HEARING THE ERINYES’ VOICES: THOUGHTS ON THE ‘BINDING SONG’ (EU. 307-96)

Abstract

In Eumenides, the chorus of Erinyes confronts Orestes in Athens. They surround him as he supplicates Athena, singing:

Let’s dance as well as sing around him,

hand in hand,

and let’s reveal the terrifying power of our dark melody  (Eu. 307-309 / Eu. 353-356[1] trans. Shapiro and Burian)

What follows is their Binding Song (Eu. 307-396). I believe, as Wilson and Taplin (1993) suggest[2], that this is the song first heard by Cassandra in Agamemnon:

The choir that sings as one, yet sings its tunes

Discordantly  [lit. together but not in harmony],  and only brings on discord,

can’t leave this house.  Yes, soused on human blood

to utter recklessness, a home-brewed,

rioting band of Erinyes is dwelling there,

not easily driven out.  And what they sing of,

as they carouse from room to room, is that

first mayhem, that ancestral sin, as one

by one each spits on a brother’s bed

that brought destruction to its defiler.  (Ag.  1186-1193 / Ag. 1357-66[3] trans. Shapiro and Burian)

At this point, Orestes and the audience both see this chorus and, most importantly, hear it. Wilson and Taplin rightly regard the Binding Song as the climax of the motif of disordered song in the Oresteia,^[4]but their interpretation is mainly concerned with the song’s symbolic significance. On a more concrete level, the language the Erinyes employ, as Faraone notes, calls to mind the tongue-binding curses of Attic trials.^[5] Thus, we are not entirely in the divine (or symbolic) realm -- the original audience would have recognized this concrete link between the Erinyes’ song and their own practices. A third layer of meaning, and one which remains largely unexplored, is the significance of this piece’s lack of metrical structure. We will examine the implications of this and demonstrate how the observations noted above should be understood in terms of a live choral performance.

[1] Aeschylus. (2003), Oresteia, trans. A. Shapiro and P. Burian, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Note that the line numeration of the Shapiro and Burian translation differs from the Greek line numeration.  I give both here, as they do in their text, listing the Greek line numbers first so as to avoid confusion.

[2] P.Wilson and O.Taplin (1993), ’The ’Aetiology’ of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, vol. 39, p. 172.

[3] See above n. 1.

^[4] P.Wilson and O.Taplin. (1993), ’The ’Aetiology’ of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, p. 172.

^[5] Cf. Eu. 306; C. A. Faraone. (1985), ‘Aeschylus’ ὕμνος δεσμοῖς (Eum. 306) and Attic Judicial Curse Tablets’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies vol. 105, p. 150.