Familial Bonds Theme Analysis

At the core of The Eumenides sits a conflict of familial bonds. Orestes, after all, has killed his mother Clytemnestra in order to avenge her murder of his father Agamemnon. The question of the play, then, is not whether or not Orestes committed this crime (he never denies his guilt), but whether he deserves to be punished for it. The Furies unequivocally believe that the bond between a mother and child is sacred, and that no excuse Orestes offers can purge his guilt. Apollo and Orestes, meanwhile, believe that Clytemnestra sacrificed any allegiance her son owed her when she killed his father. The trial of Orestes thus basically becomes about which parent—mother or father—should matter more to a child. In the end, in a display of typical Ancient Greek sexism, Athena and a jury of Athenians decide that the father takes a privileged role, and that Orestes is therefore blameless. His father’s death, in essence, wipes out his mother’s.

The question of family ties, however, goes deeper than simply a question of mother versus father. Ancient Greek mythology often takes on the topic of cursed families, and one of the most famous is the “House of Atreus.” Orestes is the last survivor of this royal family (along with his sister Electra, who is absent from this play), has been cursed for generations, with relatives seeking revenge on each other in a variety of horrific ways. The events of The Eumenides, however, finally put a stop to this curse. In fact, at the end of the play, the exiled Orestes is even able to return to his familial kingdom of Argos, his guilt erased and his birthright restored. Thus The Eumenides is not simply about the salvation of one man, but of an entire family. With the end of Orestes’ trials and tribulations comes the end of the curse on the house of Atreus—an event that signals the restoration of order and prosperity to a previously tangled and tragic situation.