent response, but his assumption that he could avoid the prophecy that he had just heard at Delphi, that he would kill his father and marry his mother. In the process of evasion, he made the prophecy come true by taking the road to Thebes, encountering the old man who was his father, and marrying the old man’s widow after he arrived in Thebes. Greek tragedy teaches that human error is inevitable, and even though a person’s character can make him or her more likely to err in judgment, the gods either ensure that mortals will make mistakes or fail to prevent them from doing so.

[cimorene]

Although it's also apparent as you read more Euripides, especially his later plays, that he does appear to view the whole thing as unfair. The gods are capricious and unjust. Human society's justice is unreliable, inconsistent, biased, bigoted, and often grossly cruel. Individual humans are never pure - even when their actions are 100% good, like Iphigenia's, we see their biased and bigoted judgement. I think his perspective is realist, but it verges on nihilist or absurdist at times. And I think his writing illuminates a thesis about this very issue that mostly amounts to everything is actually unfair and there's nothing you can do about it. The responsibility you allude to - or hamartia - can be neutral or even righteous, as long as the victim falls afoul of Fate. The gods are real and their judgement is inescapable in his plays, but it isn't glorious or worthy of celebration.

[msilverstar]

So depressing though. At least the existentialists say that living authentically and well is worth doing for its ownself.

[cimorene]

I think some of them do but not all of them? I mean nihilism is an offshoot of existentialism that contends nothing is worth anything, and absurdism is an offshoot that contends there's no point but you might as well have fun. Or rather, that's the way I remember them. I think it's quite popular now to deal with existentialism and then decide it's worth living authentically for its own sake anyway.