Caleb Simone (Columbia University)
In Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, the monstrous goddesses known as the Furies or “Erinyes” embody a system of blood-vengeance with a presence that intensifies across the three plays. After their mysterious song “welling up” in the chorus of Agamemnon and their haunting phantoms in Choephoroi, the Furies emerge fully embodied as a chorus in the Eumenides. Echoing a fascination with the visuality of the petrifying Gorgons, attention to these Furies has focused on their visual impact following their materialization from poetic image to embodied presence onstage (Lebeck 1971; Frontisi-Ducroux 2006; Easterling 2008). Aeschylus is, after all, credited with first representing the Furies onstage in a gorgonesque manner with snakes for hair (Pausanias 1.28.6; Frontisi-Ducroux 2007), an appearance often cited in connection with the shock and awe effect of this monstrous chorus. But I contend that this characterization—for all the emphasis on its unfathomability—ultimately directs attention not simply toward its own image, but toward a voice, and toward a deeply embedded identity in turn (cf. Nooter 2017).
In this paper, I argue that a key innovation of Aeschylus’ Furies was their auditory impact. Their collective ophidian voice is encoded with histories of violence against the chthonic feminine, traumatic histories that are vividly evoked in the staging of the Furies’ appearance at Delphi where the play begins. The key moment of recognition occurs when the Furies are awakening and first spring to life onstage: I argue that their enigmatic moanings and groanings that gradually rise to a higher pitch (117-30) are deliberately evocative of the centuries-old sound art performance at Delphi known as the pythikos nomos (Pöhlmann 2010; Rocconi 2014). In this instrumental solo on the double-pipes (aulos), elaborate rhythms with distinctive sound effects were used to relate Apollo’s slaughter of the drakaina or she-serpent. This pythikos nomos was among the oldest and most significant performance pieces in the repertoire of aulos music, a repertoire most suited to influence the musical accompaniment in drama (Csapo 2004). In commemorating such a performance decades earlier (Pythian 12), Pindar had already forged elaborate connections between the sound of the aulos and the lamenting voice of the Gorgon that incorporated hisses from her snaky hair. The Eumenides unites these strands in a pathbreaking audiovisual moment when the unrepresentable Furies take the form of a Gorgon and the voice of Delphi’s primordial chthonic inhabitant.
To the accompaniment of the aulos, the chorus of Furies thus brings this collective ophidian voice to the Areopagus, where their very presence and sounding continually recalls and reenacts the final cries of chthonic, feminine forces under the crushing oppression of Olympian violence. The paper concludes by considering how the play addresses the traumatic histories that flow from the very sound of the Furies’ voice. Given the affective impact of this voice, what are we to make of yet another Aeschylean innovation in representing the Furies—namely their identification with the local Athenian cult of the Semnai Theai (Lardinois 1992)?