Titre: The Fires of the Oresteia
Auteur: Gantz, Timothy Nolan
Sujet: History & Archaeology;
Description: One of the most basic features of the imagery employed by Aischylos in the Oresteia is the consistent perversion of normally propitious aspects of human existence, with the result that they become sinister and destructive. As Anne Lebeck puts it, ‘in Agamemnon those forces which should be beautiful, benevolent, and life-giving are converted into their opposites’. Male and female interchange their proper roles, sacrificial language cloaks impious deeds of vengeance, the hunting of animals turns into the hunting of men, the wealth of the house of Atreus becomes the blood in which that house is drenched, and the fertility of the whole land is corrupted by its application to death instead of life. The deliberate misuse to which Aischylos puts each of these structures has been well surveyed; taken together they lend dramatic reinforcement to a central theme of the Oresteia, that man's world is in a state of chaotic disorder from which it will not recover until the dilemma of vengeance...
Fait partie de: The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1 January 1977, Vol.97, pp.28-38
Identifiant: 00754269 (ISSN); 10.2307/631019 (DOI)