In the paper I mentioned in my previous post, I talked about the problems of understanding animal minds, and I said that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis offers moments where animal experience is vividly evoked. I said something similar about Venus, the goddess. For example, we hear that ‘a thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways’ (i.e., in her panicky grief, a thousand different passionate emotions carry her in a thousand different directions). Usually that ‘thousand’ would be hyperbolic: intensity is conveyed by an excessive number. However, given that this is the goddess of love, her passion is superhuman, and what would be hyperbolic in a mortal may be literal in an immortal. I think the moment of self-correction this causes in the reader — we think we get it and then we see we probably don’t — is one way literary representations can expose to us, and expose us to, what it is like to be something very different.

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I had divine perspectives in mind when I went to London to see the Oresteia at the Globe. The question of how gods see the world, and how humans see the world, is implicit throughout this trilogy by Aeschylus. Apollo tells Orestes that he must avenge his father — that’s crystal clear to the god. Doing so, which means killing his mother, is monstrous in itself, and it brings potentially horrendous consequences down on Orestes because he offends other laws and other gods. Immortals deal in contradictory absolutes, but it’s the mortal’s problem.
      This all comes together in the third play, the Eumenides, where justice is served. Before the play I thought this would be by far the most challenging part to convey to a modern audience. The first two are revenge tragedies, full of fear and tension, and a long tradition of drama links us to them. The third, on the other hand, is a trial, with added preaching about the democratic institutions of Athenian civilisation.
      I shouldn’t have doubted. The last thing I saw by this director, Adele Thomas, was her Knight of the Burning Pestle at the Globe’s indoor Wanamaker Playhouse. That play also had a reputation for being tricky, but she and her team made it look easy. They did the same with the Eumenides. With, if anything, more preaching, they turned to the audience and told them how the things that hold justice together are necessary, priceless, essential, strange, contradictory, and precarious, and all this means they should be celebrated even more. Or so it seemed to me, anyway. The experience was as dramatic as any action-packed horror.

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The final decision that Orestes should not be punished any more for murdering his mother hinges on a strange moment of divine perspective. The court combines humans and gods. The human vote is tied, six to six, so the goddess delivers the casting vote in favour of Orestes. She tells us why: since she was born from her father’s head (cool story), she sympathises with the father rather than the mother. That’s it. Now, the decision she enables is the human and humane one: poor Orestes is a victim as well as a killer. Is Athena glossing over the necessary compromises of justice with a bit of bluster?
      It’s interesting, maybe, to see this as an encounter with divine perspective, in that it makes little sense to us, but is lucidity itself to Athena. The gods have been brought into the courtroom, they have made their cases, and humans have been allowed to offer an opinion. In the end, though, something apparently capricious makes the crucial difference, but we should probably see that it is only apparently capricious. In Greek Tragedy, immortal authority and immortal ways of seeing the world don’t fall neatly into line according to our categories. They are how they are, just beyond our comprehension.
      At the Globe, the audience didn’t seem to respond to Athena’s justification with much anxiety. The feeling that a celebratory ending was imminent was getting strong. Also, I think that the numerous disparaging and misogynist remarks earlier in the Oresteia had probably made other people immune to it. They weren’t, as I was, giddy with niche-excitement at the arrival of their favourite complicated moment.