Classical Mythology, 7th Edition - obinfonet: dia logou

THE MYCENAEAN SAGA 435
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Herington, C. J. Aeschylus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.
Lloyd-Jones, H. The Justice of Zeus. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Vermeule, Emily. "Baby Aegisthus and the Bronze Age." Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society 38 (1987), pp. 122-152.
NOTES
1. These tales are brilliantly discussed by Walter Burkert, Homo Necans (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1983), pp. 83-109, part of his chapter entitled "Werewolves
around the Tripod Kettle."
2. The Greek phrase is obscure. Cassandra refers to the instrument of the murder, either
a sword or an axe, one or the other of which appears in different poetic accounts
and vase paintings of the murder.
3. The Areopagus was the court at Athens that heard homicide cases; its members were
former archons, that is, state officials. The court had been a center of political controversy
shortly before Aeschylus produced his play.
4. Apollo's argument that the child's begetter is the father not the mother because the
mother is only the nurse of the newly sown seed need not be interpreted as a manifestation
of Greek misogyny, as Mary R. Lefkowitz so clearly perceives in Women in
Greek Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 122-123: "[Apollo]
is acting as an advocate for a person accused of matricide; had Orestes been accused
of killing his father to avenge his mother, Apollo might well have said what Aeschylus
has the Erinyes say about the primacy of maternal blood ties. The role of the female
in conception, of course, was not clearly understood; opinions varied about
whether the female seed present in the menstrual fluid contributed to the appearance
and character of the child. . . . But no Athenian audience would have believed that
Apollo's argument was conclusive. ... In fact, the jury in Aeschylus' drama gives
Apollo and the Erinyes equal votes, and it is only because Athena, who was born
from her father Zeus without a mother, casts her vote for Apollo that Orestes is acquitted."
5. In Euripides' drama Orestes (408), Orestes is condemned at Argos for the murder of
his mother but saves himself by taking Hermione hostage. Apollo orders Orestes to
marry Hermione and foretells his acquittal at Athens. Versions of Orestes' marriage
to Hermione, including Euripides' Andromache (ca. 430), are discussed earlier in this
chapter.
6. For comparative examples, see George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens. 3d ed. (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), p. 449.
7. The child of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus was Erigone, the theme of a lost play by
Sophocles and mentioned by the early cyclic poet Cinaethon.