Similarly, we must take care not to see Agamemnon's dilemma at Aulis as a struggle between King and Father, a conflict between duty and feeling; he has a duty to both his positions: as commander of the fleet he has a duty to sacrifice his daughter if that will allow the fleet to sail; as father he has a duty to protect her, as a member of his family, his oikos. Nor should we see Clytemnestra as being motivated in the first place by jealousy of Cassandra or lust for Aegisthus. Aeschylus presents her as simply a threat to the oikos, a perverter of the natural order of things. When Orestes is about to kill her, in the second play in the trilogy, he says he will kill her next to Aegisthus, ‘for he is the man you love and you hate that other whom you were bound to love’. Jones comments: ‘When he says that Klytemnestra was bound to love Agamemnon Orestes does not mean that she should have striven to ensure a feeling of love in herself, but that she should have conformed to the love-situation in which she was placed.’ This of course brings out how difficult it is in our post-Enlightenment age to make sense of these plays and how our response to art can never be completely separated from our response to the world: we are outraged at the thought of arranged marriages and our individualised society cannot make sense of a term like philia, which does not mean romantic love but, as Jones puts it, clumsily as he admits, ‘a state of nearness and dearness’ — my wife is philia to me, but so are my cattle and my spear. Though this may be offensive to us, unless we are prepared to make the imaginative leap we will always simply project our own world picture onto that of other cultures and remain locked up in ourselves, and so deeply impoverished.
Without the music and the choreography we are of course left with a shell of what the Athenian audience would have experienced. Nevertheless, it is possible, with a sensitive masked production like Peter Hall's at the National in 1981, to understand why Kierkegaard should have felt that witnessing these terrible plays is strangely soothing. As Jones puts it: ‘The Necessity that crushes a man also vindicates the world's sense.’ The tearing of the fabric of the House of Atreus which we witness also brings home to us the strength and resilience of that fabric, and the nourishing virtues of the world's order.
In Aeschylus that order is displayed through the medium of the oikos; in Sophocles we move from family to place and from household to person. ‘No question of Sophocles’ superiority arises', notes Jones, ‘but merely of his difference.’ The key to Sophocles, he suggests, is his empathy with blindness — the blind Tiresias, the blind Oedipus. Very beautifully, he says:
All men … are teleologically blind. All life moves within a shell-like containment of final ignorance and impotence. To act or think in self-founded certainty of what tomorrow will bring is to ape the poor blind mad man who throws away his stick, shakes off the guiding hand and plunges forward alone. Humanity's stick is its ritual life … The guiding hand is lent by the gods.
And death, for Sophoclean man, is not the end-point of life; rather it is that which surrounds humanity like a sea, and men feel this rather as the blind Oedipus feels the sunlight on his body. In a passage which could almost have been written by Kierkegaard, Jones notes:
In both Aeschylus and Sophocles, the moment when a man perceives the operation of the powers that are destroying him is one of solemn religio-tragic exaltation — not because the individual is ‘saved’ thereby, but because Necessity and Fate and the ways of Zeus have been exposed for human consciousness in a flash of perfect clarity … While Death is terrible, it is also Deliverer and Healer.
Oedipus, after all, performs the task the city has asked of him, that of finding the murderer of Laius and thus cleansing the city of pollution; that this means cleansing the city of himself is terrible for him and his family and sad for the citizens, but it is the price that has to be paid if the city is to survive. His objective pollution and his subjective innocence, explains Jones,
are features, so to speak, of the tragic mask, visible side by side. Their non-communication is not mysterious, it is the norm of the Greek masked drama. The mystery is created by ourselves when we seek to validate them in depth, bending them back so that they converge upon a single stable seat of consciousness … Instead of which they lie calmly printed on the mask.
Even at the moment of death the two do not come together. In Oedipus at Colonus Oedipus, when the thunder sounds, knows what it is he has to do and ‘he begins to move with mysterious confidence towards his place of death’, as Jones says, a representative of ‘all humanity at the dark limit of life, blind, committed to action (there is no doing nothing in Greek tragedy), with a god leading’.
Before that he speaks to his daughters:
My children, this day you lose your father; here and now there perishes all that is I, and you will not any longer bear the burden of tending me — a heavy burden, my children, as I know. And yet one word, quite alone, resolves all this pain. That word is love. Love was the gift you had from me as from no one else, and now you must live out your lives without me. (ll.1611–19)
Jones's comment on this, in its precision and non-sentimentality, suggests why some of us consider him the best English critic of the second half of the twentieth century:
What renders innocent — sanctifies even — Oedipus's thought of his own love lightening his daughters' labours on his behalf, is an obscure literal acceptance of the work which the one little word has been doing; he is not using the word solely to denote the fact of his love, he is looking at the word as at a half-domesticated life which remains still outward and alien at the moment of appropriation. For utterance is appropriation: the word is Oedipus's.
The effect, he rightly says, ‘is a brilliant impenetrability; groping for the people whose words these are, we explore the hard surface of the mask in its linguistic and acoustic dimension’. In other words, we have to learn to live with such impenetrability, to relax and savour it. For it is very precious.
It is the mask that becomes redundant in the exhilarating but perverse plays of the last dramatist of the group, Euripides. For Jones, Euripides arouses the same feelings of an art form in decline, he says, as listening to Beethoven would arouse in a lover of Bach and Haydn. Here at last we find the solitary and inward self of nineteenth-century translations of Aristotle. In Iphigeneia in Aulis, for example, we have an Agamemnon who hesitates and changes his mind. First he decides to disband the army; then, persuaded by Menelaus, he alters course and writes a letter (yes, we are finally on familiar dramatic territory) to Clytemnestra, bidding her bring Iphigeneia to Aulis so that she can be married to Achilles (a ruse to get her to come of course). When the play opens he is composing a new letter, having changed his mind once again, telling his wife to keep their daughter at home. At this moment a herald enters to announce that Clytemnestra and Iphigeneia have landed. But Euripides isn't done with us yet. Menelaus now tells his brother that he has been persuaded by him and is abandoning his former standpoint: ‘Let the army be disbanded and leave Aulis.’ But it is too late. Agamemnon points out that Calchas the seer will tell the army about the divine demand for Iphigeneia's life. Menelaus suggests they kill him, but Agamemnon replies that Odysseus too knows about the oracle. There is no escape.