Mythistorema - Triceratops Home

40 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
hands—that of his father—which is a symbol of the heavy task he has to
carry out to avenge his death: to kill his own mother. Orestes did not
choose his fate, he was born with it. His father was slain when he was
very young; his head "was falling into the dream as I [Orestes) rose
from the dream." Thus, he sees his life as a continuation of that of his
father. He has the hallucinatory impression that the marble head is alive
and his father's lips are trying to speak to him. This whole experience is
psychologically so exhausting that he feels as if his hands holding the
marble head at certain moments are no longer there and at others "come
back to [him),/Maimed. , '
On the other level, which is somewhat more ambiguous, the protagonist
is the contemporary Greek, for whom the marble head represents
tradition, the heritage of a "tremendous past" so overbearing that his
present life—limited, wasted, mediocre—bends under its disproportionate
burden. There is, however, another aspect of this level, more personal,
which makes it also more credible, since without it the preoccupation
with the past would seem a little excessive. This is the modern protagonist's
identification with the Atreus family, the possibility that he too
was implicated in an unspecified act of hubris, as can be seen also
in Seferis' poems "Saturday" and "In the Manner of G.S." In the
former the protagonist sees life as a perpetual reenactment of an ancient
tragedy with the same mechanism of hubris and justice at work, while
in the latter he specifically mentions that he "slept beside them [the
Atreus family)" at Mycenae.' He feels the burden of a hubris which
makes him identify with Orestes. The poet is very ambiguous about it,
but there must have been some traumatic experience in the protagonist's
past, the nature of which remains unclear. This would explain the fact
that the tormenting situation that rends the protagonist is much more than
what would be justified by the burden of a great past.
This idea of tradition, conveyed by the symbol of the heavy stones
and related to an act of hubris (hinted at by the condemnation of the
protagonist), is stated more specifically in the poem "Mycenae":
Needs must he sink who carries the great stones;
These stones I have carried as long as I was able,
These stones I have loved as long as I was able,
These stones my fate.
Wounded by my own soil
Tortured by my own garment
Condemned by my own gods,
These stones.
The predicament of modern Orestes and the act of hubris he has
committed reappear more explicitly in poem "16" of this sequence.
'This line suggests that the protagonist feels as if he shares, in a way, the
hubris and the fate of the Atreus family.