Sunshine and Matricide: Dionysus and the Electra plays

Abstract

Ancient Greek drama is often discussed in isolation from the fifth-century Athenian Theater of Dionysus, where for the most part it was first produced, and commonly without regard for the religion and rites of Dionysus, the patron deity of the playwrights who composed its dramas, and without consideration for the nature of the festival experience afforded their audiences in the daylong sequences of enactments. Primarily lacking in the centuries of scholarship that have attempted to understand and evaluate the corpus of surviving dramas is an understanding of the nature of the ancient intoxication accessed by the god’s drink of wine, its relationship to the plant-gathering rituals of the bacchanalian revel and the herbal psychoactive fortifying agents added to the drink, making it a sacramental Eucharist, an entheogen, whose symbolism mediated the dichotomous antithesis of the wild and the cultivated, both botanical and social. Three playwrights, each the prominent exponent in each of three succeeding generations, dominate the history of Greek tragedy—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Each composed at least one play on the mythical figure of Electra, who was pivotal in urging her brother Orestes to commit matricide, to kill their mother Clytemnestra, the sister of Helen, for whom the Trojan War was fought. The two later playwrights were aware of the work of their great predecessor, and commented on it, as well as each other in their dramas. The story of Orestes’ matricide, moreover, has a quasi-historical referent in the dynastic succession for the kingship of Mycenae, whose disputed token of sovereignty was a golden lamb, a zoomorphism for an intoxicant that accessed shamanic empowerment. The controversy over possession of it involves the societal transition of the royal house from a queendom to a kingdom, from matriarchal to patriarchal dominance—the dawning of a new day, hence the coincidence of matricide with the rising sun. The murder of Clytemnestra and her chosen mate or paramour the goat-man Aegisthus, symbolically sometimes presented as a decapitation, has its analogue, in the foundational myth for the citadel of Mycenae, with the heroic task of Perseus, who first imposed masculine control over the city when he harvested the head of the Gorgon Medusa at the site of the fortress—as a mushroom.