One of the most distinctive features of Aeschylus' poetic style is the choral odes. The odes can generally be divided into two parts: lyrical narrative and lyrical reflection. The narrative sections motivate the main action of the drama, often relating past events and causes. The lyrical reflection is distinguished from the narrative parts by its overt moralizing that lift the dramatic action from the particular to the universal. Within these sections of the ode, are clusters of moral generalizations or gnomes, dealing with a variety of topics but always of a distinctively moral nature. These gnomes far from being unrelated, in fact, give logic to the dramatic events, explaining the reason for a particular event and presenting that event in universal terms, in terms, let us say, of the justice of Zeus or the working of Fate. In fact, the gnomes move along two directions of the drama. They reflect upon and anticipate its events. The conflicts in, and resolutions to the drama are often worked out at the lyrical level. It is the purpose of this thesis, then, to study the gnomes of the Oresteia and their surrounding gnomic passages, to examine their meaning within their immediate context, and to see how and to what extent the gnomes relate to the dramatic actions. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

D.Litt. et Phil. / In the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the female characters meet with one of five different fates: vilification, silencing or erasure from the text, metamorphosis, sacrifice or murder. In Ancient Greek culture, ideas of the female corresponded to the following archetypes: Virgin and Wife/Mother. There exists, in mythology, another repository of archetypes which we may categorise as a group of women not connected to the household, functioning on the level of legend or the supernatural, who represent negative degrees of aberration of the feminine. The first two categories, Virgin and Wife/Mother, therefore, are integral to the Greek concept of the oikos (household) whilst the third category, Female Aberrations or Monsters, are seen as a direct threat to the oikos. I postulate a connection between the female characters of Aeschylus’ drama, the mythical archetypes of women found in myth and the fates suffered by each character. My focus in this dissertation, Archetypal Simulacra—Women in Aeschylus’ Oresteia is the depiction of female characters in the Oresteia and how the mythological archetypes of women as described above have influenced this depiction. I aim to determine how Aeschylus used traditional myths and depictions and what the extent and purpose was of his mythopoesis. I first offer a preliminary exploration of women as defined by social practice and various canonical literary works which served to define many mythological precedents for how women were conceived in later literature. This task I divide into two aspects: firstly in an assessment of the archetypes appearing in Greek mythology to which the female characters in the Oresteia correspond; and secondly in an exploration of how these characters were ‘scripted’ into the trilogy and to what extent they supported or undermined their societal ‘script’. In my aim to discover the connection between the portrayal of the female characters, their mythical determinants and the fates they suffer in the course of the drama I conclude that Aeschylus adapts myth in such a way that it underpins and justifies the patriarchal structures. He changes or eradicates his female characters who threaten to reject these strictures. He supplies us with female figures who support the male cause while he violently negates those women who threaten to damage male authority. The playwright has used the plasticity of traditional myth to support the society of Athens with its attitudes and fears regarding the feminine Other who exists in its shadows.

My PhD thesis, The Flower of Suffering, offers a philosophical evaluation of Aeschylus' Oresteia in light of Presocratic ideas. By examining several aspects of the tragic trilogy in relation to some of Aeschylus' near-contemporary thinkers, it aims to unravel the overarching theological ideas and the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions underpinning the Oresteia's dramatic narrative. My aim is to bring to relief those aspects of the Oresteia which I believe will benefit from a comparison with some ideas, or modes of thought, which circulated among the Presocratic philosophers. I will explore how reading some of this tragedy's themes in relation to Presocratic debates about theology and cosmic justice may affect and enhance our understanding of the theological ‘tension' and metaphysical assumptions in Aeschylus' work. In particular, it is my contention that Aeschylus' explicit theology, which has been often misinterpreted as a form of theodicy where the justice of heaven is praised and a faith in the rule of the gods is encouraged, is presented in these terms only to create a stronger collision with the painful reality dramatized from a human perspective. By setting these premises, it is my intention to confer on Greek tragedy a prominent position in the history of early Greek philosophical thought. If the exclusion of Presocratic material from debates about tragedy runs the risk of obscuring a thorough understanding of the broader cultural backdrop against which tragedy was born, the opposite is also true. Greek tragedy represents, in its own dramatic language, a fundamental contribution to early philosophical speculation about the divine, human attitudes towards it, indeed, the human place in relation to the cosmic forces which govern the universe.