The Ghost of Clytemnestra is the first afterlife figure in extant Greek literature to call for vengeance instead of ritual burial. She goads the Erinyes to kill Orestes in order to rectify the wrongs she has suffered. Yet the living Clytemnestra has already proven manipulative, politically usurping, and murderous; her Ghost attacks her own son. Further, the Ghost's lack of substance (as eido\ lon, psyche\ , or onar) distances her from the living world. On what ethical grounds, then, does the Ghost base her claims? How can a character so far beyond the boundaries of societal norms demand serious ethical consideration? I. INTRODUCTION: CLYTEMNESTRA'S REAPPEARANCE AND ETHICAL APPEALS At the end of the Choephoroi Orestes kills his mother, Clytemnestra, and displays her corpse to humans, gods, and the theatrical audience as proof of his just vengeance (Ch. 973-1006). In an eerie reversal at the start of the Eumenides, Clytemnestra reappears onstage, bearing the wounds of her murder, to demand vengeance against Orestes. Like the living queen, the Ghost of Clytemnestra marshals rhetoric to effect action in the world, rousing the sleeping Erinyes as her proxies by reciting a multitude of wrongs concerning her dishonor and suffering (Eu. 94-139). 1 The Ghost
How does the afterlife affect ethical and political considerations in this life when a culture has no unified religious dogma? This article focuses on the afterlife as an uncertain “elsewhere” invoked to rethink political imperatives in specific Ancient Greek literary and philosophical texts. First, it uncovers the political implications of radically divergent notions of the afterlife in both Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Antigone—from nothingness, to continuation in a society of souls below, to ethical judgment by a divinity—significant examples of which have been neglected. It then follows out the almost congruent diversity of afterlife notions in Plato’s Apology and Phaedo. By examining how Socrates uses “unbelief” (apistia, among other words) concerning the afterlife to interrogate ethics and politics, this article gives a fresh perspective on the structure of debate in the Phaedo. The very emphasis on “unbelief,” however, demonstrates that the dialogue itself may not present Socratic views as definitive.
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