Abstract
Jeffrey C. Alexander's (2026) recent contribution to the comprehension of how warfare relates to what he conceptualises as ‘civil spheres’ rather strikingly and unexpectedly puts centre-stage The Eumenides, the final play of ancient Athenian tragedian Aeschylus’ Oristeia trilogy. What Alexander might construe as the Athenian civil sphere was at its symbolic foundation made dramatically and rhetorically compatible by Aeschylus with potentially vicious and violent relations with other polities. The problem here may go beyond the making compatible of apparent incompatibles: civility as it occurs within the polity and possibly radical incivility between polities. It may also be that the former is dependent upon the latter as a condition of its possibility. If there is a dark side to modernity, there is also a dark side to Greek antiquity's possible imaginings of what civility is, even in what we might take as its most apparently democratic dimensions. This paper situates Alexander's treatment of Aeschylus within the history of interpretations of the Oristeia, to encourage the author and others to take analysis of Aeschylean themes further for Civil Sphere and other kinds of social theory. The contingent rather than necessary dependence of civil spheres on warfare is emphasised.
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
…
Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh, might it die or rest at last!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hellas (1821)
Introduction
Shelley's poetic drama Hellas was partly written as a way of drumming up support, moral and financial, for the cause of Greek independence from the domination of the Ottoman empire. The passage above expresses an age-old hope: for cultural and spiritual civic rebirth coming after times of oppression. It is a theme that can be found in Greece, ancient and more modern, as well as in present-day Ukraine and other locations where people suffer from the depredations of external enemies or internal oppressors. Jeffrey C. Alexander's (2006) research programme on Civil Sphere Theory has given the world an innovative take on those and many other related matters.
Alexander's (2026) recent contribution to the comprehension of how warfare relates to what he conceptualises as ‘civil spheres’ rather strikingly and unexpectedly puts centre-stage The Eumenides, the final play of ancient Athenian tragedian Aeschylus’ Oristeia trilogy. Alexander is not alone in wanting to return with some urgency today to these ancient texts. As Harvey (2020: 18) has noted, it ‘is surely no coincidence that there has been renewed interest in the work [of Aeschylus] at a time when political and legal institutions, and indeed the very principle of representative democracy, are coming under challenge’ from various quarters.
The culminating play has been described as containing ‘the first courtroom drama in Western literature’ (Harvey, 2020: 2). The three plays, which also include Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers, together concern politics in general (MacLeod, 1982) and many more specific interpenetrating matters: intergenerational conflict, violence, murder and revenge (Menke, 2010), internecine warfare, the dead weight of history on the present, transcendence and conflict resolution (Hall, 2015), suffering, gods and humans, sexual and gender politics, social class and class conflict, law, punishment, restitution, warfare, political organisation, political partisanship and mediation (Njoya, 2019), and perhaps above all, justice (Euben, 1982). Sex, gender and politics radically mix here: possibly the ‘unique distinction of Aeschylus … is that the dialectic of political change is inextricably meshed with the dialectic of sexual conflict’ (Rose, 2019: 246).
Alexander notes a great paradox within Aeschylus’ dramatic treatment of the foundation of the rule of law, and thus also of democracy, at Athens. 1 The patron goddess of the city, Athena, talks the various hitherto warring parties into accepting murder trials by jury (in the court called the Areopagus), 2 conflict resolution, and a broader mode of democratic governance. But simultaneously she also recognises the inevitability, as well as morally licencing, future warfare between the now-civil world of the Athenian polis and all the potentially hostile political entities which exist in the environment of its foreign relations.
What Alexander might construe as the Athenian civil sphere was, at the very moment of its symbolic foundation, thus made dramatically and rhetorically compatible with potentially vicious and violent relations with other polities, including possibly other ‘civil’ ones (if such existed). Indeed, the problem here may go beyond merely the making compatible of apparent incompatibles, i.e., civility as it occurs within the polity and possibly radical incivility between polities. More troublingly, it may also be the case that the former is dependent upon the latter as a condition of its possibility. If there is a dark side to modernity (Alexander, 2013), this suggests also a very dark side to Greek antiquity's possible imaginings of what civility is, even in what we might take as its most apparently democratic and optimistic dimensions.
In this paper, I want to situate Alexander's treatment of Aeschylus within both the longer-term and the more recent history of interpretations of The Eumenides and the Oristeia as a whole. I draw upon, and on occasion take issue with, contemporary scholarship concerning Aeschylus, coming variously from classical studies, literary studies, legal theory, and political theory. (Tellingly, social theorists today seem to leave Aeschylus and wider Athenian tragedy well alone. Maybe these seem too ‘Western’, too patriarchal, and just too old-fashioned to be taken seriously as resources for theorising.) This is done with a view to encouraging the author to take his analysis of Aeschylean themes further in productive directions for Civil Sphere Theory. I will pose various pertinent questions to Alexander, and possibly other Civil Sphere theorists, that come out of various issues I touch upon.
Situating Aeschylus
Rather like Hamlet, to which it bears some distant family resemblances, the Oristeia trilogy of Aeschylus occupies an important place within wider Western mythology (Barthes, 1972). The play series seems today ‘at once historical and timeless’ (Sidiropoulou, 2018: 177). As representations of time and space, the plays have been hugely influential in later Western drama (Seaford, 2012). As apparently all-purpose allegories (Foley, 2005), concerning the nature of power (Griffith, 1995), they have possessed the capacity over the centuries to attract a great deal of interpreters, and to have hermeneutic depths able to take on all comers, furnishing them both with novel ideas and with what they had already wanted to find (Griffith, 2023).
Tragedy can be one of the most explicitly ‘political’ forms of theatre, in the modern world as much as in the ancient (Monoson, 2000). In 5th century BCE Athens, the presentation of tragedies at one of the most important annual city festivals, the Great Dionysia 1987, meant that they were viewed by a significant proportion of the citizenry, forming part of their civic education. 3 The characters were drawn from the myths of aristocratic protagonists, such as propounded by Homer. 4 But the stories were repurposed as socio-political dramas aimed at present-day audiences, gathered together in a theatre within a city-state that, at least in some ways and at some times, imagined itself to be a democracy (Hall, 1997: 102, Adams, 2018: 408). 5
Of all the tragedies performed, Aeschylus’ works perhaps especially encouraged citizen audiences to reflect upon the nature and desirability of critical judgement and considered deliberation (Markovits, 2009). They were given the chance to ‘explore without preconditions, without mental reservations, without foregone conclusions, the costs and benefits of each venture, both to themselves and to others’ (Bakewell, 2011: 43).
The ordinary citizens could perhaps recognise in the voices of Aeschylus’ choruses (Foley, 2003) their own hopes and fears (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990: 33–34). Performances of Aeschylus’ texts seem to have particularly encouraged active participation, self-government, mass meetings, equality before the law, and open debate – or at least present-day scholars like to think that they did (Cartledge, 1997). A general scholarly consensus today on these matters is voiced by Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1988: 33, cited at Rose, 2019: 226). Tragedy did not reflect social and political reality but rather called it into question, for by ‘depicting it rent and divided against itself, it turns it into a problem’, one to be considered by the audience in ways shaped by the playwright.
Performances of the Oresteia plays throughout the 20th century either presented them as pageants celebrating the social status quo – as in the infamous Nazi presentation of the trilogy at the 1936 Olympiad (Fischer-Lichte, 2017), or in the former East Germany (Segal, 1992) – or alternatively as biting critiques of past and present tyrannies, as leftist actors strove to do during the Colonels’ regime in Greece in the late 1960s (Sidiropoulou, 2018). Performances in the 21st century read the plays either as exercises in pathological individual psychology or as diagnoses of recurring problems of political organisation (Castellucci, 1997, Foley et al., 2005).
One can see why Jeffrey Alexander would in various ways find the Oristeia in general, and The Eumenides in particular, as highly suggestive and good to think with, even after the passage of 2500 years (or perhaps precisely because of it). The dramas raise many issues connected to civil sphere-related questions: ‘What is Justice? Is it the rule of the vendetta? Is it the law of blood for blood? Does it permit of absolution?’ (Thomson, 1968: 270). The trilogy is about ‘the emergence of justice as a distinctive attribute of political life and drama's role in sustaining both’ (Euben, 1982: 24), themes very important in Alexander's work for many years. As a cultural sociologist who takes cultural forms, and civil spheres, to be fundamentally shaped by dyadically opposed terms, the Oristeia offers up to Alexander's possible analysis many binary oppositions: human/divine, nature/culture, human/animal, male/female, young/old, rational/irrational, free-born/slave, citizen/non-citizen, Athenian Greek/non-Athenian Greek, and Greek/barbarian, and above all, just/unjust (Segal, 1981, Hall, 1997: 96, Trousdell, 2008: 9).
There is indeed a striking parallel between this 21st century sociological thinker and the 5th century BCE dramatist. Both in their own ways reach back into the past – into the distant heroic age of Homer and Hesiod, as in the case of Aeschylus, and back to Aeschylus's Athens, in the case of Alexander. Each does this to conceptualise present-day phenomena, and to look forward with an eye to looking for more civil or more uncivil futures (points explicitly raised with regards to Aeschylus by Stoessl (1952: 139)). Indeed, some have argued that Aeschylus is a kind of sociologist avant la lettre. His texts can be read as reflections on the nature of agency and structure, of freely chosen and morally informed action (Williams, 1993, Markovits, 2009). Indeed, Aeschylus ‘may well merit the palm as the first Greek author to insist that political and social institutions, not inherited characteristics, are the chief determinants of social practice’ (Rose, 2019: 216).
The last two plays in the trilogy concern the pitiless revenge-seeking of the Eumenides, the fearsome female avengers known in English as the Furies, against Orestes. As Sidiropoulou (2018: 167) asks: who are the Furies of today, and how might we deal with them? The law court established at the end of the final play is intimately connected with the vengeful female spirits relinquishing their desire for revenge. The court is ‘the symbolic representation of Athenian democracy insofar as it implies the rule of law, the participation of anonymous citizens, and group decision making’ (Rose, 2019: 250). This democratic situation is an achievement only gained through traumatic suffering, experienced both individually and collectively (Rose, 2019: 255). These are themes again echoing Alexander's (2012) intellectual and political interests, this time in cultural trauma and its political dimensions and consequences.
Moreover, Alexander's theorising is very attentive to the languages that theory and other forms of conceptualising social matters are expressed within. Athenian tragedy deliberately distorts and heightens normal speech, such that characters address each other in a specifically ‘tragic’ register. The linguistic dimensions of the Oresteia can be analysed ‘in terms of a dissolution and gradual reconstitution of language[,] which runs parallel to a destruction and reconstitution’ of ritualistic and other social forms (Segal, 1986: 44–45). This is a focus Alexander would likely be very attuned to.
Goldhill (1984: 164) emphasises the ‘uncontrollable polysemy’ of Aeschylus's dramatic expression, with many key words used seeming to modern exegetes troublesome, slippery, and evasive (Hall, 2015). The key term dikē is like a leitmotiv running throughout the Oristeia. Dikē was the goddess of justice, and her name was deployed to describe what we today would call not only ‘justice’ but also ‘punishment’ and ‘revenge’ too (Goldhill, 2004: 28–29).
The relatively structurally un-differentiated nature of Athenian society – a theme that would be very familiar to Alexander (1998) from his earlier work on societal differentiation – was paralleled in the fact that words like dikē conjoined these multiple meanings. The final play of the Oristeia can be read as concerning the structural emergence of social institutions – interpenetrating public law and democratic governance – which are the underpinnings of a nascent Athenian civil sphere. Portraying the roots of modern civil spheres in ancient Athenian democracy would naturally be an important concern for Alexander. Aeschylus both represented these matters for posterity and brought them into public consciousness in his own time. Thus, it makes sense within Alexander's intellectual programme to look to Aeschylus for confirmation of previous arguments about civil spheres, as well as for inspiration for future analyses. Below I pose some questions with a view to encouraging him to look further into the depths of the Oristeia series.
Interpreting Aeschylus: Some older variations
Alexander's commentary on Aeschylus’ work, undertaken as a means of developing further considerations as to the interplay of war and peace, and civility and incivility, comes at the (current) end of a long line of exegetes and exegeses. Many of the big intellectual guns of Western intellectual worlds over the last several centuries have wrestled with what the essential messages of the Oristeia trilogy are. They have extracted what they take to be contemporary, and often urgent, significance from 5th century BCE Athenian materials (Hall, 1997).
Their interpretations often tell us as much about the interpreters, their own preoccupations, and the cultural assumptions of their own times, as they do about Aeschylus and his writing. The better interpreters permit Aeschylus’ texts to reconstruct their own pre-existing ideas; the worst brusquely impose their own assumptions and obsessions on the texts, sometimes with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer on a walnut. How people have understood the plays has depended on whether they can read ancient Greek or not. 6 As horizons of interpretation have shifted over time, and as new, often politically motivated, sorts of interpreters have taken up the hermeneutic cudgels, the figure of Aeschylus has altered accordingly.
Some have found him to be aristocratic propagandist, others a reformist, or even revolutionary, poet. Some have discerned a social historian, others a political theorist of monarchy, tyranny and democracy (Stoessl, 1952, Thomson, 1968: 2, 231–232, Euben, 1986, 1990). Some have found a pessimistic student of human affairs, others an anticipator of Christian and modern views of human progress, while others again have rejected what they take to be such presentist mis-readings of ancient mentalities (Thomson, 1968: 259, Smith, 1980: 9–10). Political identities ascribed to him encompass both Athenian chauvinist and pan-Hellenic cosmopolitan (Stoessl, 1952), cynical realist as well as democratic utopian, complacent elite male or as a lone author bravely mounting ‘the first and in some respects only surviving frontal assault on … [aristocratic] hegemony’ (Rose, 2019: 186). Others again prefer to say what Aeschylus was not or not only: neither hired propagandist for reactionary aristocratic elements, nor a radical democrat; neither a political leader talking down to the ordinary citizenry, nor just a well-born male patronising women and disdaining slaves (Hall, 1997: 95).
This semiotic openness is rooted in the language of the texts. Aeschylus's work is widely acknowledged for its ambiguity and its unusual, even obscure, forms of expression. This is in contrast to the biting clarity of Sophocles (Trousdell, 2008: 7), and the more explicitly socially critical works of Euripides. The uncomfortable implications of Euripides' tragedies seem to have made them less popular with Athenian audiences of the time (Adams, 2018).
Translations of Aeschylus particularly proliferated in the 19th century. More pessimistically inflected German translations both influenced, and then were reworked in more positive ways, by English translators (Adams, 2018). Many 19th century interpreters, notably Kierkegaard (1987 [1843]), followed the ancient lead offered by the diagnosis of tragedy offered in Aristotle's Poetics. They discerned a universal significance in Aeschylus’ representation of the immutability of the ultimately tragic human condition. Romantic and post-Romantic 19th century interpreters worked with a philosophical anthropology that took Man as a noble and yet flawed and ultimately tragic figure, a being captured in all its problematic glory by the genius of the ancient dramatists.
It is exactly this sort of universalising narrative that present-day academics particularly dislike. It seems to be radically a-historical and a-social, a figment of the limited imaginings of 19th century white, privileged, sexist, and ethnocentric European males (Hall, 1997: 94). Beyond that sort of now rather predictable response to 19th century conceptions of Greek conceptions of the human, a more interesting set of issues emerges. They provoke the first question I pose to Alexander: Which sort of philosophical anthropology does Civil Sphere Theory work with? This is a point also raised by Vandenberghe in this Forum (2026, this volume).
The subject of Kierkegaard's critical ire, G.W.F. Hegel, took things in a more dialectical and historical direction, which may seem more promising to our contemporaries, at least at first. The Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1991 [1821]) was written in the same year as Shelley's Hellas, and this and other of his writings about Aeschylus inhabit something of the same intellectual universe as Shelley's paean to freedom. Hegel regards Aeschylus as depicting the advent of a universal form of law, centred on jury-deliberated punishment (Cohen, 2005), emerging out of primitive, eye-for-an-eye retribution which always takes extreme revenge on perceived miscreants (Allan, 2013). The new universal legal form takes legality out of the private into the public realm. It regards crimes against individual persons as injuries to the whole polity. It is therefore capable of producing real, because de-personalised, justice. It subdues victims’ needs for revenge, while making punishments less physically violent. It can mediate between conflicting social groups with divergent interests. It is foundational for a higher ethical form of life and human freedom (Njoya, 2019: 141, 149).
Despite its historical orientation, Hegel's optimistic viewpoint is probably not going to seem very convincing to present-day academic interpreters of a critical bent, whether Marxist, feminist, post-colonial, or otherwise, as we will see below (Njoya, 2019: 142). This suggests another question to Alexander: Are there elements in Hegel's position that Civil Sphere Theory today still could broadly accept or develop further?
Much contemporary academic criticism is directly or indirectly influenced by Marx. We know that Marx much admired Aeschylus (Prawer, 1976: 390). But his preference was for the play about the gods-defying Prometheus – which Aeschylus may or may not have written as part of a now-lost trilogy (Rose, 2019: 194) – and not the Oristeia. Given Alexander's (2010) well-known rejection of Marxist modes of analysis, it is not surprising that he has focused on precisely the part of the Aeschylean oeuvre that Marx had less interest in. The Eumenides would likely have struck Marx as fatuously complacent about the nature of so-called ‘democracy’ in the Athens of Aeschylus’ day.
For democratic Athens was as much a slave-owning society as were the rest of Greece and its wider world at the time, and as was the ante-bellum South of the United States. Marxist studies of antiquity particularly emphasise this fact (de Ste Croix, 1981). Only the poorest citizens, all male of course, could not afford slaves at all. ‘Slavery affected the Athenians’ conceptualisation of the universe at every level, a process reflected in their metaphors, for the citizen perceived analogies between his relationships with slaves and his relationships with women and children’ (Hall, 1997: 110). In all Athenian tragedy, as in wider cultural forms, the strict symbolic and practical divisions between slaves and the free-born were understood as being absolutely natural and eternally fixed. Evidence from slaves was not allowed in the courts – hymned by Aeschylus as foundation-stones of democracy – unless obtained through torture, for slaves were understood to be natural and incorrigible liars. They were thought to be especially liable to mislead through false witness and rumour-mongering naturally susceptible free-born women (Hall, 1997: 112, 113, 116).
What Alexander calls ‘civil repair’ – hitherto oppressed groups making claims on the dominant to be recognised as real human beings and be given the rights they feel are due to them – was simply impossible for slaves within the Hellenic cultural universe. The putative Athenian civil sphere – if that is indeed what it was – was the most ‘democratic’ of all the modes of political organisation in the ancient Mediterranean world. Yet in the most fundamental manner it could not be opened-up to accommodate slaves, and operated on the foundation of their ongoing radical, often violent, exclusion.
Thus another set of questions to Alexander: Was democratic ancient Athens possessed of anything like a civil sphere at all? Is it conceptually misleading even to label it more modestly as having a quasi- or proto-civil sphere? Did it in fact have a pseudo-civil sphere? (Here one might keep on adding as caveats Greek and Latin prefix words in front of the phrase ‘civil sphere’…).
Of all the plays in the Oristeia trilogy, The Eumenides has particularly attracted a host of glossers, defenders, and critics – all equally armed with tendentious reasons for interpreting it in certain ways – precisely because of its culminating scenes. These are where Athena heralds a new era of rule of law, judicial and political deliberation, and democratic government. This was after years of internecine struggle stretching from the time of the Trojan wars down to the start of historical time. This begins when the mother-killing Orestes, son of Clytemnestra, is acquitted of murder by a jury of citizens brought together by Athena. In the early Nazi period, Erich Fromm (1934) could speculate on themes of human freedom and unfreedom partly through reflection upon the nature of the Eumenides, the Furies. They pursued Orestes relentlessly for the crime of matricide, yet they are ultimately persuaded to relent and become good spirits that look after the welfare of the polity. This is achieved through the persuasive verbal powers of Athena. Carl Jung found in the play a sense of healing of wounded, traumatised subjectivities (as more recently has Badiou, 2009), and the human capacity for looking not just retrospectively at previous horrors but also prospectively towards peaceful futures (Trousdell, 2008). All these are themes that Alexander's sociology has developed its own specific takes on.
After the Second World War, Hannah Arendt (1998) meditated on how the trilogy's account of inter-generational violence and revenge on murderers begetting more murders in the family allowed one to think in general terms about various phenomena. These included the sins of the fathers – and in the case of the husband-slaughtering Clytemnestra, of the mothers too – as well as the good deeds of the tribal ancestors. She considered what could provoke the present-day generation to take constructive responsibility for the crimes of the past, rather than feeling helpless, hopeless guilt about them. The significance of these reflections for the post-1945 generations of (West) Germany was apparent.
Alexander (2002) has written influentially on the post-war transformations of ‘the Holocaust’ in public discourse and collective memory formations. Perhaps future writing could engage as much with the two earlier plays in the Oristeia as with the final one, for in the manner of Arendt, they may provoke further insights into the nature of remembrance, guilt, and its possible overcoming. The Civil Sphere programme certainly potentially resonates with some contemporary Aeschylus scholarship. This reads the Oristeia as providing resources to think about how each successive generation must take responsibility for past societal crimes that they themselves did not commit but which continue to poison social relations in the present and which threaten social solidarity in the future (Markovits, 2009).
Interpreting Aeschylus: Some newer variations
The myriad ways to interpret Aeschylus in scholarly terms over the last 40 years until today ultimately may be reduced to several meta-positions. All of them go beyond and are generally very critical of earlier interpretative orthodoxies, especially liberal ones which had read the Oristeia in a favourable light as a relatively straightforward hymn to democracy.
One can instead today choose to detect and denounce the sexual, ethnic, class and other forms of domination apparently justified by the plays (Njoya, 2019). Contemporary ‘critical’ academics are trained to sniff out what they take to be hypocrisy in claims and judgements, and Aeschylus’ texts seem ripe for interrogation in this regard. Already in the early 1970s, Lloyd-Jones (1971: 94) lambasted what he saw as fatuous liberal interpretations: ‘the cliché we have heard repeated all our lives, that The Eumenides depicts the transition from the [primitive] vendetta to the [civilized, democratic] rule of law, is utterly misleading’.
Critical critics today are impatient with idealising claims like Euben's (1990: 41; also 1986) that the trilogy ‘helped the collectivity better [to] appreciate what it was doing to itself and to others’, and to understand the need for everyone to be included in relations of mutuality. Scepticism about such views abounds, because it is recognised that the bulk of the population (women, slaves, foreigners) were not included within the bounds of citizenship. Bland statements to the effect that ‘communal decisions inevitably benefit some citizens at the expense of others’ (Allen, 2004: 28) do not pass muster when analytic focus is on symbolic and practical means of exclusion and domination of such others.
However, instead of reading the plays as ideological justifications of the socio-political status quo, one can instead emphasise their ambiguity (Rose, 2019: 58). One dimension of that is their alleged polyphony (Fletcher, 2014). While the drama ‘legitimises the value-system necessary to … the subordination of the slaves, women, and other non-citizens … the polyphonic tragic form, which gives voice to characters from all such groups, challenges the very notions which it simultaneously legitimises’ (Hall, 1997: 118).
Thus ‘tragedy's claim to having been a truly democratic art-form is therefore, paradoxically, far greater than the claim to democracy of the Athenian state itself. The tension, even contradiction, between tragedy's egalitarian form and the dominantly hierarchical world-view of its content is the basis of its transhistorical vitality’ (Hall, 1997: 126). That viewpoint in turn suggests searching for implicit, even unconscious, utopian content within dramas that at first blush may look like straightforward celebrations of male and elite power (Rose, 2019).
Below I will tentatively, and for the sake of argument, pursue some ideas in that sort of direction suggested by my reading of the neo-Marxist critic Peter Rose (2019). His account of certain implicit utopian and counter-hegemonic elements in the Oristeia was inspired by the early ideas of Fredric Jameson (1971). I will also briefly invoke another Frankfurt School thinker, Max Horkheimer. 7
Hall (1997: 125) summarises some key ideas here. Athenian tragedy, especially as expressed by Aeschylus, is ‘a supreme instantiation of what [some] Marxists call art's “utopian tendency”; this expression denotes art's potential for and inclination towards transcending in fictive unreality the social limitations and historical conditions of its own production … Greek tragedy does its thinking in a form which is vastly more politically advanced than the society which produced Greek tragedy’. If that is the case, then the art of tragedy is akin to myth in that it ‘seeks imaginary resolutions of real contradictions; but to the extent that art is more self-conscious than myth, it is capable of presenting solutions that do not simply validate the status quo but negate it, transcend it by projecting a utopian vision and inviting society to embrace that vision’ (Rose, 2019: 257–258).
Taking a certain sort of late Frankfurt School line on Aeschylean issues will likely not be found very endearing by Alexander – but let us see what transpires. I turn first to matters of gender and sexual politics, thence to the dual nature of law, and then finally I move towards the core of Alexander's discussion of Aeschylus, the issue of the democratic polis waging war on other states.
Gender and sexual politics
The current critical orientation towards the gendered and sexual politics of the Oristeia identifies another apparent paradox: that the trilogy is both a stinging critique of aristocratic patriarchy and simultaneously an advocation of the subordination of females within democracy (for general discussion, see Cantarella, 2005). Democracy, as a male construction, depends on the tight regulation of unruly female passions. Democracy is seen to be argued by Aeschylus not just to be compatible with patriarchy but dependent upon it (Thomson, 1968: 268). 8
The dramatic form of tragedy itself is somewhat paradoxical in gender terms. In Athens, as wives and daughters of citizens (Loraux, 1993), women were not allowed to disport themselves in public, or even be mentioned in public discourse, and were accordingly immobilised within households, both physically and symbolically (for general discussion, see Foley (1992 [1981])). Yet they appear at the forefront of the tragic stage. This is because they were assumed to be more prone to wild and invasive passions than were men. Many of the disasters evoked in tragedy are caused by the actions of women, such as abandoned wives, who are temporarily unsupervised by men (Hall, 1997: 105–106, 109).
In radical feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, it could be said that the Oresteia falls within the misogynistic mindset which pervades wider Greek thought (Saxonhouse, 1984). The final scenes of the trilogy represent onstage a decisive defeat of matriarchy and female political agency (Rose, 2019: 221). The Furies, avenging female spirits, are sweet talked by another female, Athena, into a subordinated position, becoming beneficent protecting spirits of the polis (Markell, 2003). The court of the Areopagus involves an exclusively male – and probably upper class – jury. Orestes is acquitted of murder by the jury because the casting vote goes to Athena (Winnington-Ingram, 1948), who is the most apparently non-feminine of all goddesses, an entity with no mother but sprung fully-grown from the head of her father, Zeus (Thomson, 1968: 268). 9
Athena articulates a message that legal recognition of children be through the father's line, not the mother's. Only the male is a real parent, while the mother is just host of male semen. This is the central point of the whole drama for some radical feminist criticism (Zeitlin, 1978: 167–172). The trilogy presents, justifies, and lauds the simultaneous and inexorably intertwined ‘replacement of archaic order with democracy, chaos with order, female with male, family with polis’ (Markovits, 2009: 439). The female is pushed out of both the public arena and the domain of the rights of parenthood. Both the private realm of the household and the legal/political public arena of the polis (Just, 1989) have in the play been symbolically purged of women (Holland, 1998).
Thus the ending of the trilogy raises female subordination to the level of abstract political philosophy. This articulates the fundamentally and inescapably patriarchal nature of democracy. The final play thereby set the template for later Western forms of misogyny in political thinking (Zeitlin, 1978; also 1995). Kelly (1984) argues that all this on-stage justification of patriarchal democracy expressed the real situation in Athens: women suffered significant losses in agency with the development of democratic government. Orthodox Marxists have added that democracy permitted the male citizen populace to protect itself better than hitherto from aristocratic exploitation, but the fundamental economic relations of class domination and exploitation remained largely unchanged (de Ste Croix, 1981: 72–73).
Present-day radical criticism repeats and extends this viewpoint on the sexual politics of democracy. As an advocate of such a position, Njoya (2019: 150) has it that just ‘as the law of woman has to be defeated in order to create a stable foundation for the [democratic] state, the precondition for the emergence of civic relations is the breaking of the blood bond that ties young men to the family, and especially to the mother’.
Thus, the Areopagus court may possess many of the advanced and progressive facets praised by Hegel, like jury trial, the right of self-representation in court, and moderation of punishments meted out. ‘However, something else is also instituted in this trial – the gender hierarchy of the democratic regime of Athens’ (Njoya, 2019: 146). Political and legal ‘progress’ go along with, and are achieved through, socially retrograde steps towards the subordination and sequestration of women especially, but also all non-citizens. While law in the democratic polity means rights and deliberative conflict resolution, for females and non-citizens it is an oppressive form of social control (Luban, 1986–1987).
Rose (2019: 225–226) takes issues with aspects of such readings of the plays. He counsels against the temptation to present in overly stark terms the movement of the play as ‘politically and juridically progressive but sexually retrograde’. While it might on an explicit level operate in ‘the service of entrenched class and sexual interests’, it more implicitly and subtly ‘projects a utopian vision that significantly negates the alleged necessities of the status quo by opening a realm of relative freedom’. Thus one should avoid ‘castigating the text for a failure to resolve adequately the largely unconscious sexual attitudes that it is this text's special distinction to have raised consciously as a problem’, first for its intended audiences and then for its later readers.
Reading The Eumenides more dialectically than in a uniformly negative register raises the possibility that it is as much protest against the male mistreatment of women as an argument in favour of their subordination within a democratic polity. Perhaps we are not dealing here with pure misogyny and total female subjugation in the resolution of the trilogy (Rose, 2019: 260). The play at least points to the positive contributions of females to the new political order, ‘presenting the political, social, and procreative prosperity of the democracy as entirely the gift of females’. This ‘purely symbolic political role is, to be sure, a far cry from full political isonomia for women’ (Rose, 2019: 260). But it is not the complete subordination of women that some present-day critics allege. Ultimately, the ‘critical edge of the trilogy confronts the audience with the intolerable human cost of unmitigated patriarchal power: murdered daughters, injured wives, foreign women raped and enslaved, seething resentment and deceit at home’. These are all phenomena that not even the most complacent male citizen could fully ignore or seek to legitimate (Rose, 2019: 264–265).
The dual nature of law
Significantly, the otherwise disagreeing critics Njoya and Rose reach some common ground when the former raises the possibility of a utopian element in Aeschylus's treatment of law.
Here the inspiration is another Frankfurt School thinker, Max Horkheimer, and his writings on the Oristeia from the 1930s. He in turn drew partly on work by Friedrich Engels, who had stated that the treatment of women in the trilogy was evidence that the legal order of Athens was far from the universalising entity praised by the likes of Hegel (Njoya, 2019: 142).
Horkheimer's understanding of the history of law ‘focused on the underside of progress … Law progresses dialectically, which is to say that it turns through itself into its opposite’ (Njoya, 2019: 142). This viewpoint has in recent years been elaborated upon by Brunkhorst (2014). Revolutions in law – one of which Aeschylus dramatises – are Janus-faced: they create rights and freedoms for some, while stabilising relations of domination and injustice, often through the very same legal codes.
Thus, on the one hand, Athenian law, at least in theory, protected citizens but could also be deployed as a form of terror against non-citizens. In the Areopagus court's judgement in the play, which was swung by Athena's casting vote, ‘the court sided with male property interests and the patriarchal structure of the state. Indeed, property and the state became two sides of the same coin’ (Njoya, 2019: 153). Aeschylus both celebrates and inadvertently reveals the fact that the ‘function of law is to create a category of persons for whom the law will indeed be universal. Everybody else is in the “outsider” category, unable to gain access to the legal protections afforded to members of the “universal” community’ (Njoya, 2019: 155).
On the other hand, Horkheimer (cited at Njoya, 2019: 156) has it that ‘[a]gain and again in history, ideas have cast off their swaddling clothes and struck out against the social systems that bore them. The cause, in large degree, is that spirit, language and all the realms of the mind necessarily stake universal claims’. The oppressed, in the form of claims-making social movements, take up such ideas and press for the rights that either exist only in theory for them or which they have hitherto been denied altogether. Social movements invert a legal order's previous inversion and perversion of justice and the restriction of rights. In Alexander's (2006) terms, they demand inclusion of people of certain types within the boundaries set by the law and the political system, and thus within the civil sphere.
Two issues therefore arise. First, one might speculate that in The Eumenides Aeschylus simultaneously presents something thinkable at the time – a universally applicable legal-political order – and something unthinkable to the mainstream Greek mindset – the eventual possibility of inclusion, through claims-making and struggles, of women, slaves and others demanding access to it. The political consciousness of the play co-exists with its political unconsciousness, a utopian hope peeping through the gaps in a patriarchal and exclusivist conception of democracy. Second, as there are at least some ostensible similarities between a neo-Frankfurt approach to such matters and Civil Sphere Theory, a question to Alexander is this: to what extent does he accept the account of the Oristeia outlined by that approach?
Warfare
What troubles Alexander (2026) is that the foundation of the Athenian civil sphere as articulated by Aeschylus goes together with, and seems to be based upon, bellicose relations with other polities. Other contemporary commentators are struck by this. Thus Njoya (2019: 161) makes the same point as Alexander, extending it into the realm of violent gender relations: The ‘new’ law of the Areopagus court does not abolish war or slavery – in fact, Athena recommends war as an outlet for aggression in order to preserve the peace at home. She promises men who have an urge to dominate that they will still have the right to seek glory in foreign battlefields. No doubt they also have the right to treat captured women as personal property. At the end of the Oresteia, the violence of the social order remains unresolved, even as it acquires a new kind of legal justification.
It is certainly the case that Aeschylus lived in a period characterised by violence, internally and externally. There were deep political rifts and violent relations between elite factions within Athens, with some committed to the retention of aristocratic privileges and power, others seeking to strip the aristocracy of these capacities, to move in the direction of more democratic government (Goldhill, 2004). He also lived in a context of constant warfare between states, the Persian wars being closely followed by the inter-Hellene Peloponnesian War (Harvey, 2020).
Rose (2019: 252) therefore suggests that any ‘realistic Athenian in the early 450s could not possibly envision a world free of war’. That included Aeschylus, who had himself been a soldier on the frontlines. Bellicose behaviour is presented by him ‘as at best a monstrous force to be directed outside the body politic, faute de mieux’. Aeschylus could not imagine anything better, certainly not any condition of perpetual peace, and the attitude of Athena in the play reflected that sense of resignation. But this resigned ‘realism’ is very different from an enthusiastic embracing of warfare between states, including as foundation-stone for democracy.
Rose (2019) argues that Aeschylus had a strong sense of social classes, especially of aristocrats and citizens of a middling social position, and the antagonistic relations pertaining between them. The trilogy is very much a critique of the myths of the heroic age peddled by Homer and Hesiod. It is about a movement away from the power, generally unwisely utilised, of aristocratic fathers, towards the rise to pre-eminence of non-aristocratic and democratic sons (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990: 26–27).
Great wealth among the aristocracy is seen in the plays to be intrinsically corrupting and disastrous, especially when in the possession of an overly passionate warrior caste. This is a group embroiled in rivalries and feuds, and too easily driven to extremes, criminality, and acts of madness. There is no such thing as real justice among such people, just bloodily excessive revenge, destroying the innocent – especially innocent women – in its thoughtless and pitiless course. Aeschylus writes as part of tragic literary convention, whereby raw, uncivilised, even bestial, Nature, as represented in aristocratic warrior figures like Agamemnon, is juxtaposed against Culture, as embodied in the polis and its legal and political institutions (Segal, 1981). In Aeschylus’ time, aristocratic power had been muted to some extent, but only partially and it always threatened to come back. 10 Aeschylus could not write in anything other than politically relevant ways. Rose (2019: 212) sees matters thus: ‘Hesiod's polis may silently go down to ruin with its unjust rulers, but for Aeschylus the cost to the city entailed in aristocratic justice is grounds for popular rebellion, for seeking change’.
If Rose (2019) is correct, both about the typically phlegmatic view of warfare that Aeschylus and other Athenian citizens had, and about his antipathy to the excesses of the aristocratic warrior mentality, then the general thrust of the final play in the trilogy is as follows. It concerns how enthusiastically bellicose behaviour is only characteristic of the aristocracy, both as represented in the plays’ reality of the (not-so heroic) mythical past, and in its real-world manifestations in the present day, especially among the most reactionary elite anti-democratic factions. Bellicosity of an untamed kind is not a characteristic of contemporaneous ordinary citizens. This is partly a class-based difference in temperament and everyday life-conditions: warriors like to fight, but not every citizen is a warrior, at least not all the time. Not all warfare is about the enthusiastic embrace of individual heroics in search of glory; much of it is about reluctant but necessary taking up of arms when enemies threaten the state.
Thus Aeschylus might be taken to suggest that rule of law and democratic institutions curb unnecessary bellicosity. There is here perhaps an embryonic account of a civilising – or rather, civil-ising – process. This pertains when democratic socio-political arrangements, that we might say are generative of an embryonic civil sphere, at first reign in that bellicosity and aggression towards others, certainly towards other citizens inside the State, but possibly also outside it too. 11 Then over time they come to modulate such dispositions in a generally calmer, self-restraining, and more considered direction amongst most citizen males. At the same time, Aeschylus has Athena state that the full force of the law will come down on those who transgress the civic rules, fear of the (just, equal, democratic) legal order being a necessary guarantor of civil virtue.
This account of increasingly less bellicosity among the ordinary citizenry is made more plausible if we remember that the trilogy seems to have been explicitly offered as an encouragement to learning. The remaining characters still alive at the close of the epic have learned to give up blood feuds and thirst for revenge against transgressors. Mirroring that, the audience are invited to learn the benefits of law and democratic governance (Rose, 2019: 255). This lesson is arguably more than just a hymn to what Aeschylus thinks, or hopes soon will become, the socio-political status quo. Perhaps The Eumenides is less (or not only) ‘enthusiastic celebration of the Athenian present as the triumphant end of history’ (Rose, 2019: 260), and more (or at least partly) a pointing towards a more peaceful future political settlement, a condition pertaining both within the city-state and in its relations to other polities.
Perhaps it was just about possible, or it may have become possible, for Athenians to think of democracy as not being founded upon, or necessarily going along with, warfare, or at least these connections not being absolute necessities. If so, then we have an alternative possibility found through perusal of Aeschylus’ work for Civil Sphere theory to ponder upon and conceptualise.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have meditated upon Jeffrey Alexander's reflections on Aeschylus. I have posed a series of questions to him that have arisen from his engagement with the ancient tragedian and from my reading of the literature concerning the latter. Social theory today too rarely engages with classical Greek materials, although it sometimes used to (Gouldner, 1965), and ‘classical’ sociology, reflecting the wider educational cultures of the time, was packed with ancient reference points. Yet political theory knows that the Greeks may still be worth looking to for the purposes of diagnosing the nature of ever more conflictual and fractured modernity (Rocco, 1997).
I like the fact that Alexander has turned to Aeschylus. It seems to me a refreshing reclaiming of what older forms of sociology used to do more regularly, namely looking to the ancient world, but in a manner now much more sensitised to issues of gendered and other forms of power and domination. I have sought to draw his and others’ attention to different possible ways of interpreting and using the Aeschylean texts for present-day purposes.
Both the central authorial figures dealt with in my text may be described using the ancient Greek term sophos didaskalos. The first word means in some contexts ‘poet’, the second word refers to the trainer of a chorus. Taken together, they mean ‘tragedian’ (Rose, 2019: 256). Both Aeschylus and Alexander have written eloquently about the lighter and darker shades of law, politics, and power, so it is fitting that the modern figure should turn to consider his ancient counterpart at a time of darkening world conditions for democracy and the rule of law. Permanent warfare is back on the radar of those privileged parts of the world whose people thought such a condition had been overcome in 1945 and/or 1989.
Aeschylus lived in a time of endless civil strife within the polity, involving recrimination and assassination, and armed conflict outside it. He points to the civil-ising emergence of civic phenomena, celebrating their appearance. Yet at the same time, he implies that things can go in other, de-civil-ising ways too, involving a collapse of formal law and a return ‘to the violent cycles of revenge to which it is opposed’ (Njoya, 2019: 161). Would-be warrior tyrants of our own time are pushing against legal restraints, as well as political checks and balances, and working towards unchallenged monarchical power, inflected with patriarchal overtones. Untrammelled power is a condition which the ancient Greeks saw as corrupting even the best persons and making the worst utterly appalling, a situation leading to endless cycles of ‘insolent violence’ (hybris) and ‘resentful jealousies’ (phthonos) (Rose, 2019: 253).
Aeschylus wrote a happy ending for his epic trilogy, but one still haunted by thoughts of possible returns to a most unhappy past. As we move into an ever more unhappy future, surely an Alexandrine Aeschylus can be a guide to thinking through the confusion, even if he cannot operate as a simple comfort for unsettled spirits?
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.