Antiphon, A New Aeschylus?
A short study of the Oresteia in Antiphon’s “Against Stepmother”
At the heart of Antiphon’s speech Against Stepmother, just before he tells the jury the details of the father’s murder, he calls the stepmother “this Clytemnestra” (τῆς Κλυταιμνήστρας ταύτης) (Against Stepmother, 17). This curious invocation of Aeschylus’ tragedy, The Oresteia, (for further argument see: Wohl, pg. 46) at so crucial a point in his speech requires greater attention. What follows is a further explication of Antiphon’s tragic comparison and a modest attempt to understand its purpose.
If Antiphon frames the stepmother as a “Clytemnestra,” are we supposed to see Antiphon in the role of a new Aeschylus? At first glance, Antiphon’s client would appear to make for a poor Orestes. Upon learning of the death of his father, Orestes returned home and took vengeful justice into his own hands, killing not his stepmother, but his own mother. By contrast, this young man has not so boldly taken it upon himself to bring about the punishment he seeks; instead he presents himself almost apologetically before the jurors as a young man, unexperienced of the laws “νέος μὲν καὶ ἄπειρος δικῶν” (Antiphon, 1). But these are not Oresteian times; this is post-Eumenidies Athens, when, as Mera Flaumenhaft argues in “From Furies to Juries,” the sphere of justice and punishment has grown beyond the house and becomes the public prerogative of the city, not the private family.
Orestes’s dramatic legacy, therefore, is not the murder of his mother on behalf of his father, but the creation a new system of justice, which replaces the ancient vengeance of gods below (Flaumenhaft, Seeing Justice Done). Discovery of facts in a trial by way of inquiry, Flaumenhaft argues, ensures that the Furies will “be superseded by a new kind of justice, one that will replace dancing and chanting with looking and talking” (Flaumenhaft, pg. 30). Thus, by “merely” bringing his stepmother in front of a jury on charges of murder, Antiphon’s νέος is not running from Orestes’s legacy, but more fully realizing it.
The relationship of Antiphon’s oration to the Oresteia becomes more compelling in Antiphon’s description of the circumstances of the father’s murder. According to Antiphon’s case, the murder takes place at the Piraeus where the boy’s father and his guest-friend Philoneos have traveled together for the two-fold purpose of sacrificing to Zeus Ktesios, the protector of the household, and to send the father off on his sea journey to Naxos (Antiphon, 18). There is a triple irony here and reverberating echo of the Oresteia: First, the father and Philoneos are murdered by their supposed lovers while propitiating Zeus the protector of the household; second, the pair are murdered as libation-bearers, a fact Antiphon goes out of his way to make explicit: καὶ ἐκεῖνοι ἐπειδὴ ἀπέσπεισαν, τὸν ἑαυτῶν φονέα μεταχειριζόμενοι ἐκπίνουσιν ὑστάτην πόσιν (Antiphon, 18). Finally, the sacrifices and the pouring out of frankincense and libations are done in part to secure a safe voyage for the boy’s father, recalling the original crime of Agamemnon in the eyes of Clytemnestra.
So what should we make of Antiphon’s Aeschylean analogy? Is this simply a rhetorical device to hoodwink the jurors through an appealing demonstration Antiphon’s own sophistication—to present his client as the “tragic man” (Wohl, pg. 38)? Wohl notes that, while tragedy was occasionally invoked by Fourth Century orators for the sake of prestige or slander, “Antiphon’s engagement with tragedy is at once broader and more precise” (ibid). This is a dangerous card to play, she reasons, because it might recall the complexities of tragedy to the mind of the juror. If such an analogy induces pity, “the tragic allusions…risk introducing a tragic ambivalence that will culminate not in a decisive verdict but in aporia” (Wohl, 39). But according to Wohl, the comparison to Clytemnestra circumvents such a response, inspiring unreflective certitude rather than empathic consideration from the jurors:
The speaker uses the Aeschylean model simultaneously to prejudge the issue of his stepmother’s intent and to preempt it, to rule it inadmissible. In so doing, he appropriates for his own case the legal sleight of hand that had secured Clytemnestra’s posthumous conviction in Aeschylus’s trilogy. The trial of Orestes in Eumenides does not so much answer the trilogy’s questions of responsibility—Agamemnon’s, Clytemnestra’s or Orestes’—as it supersedes them. That case looks not to causes but to effects: it weighs a regicide against a matricide. The jury is split on this question but Athena’s vote breaks their deadlock: the man’s life is worth more than the woman’s. (pg. 50)
In this way Wohl claims that Antiphon is relying on the “familiar gender hierarchy” which brought about “a simplification of the trilogy’s intractable quandaries” for a “a decisive resolution” also in his case. Flaumenhaft, too, observes that establishing the Areopagus on the hill where Theseus’s men were said to have defeated the female Amazon warriors signifies that “the justice of the new court will be primarily male justice” (pg. 32). It would be naive, therefore, to think that Antiphon, in pursuit of winning his case, does not make use of this “familiar gender hierarchy” in this space that celebrates the triumph of Athens’ male ancestors over nefarious women.
But Antiphon’s invocation of the Aescyhlean trilogy is not merely cynical. Flaumenhaft argues that it is the “shared, public, on-view nature of the Areopagus” (pg. 31) that truly distinguished it from the realm of private disputes, wild acts of vengeance, and “trials” that took place before, in which the “indiscriminate” Furies held sway (Flaumenhaft, pg. 28). At the end of his speech, Antiphon lays out the “facts” for the jury one more time. This time, in addition to reminding the jury of the crime itself and its impious circumstances, he warns them that the stepmother conspired in private, as “those who plot the death of their neighbors do not, I believe, form their plans and make their preparations in front of witnesses” (Antiphon, 28). By contrast, it is the desire of the wronged, and those who seek justice—“god, hero, or human being” (27)—to bring private wrongs into public. This is what the young man, through Antiphon’s authorship, has done by coming to the rescue of the dead and the law (διήγηται καὶ βεβοήθηται τῷ τεθνεῶτι καὶ τῷ νόμῳ). Finally, in the voice of his young hero, he reminds the jury of what is at stake with their solemn duty—the νέος recalling the Furies of old:
“The gods of the world below are themselves, I think, mindful of those who have been wronged.”
Works Cited
Flaumenhaft, Mera J. “Seeing Justice Done.” Civic Spectacle: Essays on Drama and Community, Rowman & Littlefield, U.S., 1994, pp. 7–56.
Wohl, Victoria. “A Tragic Case of Poisoning: Intention Between Tragedy and the Law.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, Johns Hopkins University Press, 9 May 2010, muse.jhu.edu/article/380910/pdf.
