Ancient Greek Women

The course I am taking in Greek drama has taken over my life. My heroine Joan of Arc is so straight forward, pious and innocent compared to these twisted agonized souls. Where Joan killed reluctantly for a holy cause, the Greeks commit matricide, murder and mayhem. The Bible differentiates between killing and murder. The commandment really says thou shalt not murder.

Clytemnestra waits ten years for Agamemnon to return victorious from Troy. She has already filled his place in her bed with Aegisthus. Agamemnon returns and violating all the rules of Greek hospitality she welcomes him to the house slays him and Cassandra his new wife and expects to live happily ever after. A cursed family, and the family Atreus is cursed, never lives on without revenge. Electra daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra mourns her father's death to the point of psychosis waiting only for the return of her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her paramour. Of course Agamemnon is not without guilt having killed his daughter Iphigenia in order to insure a good wind for the voyage to conquer Troy. Oh the collateral damage of the great wars.

Trickery, cunning and deception are held in great esteem as personified by Odysseus. And yet here is the beginning of Western democracy. Is matricide a worse crime than the murder of a non relative? Is revenging one's father's death more important than living? In the golden age of Greece we have the beginning of a jury system with twelve jurors. The barbaric stands side by side with the civilized. I guess as it still does.