Sacrificing Justice

Suffering and Civilization

Before whom do we feel shame? Can we be guilty, must we atone, to those whose lips will never pronounce a curse against us? If stag falls in the forest to a hunter’s bullet we know it makes a physical sound, an echoing of waves in the medium of air, but what is the ethical noise made by the conjunction of a flying piece of lead, a man in camouflage, and a dying hart? Does this suffering have anything to do with justice? John Rawls would say no; Martha Nussbaum would say yes. ¹ But my story is not about rival descriptions of the theory of justice, or at least not primarily so. Instead this is a story about the suffering of animals, about how that suffering is experienced as an accusation and a threat, about how humans have covered over this accusation via the institution of sacrifice, and about how we continue to use tragic theater, juridical justice, and the democratic theory of consent to hide ourselves from the consequences of our actions. It is about how knowing what we are doing produces a longing not-to-know, a desire to escape into forgetfulness, and about how we need to recover the sources of this longing if we are to ever wake up. This brings me to the major portion of my story, which will take us through the acts of suffering, guilt, expiation, trial, consent, and forgetting in the great trilogy of Aeschylus the Athenian. While critics frequently describe the movement of the Oresteia as a progression from barbarism to civilization, it is in Aeschylus that we will instead see how barbarism and civilization collude in establishing a human community on a dual basis: the sacrifice of animals and the denial that this sacrifice counts as political violence.

The Animals’ Place

Animals, at least of the nonhuman variety, are not typically considered relevant to political theory; most academics take it to be obvious that humans are distinguished from animals precisely by the fact that we are uniquely political. This claim is read back onto Aristotle, who says something like it in the Politics, though careful readers of Aristotle would also note that he complicates this claim in his biological works. ² Still, the work of primatologists like Frans de Waal, who argues that chimpanzees at least are political creatures, has had little effect on the borders of academic political philosophy. ³ This is the sleep that I am talking about: the assumed obviousness of the nonpolitical status of nonhumans. It is easy to see why nonhumans are so easily classed as nonpolitical, since they are not political in the traditional Aristotelian senses: they do not argue (with us) about justice or expediency. But the same could be said about many groups of humans in the past, and perhaps in the future. Whether because of language barriers, or cultural prejudice, or patriarchy, there were numerous ways in which one group of humans failed to hear the voice of other humans in any way that could allow them to engage in actions of reciprocity, justice, or politics.

One of the implications of being classified as nonpolitical, as a nonperson, is that you are rendered capable of being appropriated as property by someone who is a person. While there are benefits to being someone’s property, in that, following Aristotle again, you are arguably more likely to be cared for (because you belong to someone), there are substantial costs to this as well (which perhaps explains why no human wants to be the property of another human, however great the possible benefits). Among these costs to nonhuman (animal) property one might include (1) spending the entirety of one’s life in the industrial food chain under conditions that are at best “unnatural,” and at worst cruel; (2) being subject to regular pain-inducing experiments as part of a life under the medical-industrial complex; (3) living a foreshortened life because, as property, there is no fiscal incentive to a capitalist enterprise in maintaining life beyond maximum profitability; (4) having one’s DNA subject to manipulation on a massive scale, based on the industrial patenting and trade-marking of your species’ genome.

This list barely begins to enumerate the costs of being nonhuman, and it does not touch on the degree to which humans are themselves subject to the cost of being designated as property, a nontrivial addendum. But though the mistreatment of humans and nonhumans shows significant correlation, my primary concern in this essay is with the nonhuman side of the equation. ⁴ My task here is to recover the manner that sacrifice, in particular as it is conceived in the Greek context and as it is entwined with Greek notions of political subjectivity, is related to contemporary structures of human/nonhuman dominance. In returning to Aeschylus I unravel one of the key causal threads in the fabric of the human/nonhuman tapestry, by revisiting one of the earliest moments in our political and cultural tradition where the linkages between sacrifice, nonhumans, and politics are theorized and displayed. By examining the past we are able to see the contingencies of history that time has covered over and turned into “nature.” We will see that one of the causes for our current episteme/practice lies in a long-hidden assumption about the violence underlying all possibility of life, and the need that this impels in us to deny violence through a juridical scaffolding that elides its debt to sacrifice. We can begin to look again at sacrifice and the demands it makes upon us, the costs it imposes, and the false promises that it makes us. We can then begin to ask what a democracy beyond sacrifice might look like, and whether there is really such a significant difference between the cosmos and the polis.

Sacrificial Misgivings

One might fairly raise a challenge at this point, to wit: what does a modern slaughterhouse have to do with the sacrificial rituals of the ancient Athenians? Aren’t we moderns completely different from the Greeks in that, to the extent that we slaughter and eat animals by the billions every year, we largely conceive of the animal body as something evacuated of moral meaning? That is, even if one grants that human treatment of animals is problematic, even cruel, what does looking at rituals of Greek sacrifice tell us? This is a serious challenge, though it is one that, in principle, is no different or greater than the challenge that contemporary democratic theorists face when applying Athenian practices to our own often novel problems.

Contemporary democratic discourse, however, suffers from cognitive dissonance on the issue of sacrifice. While democracies must mobilize their citizens to make sacrifices on behalf of the community as a whole, democratic rhetoric generally renders this sacrifice invisible. Against this tradition, Danielle Allen argues for “the centrality of sacrifice to democratic politics and the close relationship between sacrifice and democratic legal authority,” ⁵ since “[n]o democratic citizen, adult or child, escapes the necessity of losing out at some point in a public decision. . . . Their sacrifice makes collective action possible.” ⁶ Sacrifice, like many concepts before it, now has a secularized meaning that is linked with its theological origins, though which now has developed a broader connotation. We commonly use “sacrifice” to mean giving up something for the sake of something else, and this “giving up” can take forms both quotidian and heroic.

In the case of nonhumans today, we can see both a general and specific meaning of sacrifice. In the wider sense, nonhuman interests are typically surrendered in favor of human interests. A pig’s interest in living more than eight months is given up in favor of the consumer’s interest in eating bacon, so we can say that the pig is sacrificed for the consumer. There is a more specific sense to sacrifice, however, that is more appropriate to use in the case of animals. Jacques Derrida points to this when he calls sacrifice “a noncriminal putting-to-death,” which is essentially to say that it is a form of killing that is legitimate. ⁷ Derrida’s larger point is that doing violence is necessary to being alive, being human, such that to maintain one’s life one is constantly forced to take other lives. Naming something “sacrifice,” according to Derrida, allows us to separate out the necessary from non-necessary killing, so that we can live in the world without thinking ourselves murderers (the criminal form of putting-to-death). And we cannot live without sacrifice, Derrida says, since even the most basic practices of being human, such as eating and learning, involve something akin to eating (taking in matter, decomposing it for our purposes, eliminating the unused as waste). To live we must kill but to kill is wrong, so we create a kind of killing that is the exception to the rule that killing is murder. Thus the importance of animals: if we must kill living things to eat then we need a class of living beings who are sacrificeable —whose deaths do not produce the retaliatory cycle of vengeance depicted in the Oresteia (see below) because their deaths are not criminal.

My second response to the relevance of sacrifice is to return us to the actual Greek practice, in order to see that we may do the Greeks and ourselves a disservice in depicting their actions solely through a sacralized lens, as wholly “other” to our modern secular pretensions. The average Greek citizen, and certainly the men performing the killing work on the animals, probably thought little about the theological underpinnings of their activities; they were providing meat for the city to eat and killed thousands of animals yearly to fulfill this rather mundane purpose. In this sense, the Athenians in sacrifice are not so distinct from Americans at the slaughterhouse —there is a demand for meat and someone is going to provide for it. ⁸

If, as Danielle Allen has suggested, all democracies depend on sacrifice in order to function at all, perhaps there are also ways in which sacrifice is not simply a “fact” of democracy, but is instead a valuable tool in the creation of a more self-reflective polity. Recent political theorists of the “tragic” stripe argue that attending to sacrifice is particularly important to democratic practice, as it is through pondering tragic, sacrificial spectacles that democratic citizens can become better citizens. It is to these arguments and their invocation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia that we now turn, though this turn will also reveal that Allen’s notion of sacrifice has its own soporific effects to beware. We will then be forced to ask whether sacrifice is located, as she claims, at the static border between the social and political worlds, ⁹ or whether it is instead that sacrifice constantly produces the separation between social and political realms. Sacrifice seen in this new light is less a mediator of the tension between social and political than it is the concept that effaces tensions and erects the stability of the polity on the back of a silenced “social” that is largely (now) composed of nonhuman actors.

Troubling the Aeschylean Solution

The Oresteia is especially important because of its influence on the political thought of ancient Athens, ¹⁰ and tragedy more generally is now taken to be a crucial institution of Athenian democracy. Peter Euben, Sara Monoson, and Josiah Ober, among others, have made the broader case for the relevance of the ancient theater to our contemporary reflections on the nature of democratic citizenship. ¹¹ Indeed, it has been claimed that the Oresteia is quite singular in this regard among the extant tragedies since what we see in the trilogy is nothing less than the emergence of civilization itself, where the play “exemplifies democratic efforts at political judgment in difficult circumstances marked by conflicting imperatives . . . [and] legal institutions come to replace blood feuds.” ¹² The institution of the jury trial at the conclusion of the trilogy not only ends the cycle of violence begun in the House of Atreus but creates an entirely new form of justice that becomes synonymous with the polis itself. Democratic politics enables a new appreciation of the capacity for unity to include difference and is imagined as the solution to the violence of the Homeric world that preceded it, with its aristocratic notion of justice ¹³ as “helping friends and harming enemies.” ¹⁴

As we see through the lens Aeschylus provides us, this traditional notion of justice, a version of the lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”), leads to a world that cannot escape from bloodshed because each new act of justice itself enacts a violence that brings forth a new round of avengers. This cyclical movement of vengeance has no point of cessation and can go on to infinity since justice in this world is inseparable from strife and warfare. But Aeschylus shows us how such a cycle can be stopped. What he celebrates as the triumph of Athenian ingenuity, the law court of the Areopagus, is something that encompasses conflicting conceptions of justice and which can adjudicate between these rival claims by (1) securing the prior consent of the parties to a public proceeding that itself claims to be authoritative, ¹⁵ and (2) ensuring that the judgment is lasting by giving each side, even the losing one, a degree of respect and recognition that reduces the likelihood of extra-procedural vigilantism. ¹⁶

This is an attractive vision of justice, to be sure, as it maintains a subtle and textured relationship to ambiguity and difference not often achieved even in our liberal polities. To paraphrase Peter Euben, it is so attractive because, like the framework of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, it seeks to grant both parties their due by giving honor even to the side which it chooses against. ¹⁷ But as I shall seek to explore here, this honoring-in-choosing-against is accompanied by an underlying violence that hides precisely in the interstices created by this ambiguous honoring. How is this so? Thoughtful readers of Aeschylus like Euben and Simon Goldhill ¹⁸ enable us to see the very real losses that triumphalist readings ¹⁹ of the Oresteia cover over, by grounding their own readings in the continuing importance of Aeschylus’s famed pathei mathos, the suffering that births wisdom. ²⁰ Suffering in a just city is “the foundation for a model of political thought and judgment alert to the meaning of human power and mortality” and as an institution “tragedy maintains the suffering necessary for wisdom” because our wisdom is necessarily faulty to the extent that it becomes complicit in the obliteration of pain, grief, and the memory of loss.” ²¹ Tragedy’s role in this project of civic education is likened by Euben to the actual deaths meted out to domestic animals in the sacrificial rituals, in that tragedy seeks to trouble civic identity by highlighting “the discrepancy between poetic vision and political realities . . . in the same way that Greek sacrifice joined festive joy with the horror of death.” ²²

This horror of death, both in the normal Greek religious ritual as well as in the production of tragic theater, depended upon the actual killing of living beings. If Euben is correct about this civic function of tragedy, the effectiveness of the tragic spectacle depends on the killing of beings similar enough to the audience that it evokes acute, visceral, horror in them. I will argue that this confrontation with horror is often complicit with a fetishization of animate death, both human and nonhuman, and that this fetishization continues to shape a host of social and political practices. In what follows I ask whether there is not something troubling about explicitly praising the Greek tragedies in light of their use of the Greek ritual of blood sacrifice. What does it mean to praise a practice for its complexity, texture, ambiguity, sensitivity to difference, and resistance to totalization, by comparing it to rituals that required pain and blood from nonhuman animals? Is it significant that these animal victims are marked by their silence and powerlessness? ²³ Where does wisdom cross over the thin line that separates acknowledging the woundedness of the human condition, to a political order that actually constitutes itself in and through the production of suffering?

The problem, in short, is that contemporary theorists who rely on suffering as a necessary antecedent find themselves endorsing not just metaphorical sacrifice but also the literal sacrifice of living beings. I will argue that this echoes the quest for the epithusias ²⁴ that we see in the Oresteia—the “final sacrifice” of Greek ritual that restores order. It is not simply that the sacrificial animals in the concluding processional of the Eumenides consummate the overturning of the “corrupted sacrifices” from earlier in the play; ²⁵ rather, the Furies themselves are sacrificed as part of the “third libation” that is necessary to the resolution of the moral and political problem of violence. ²⁶ What is more, this final sacrifice can only be effective—can only serve as “the act of violence that will bring the violence to an end”—if the victims themselves cannot or will not be avenged. ²⁷ How can such a stringent condition be met? This is the achievement of sacrifice as an institution, for which there are two crucial desiderata: (1) the victim either consents or is guilty beyond any possible dispute so that no one seeks to avenge its death, and (2) the victim is suitably akin to the “real” human perpetrator, the one who has committed a crime that others seek retribution for, to stand in as a substitute. ²⁸

These two criteria are met by displacing victimage as an institution, by making sure that victims are readily available but that they are not pulled from any community that could ever bring suit or pursue a vendetta. The Furies, I will claim, enjoy membership in such a community. But for “prosperous human communities” to endure they require something akin to certainty that both desiderata will be met in semi-perpetuity, particularly the first aspect, which I will term “invengeance” to indicate the inability (broadly construed) of the victim-group to be avenged. To be certain that such killing will not bring any challenge the Greeks, and we their heirs, have had recourse to a most serviceable category: those beings designated as nonhuman, whether as “animal” (zoon) broadly construed to mean “animals as opposed to humans” or “beast” (ther) or as named by their species (and therefore as always distinguished from humans/anthropoi). To be nonhuman is therefore to be classified as an invengeant, which also means that such a being is qualified to be sacrificed.

It is also crucial to the effectiveness of sacrifice as an institution that the origins of the violence of the practice be hidden, as social theorist Rene Girard has explored at some length. For Girard sacrifice must obscure its basic brutality because the selection of the sacrificial victim, or scapegoat, is almost entirely arbitrary, yet if this arbitrariness is recognized by the group then the sacrifice fails in its purpose. ²⁹ Communities need sacrifice in order to continue to exist at all, according to Girard, because they need to vent surplus aggression. Without the pressure-release valve that sacrifice serves as, groups are torn apart by factional strife resulting from internecine rivalry. ³⁰ The scapegoat is deemed responsible for the violent disruption of communal harmony, and is then subject to the unanimous violence of the group: “the two faces of violence seem to be juxtaposed; the extremes meet. The surrogate victim serves as catalyst in this metamorphosis. And in performing this function he seems to combine in his person the most pernicious and most beneficial aspect of violence. He becomes the incarnation, as it were, of a game men feign to ignore, one whose basic rules are indeed unknown to them: the game of their own violence.” ³¹ This “game” requires misrecognition in order to be effective, and paradoxically entails a reversal in the community’s evaluation of the scapegoat post-sacrifice. Now instead of the source of pollution, the scapegoat becomes the savior of the community: “The surrogate victim dies so that the entire community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in a new or renewed cultural order.” ³² This turnabout will take on particular significance when we later consider the hallowing of the Furies after their conversion into the Eumenides.

The blood sacrifice of nonhumans, especially, partakes of the misrecognition necessary to the “scapegoat function” that Girard describes. It appears on the surface that nonhumans in the normal Greek ritual, and the Furies in the Oresteia, are selected with good reasons (consent, guilt, etc.), but this rationality is only part of the story. There are particular qualities about the Furies that indeed make them desirable to exile or sacrifice, especially the vampiric joy they direct at Orestes that seems out of all proportion with their function as the incarnations of retributive justice: “all blood sucked from your body till it’s nothing but death’s vaporous feedbag” (Ag. 346-48). ³³ While the domestic animals usually sacrificed by the Greeks did not display the bloodlust and savagery that Aeschylus attributes to the Furies, the chaotic admixture of bestial and divine in them makes their continued untamed presence in the polis a source of pollution. Aeschylus shows his audience good reasons to target these avatars of unchecked aggression as a particular site of danger for the continued peace of the community.

Why then has it been so common to for commentators to argue that the Oresteia is a progression from darkness to light, from barbarism to civilization? ³⁴ This is where the Girardian sleight-of-hand occurs. The solution to the trilogy partakes of the very brutality it seems to expel, but it does so by ending the reign of “rigid Fury” (Ag. 78) in the name of the substitution of persuasion and civilization over force and barbarism. For its success in this operation it requires that the qualities that seem so dangerous are projected externally onto a group (the Furies) that can then be excluded from society. The community needs to exorcise fear, force, and violence to maintain itself, but also needs to seem like it does not do so in the manner of the old world of the Atreidae. It is due in part to the skill of Aeschylus’s dramatic art, and in part his use of the scapegoat mechanism noted by Girard, that critics have so frequently missed the continuities between the world of the Agamemnon and the world of the Eumenides. Aeschylus does not completely hide all of this, of course, since Athena and the Furies state quite plainly that the fear and punishment will continue in the new Areopagite Athens. But the trilogy ends on the triumphal note of a torchlit procession, complete with animals in train and animals (possibly) being sacrificed onstage. If Aeschylus has pulled back the curtain on the violent foundation of the polis a bit earlier, he is in the finale engaged in a covering action that uses precisely a sacrificial operation (real sacrifice of live animals, metaphorical sacrifice of actor-Furies) to induce a repression of the knowledge of violence in the audience.

So Aeschylus requires that the Furies maintain some of their old functions, but they are also sent underground—expelled in a sense—and sacrificed. They embody traits necessary for the survival of the polis, but those traits also represent a fundamental threat to the stability of the community. This is the problematic solution to political violence that the Oresteia crafts: its resolution is indeed complex and ambiguous, as Goldhill and Euben have noted, but what needs exploration is the way the trilogy continues its sacrificial structure all the way through to the conclusion. This sacrifice is all the more effective for the way it covers over its sacrificial aspects in its use of consent, juridical reason, and plurality-in-unity to resolve the dangers that radically different visions of justice create for the polis. And animals, real and metaphorical, are crucial to the operation of this resolution.

The Longing for Proper Sacrifice

The chorus of the Agamemnon states the problem that the people of Argos live under the implacable reign of Fury haunts the trilogy as a whole: “And neither by singeing flesh/ nor tipping cup of wine/ nor shedding burning tears can you/ enchant away the rigid Fury” (Ag. 75-79). Echoing this initial lament, Aeschylus dramatizes the failure of sacrifice as an institutional solution to violence through the narrative arc of the Oresteia as a succession of failed sacrifices: Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia (though formally outside the action of the play), Clytemnestra’s sacrifice of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s libations to supplicate the ghost of Agamemnon, Orestes’s killing of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (described by Orestes as a sacrifice), Orestes’s purification via pigs’ blood, and finally Orestes’s flight as a suppliant from Delphi to Athens. Each actor tries to dam the flow of the blood-drenched tide through a sacrificial act that can be the concluding sacrifice (epithusias) to “set the house in order once and for all” (Ag. 1708), as Clytemnestra wishfully concludes the Agamemnon, but each in turn fails. Sacrifice throughout the trilogy is not simply an attendant or handmaiden to justice, but is inseparable from justice itself.

The choral lament and Clytemnestra’s wish dramatize the gap between the expectations of the suppliant and the harsh reality that they must instead face, as the only practices that secure human access to the divine are themselves powerless in the face of violence incarnate. Aeschylus, the reputedly stodgy champion of the old heroic morality, ³⁵ shows us more than anyone why the heroic ethos is fatally flawed. He does so in part by giving us such a detailed description of three failed sacrifices that power this text: Iphigenia, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra. Finally, the Furies themselves want to sacrifice Orestes in order to atone for his matricide, and from their attempt to sacrifice Orestes the final resolution will emerge, though it occurs through a paradoxical reversal (one of many in the text). Anne Lebeck is correct to note that in the Eumenides “the fate of victim and avenger fuse. The Erinyes, who threaten transgressors with darkness and dishonor, themselves face loss of honor, dwell in darkness,” though she does go quite not far enough in recognizing just how fully the Furies must become victims in order to become Eumenides. ³⁶

Clytemnestra’s subtle goading of Agamemnon (to walk across the tapestries, invoking divine wrath against his overweening pride) is in a sense superfluous: she has already decided to kill her husband and has planned the scenario in elaborate detail. We might be tempted to ask why there is a need for the extensive pomp that accompanies her murder. Is she just reveling in her intellectual mastery of her husband, or heightening the depth of his fall by claiming to grant him a quasi-divine elevation? ³⁷ The actions of both Clytemnestra and Agamemnon are redolent with the themes already announced by the Chorus earlier in the play, and here Girard’s sacrificial frame can help bring clarity to the episode. In that Clytemnestra requires that Agamemnon ritually sin (walking on the tapestries) as the precursor to his death, she is in fact enacting one of the moments in the Greek practice of animal sacrifice that seems most contradictory and absurd to the modern eye.

The Greek ritual of animal sacrifice calls for a victim that will be both assenting and guilty: ideally the guilt is produced through the symbolic violation of the sacred order, though the victim can also simply assent to being killed (as a voluntary acknowledgement of the need for someone to die in order for gods to be propitiated and the community preserved). As Walter Burkert tells us, this “comedy of innocence” could begin in a number of ways, one of the more common being the placing of grain in a sacred space around the altar. ³⁸ When the sacrificial victim not surprisingly wandered over into this region to eat the grain, it was seen as having committed a crime by transgressing on ground hallowed for the gods, and thus as “guilty” it could be legitimately killed. While this may seem an odd or incidental portion of the ritual, Burkert tells us that the multiple instantiations of this comedy were rather common, and thus Aeschylus could draw on this aspect of Greek religion to bring additional resonance to his text. ³⁹

What deserves emphasis here is that, in addition to the Chorus’s earlier lament about the failures of sacrifice as an institution, the killing of Iphigenia is not only described as a proteleia, the preliminary sacrifice usually performed before marriage, but Iphigenia herself is described as a sacrificial animal: “Hoist her over the altar/ like a yearling” (Ag. 230). Clytemnestra will repay Agamemnon’s killing of her child with a sacrifice of her own, replacing the virgin with the king entrapped in a net of robes as a direct response: “He thought no more of it than killing a beast/ and his flocks were rich, teeming in their fleece/ but he sacrificed his own child, our daughter” (Ag. 1440-41). She offers Agamemnon’s death in the context of the “third libation” ⁴⁰ and orchestrates from beginning to end the set of offerings, animal victims (killed earlier in the Agamemnon), and the murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra as a complex but unified sacrificial drama. ⁴¹ It is in this context that we should consider Agamemnon’s treading on the purple tapestries (Ag. 932 ff.), which he initially resists for fear of bringing the wrath of the gods as well as because it smacks of “barbarian peacocking out of Asia” (Ag. 913).

When Clytemnestra gains Agamemnon’s willing complicity, she is not merely revealing the underlying flaws of his character; she is carrying the sacrificial ritual through to its logical conclusion. What strikes the modern eye as absurd, and what leads to the convoluted attempts to explain Agamemnon’s actions in terms of his stupidity or hubris, is also what is likely to cause us to misread what Aeschylus is showing us here. The comedy of innocence that is part of the normal structure of sacrifice seems ridiculous; no animal can really be said to be “guilty” in any real sense of the term, and we look askance at the Greeks when they feel the need to make the victim somehow complicit (willing, guilty) in its own death. Yet without this compliance the victim’s death calls for vengeance that will raise the Furies in its wake, as the Chorus in the Agamemnon laments, “Justice brings new acts of agony, yes, on new grindstones Fate is grinding sharp the swords of Justice. . . . Each charge meets counter-charge. None can judge between them. Justice. The plunderer plundered, the killer pays the price” (Ag. 1564-65, 1588-90). But with Agamemnon’s consent to incur guilt by walking across the tapestries, Clytemnestra hopes that his violent death can be transformed from murder into sacrifice; Fury would not be aroused, and normal life is then made possible. Clytemnestra herself points to this rationale as a justification for her actions: “But I will swear a pact with the spirit born within us. I embrace his works, cruel as they are but done at last, if he will leave our house in the future, bleed another line/ with kinsmen murdering kinsmen” (Ag. 1595-1600). The Queen is engaged in the “first stage” of requital for murder, according to classicist Froma Zeitlin in which order can only be restored by shedding the actual blood of the murderer. ⁴²

Clytmenestra’s sacrifices are corrupted, however, as is Orestes’s killing of his mother, resulting in the trial scene of the Eumenides where “charge meets counter-charge” in a novel form (Ag. 1588). It is frequently argued that Aeschylus is giving us a new kind of hero in the finale of the trilogy—here the polis emerges as the true subject of the play, as it and not Orestes or any of the other characters brings to a conclusion the irremediable cycle of violence. ⁴³ Athena and the Areopagus substitute impartial justice for the partiality and passion of Apollo and the Furies, and the novel establishment of a trial court in effect shows the public sphere to be the necessary resolution to private violence. Yet what appears a bloodless victory through peitho, the persuasion that Athena uses to transform the Furies, is in fact less an escape from sacrificial bloodletting than a metaphorical reinstantiation of the sacrificial economy by different means.

Aeschylus insists, ultimately, that animal sacrifice will bring about the longed-for resolution to the bloody violence of the house of Atreus. The finale of the trilogy is shot-through with imagery that ties the Furies to predatory beasts (who are not typically the subjects of sacrifice in Greek ritual), but there are a number of places where the poet’s imagery ties the Furies/Eumenides directly to the domestic animals of the sacrificial rite. Furthermore, the dramatic action that closes the play, in which the transformed Furies are led to an underground chamber where they will hence dwell, itself enacts an entombing of these goddesses. Finally, the much-celebrated persuasion of the Furies, and the recognition that they seem to win from Athena and Athens itself, can be seen as the culmination of the comedy of innocence that grounds the Greek practice of sacrifice.

The images of the Furies directly depict them as ravenous, bloodthirsty monstrosities: woman, bloodhound, Gorgon, and goddess wrapped in one, they are not so much one particular kind of animal as they are a polluted, ever-shifting mixture. ⁴⁴ They are indirectly likened to predatory animals via the actions and desires ascribed to them, particularly if we keep in mind the numerous occasions on which they talk of drinking human blood. They taunt Orestes in the Eumenides by describing him as a sacrificial victim meant for them, but one whom they will eat raw as would a wild beast of prey: “out of your living marrow I will drain my red libation, out of your veins I suck my food, my raw, brutal cups . . . you’ll feast me alive, my fatted calf, not cut on the altar first” (Eu. 265-66, 304-5). They are also quite directly linked with domestic animals destined to be sacrificed, as when the Chorus of Furies is heard for the first time in the Eumenides—in one of the rare places that stage direction occurs in Greek drama–Aeschylus has them say “mugmos” (Eu. 117) twice. This is usually translated as “muttering” but it is also the Greek equivalent of “moo,” drawing attention to the Furies’s resenblance to while they are sleeping. ⁴⁵ This bovine lowing echoes and amplifies earlier references to the Furies as a “flock without a herdsman” (Eu. 194), as Apollo calls them, as well as the Furies’ own claim to be a wide-ranging flock in pursuit of the guilty (Eu. 248).

Sacrificed, Honored, or Both?

How can it be demonstrated that the resolution of the play depends upon the actual sacrifice of the Furies, rather than their cooptation into the new order? First consider that there is a general consensus in the literature on the importance of the sacrificial theme to the trilogy as a whole. ⁴⁶ If the critics are correct that “restoration” of the sacrificial cry, the ololugmos, ⁴⁷ and the return of proper sacrifice is so central to the solution of the Eumenides, then we must wonder how this is actually achieved if the Furies are not sacrificed, but instead are merely the objects of the final sacrifice of the Eumenides. Are they being propitiated, or are they the means of bringing propitiation? Anne Lebeck tells us that the dramatic economy of the plays works by turning avengers into victims. ⁴⁸ We know that the Chorus in the first play laments that their normal blood sacrifices are ineffective, and we then see the failure of sacrifice dramatized as Clytemnestra and Orestes each attempt to bring order and peace to their house via further bloodshed but fail. Both of these characters offer traditional sacrifices in the wake of killing their family member, but these rites (at the beginning of the Choephoroi and Eumenides, respectively) are as ineffectual as the Chorus’s initial lament would have led us to believe.

How then can the ololugmos be said to be restored? There are various ways that scholars have answered this. For Heath it is that “the beast within must be isolated and relegated to its proper role in the state” and that this occurs by the Furies being separated from their previous bestiality—“at the end of the trilogy and for the first time, beasts may simply be domestic animals firmly ensconced in the polis” rather than metaphorical carriers of the contagion of violence. ⁴⁹ For Zeitlin the restoration occurs because the Furies are reconciled, transformed, and cured by Athena’s persuasion. ⁵⁰ I think there is something to both of these proposals, but we can go farther if we combine them by connecting peitho with putting “the bestial in its proper place.” ⁵¹ Aeschylus needs beasts to return to their normal function, as animals for the use of the polis, and being available for sacrifice is one of their primary uses. But we have also seen that the Furies are themselves bestial. Yet interpreting this as a story about the efficacy of “civilization” triumphing through Athena’s peitho misses something important. Why? We know (1) that Athena’s peitho is hardly innocent of violence, since she openly marks her access to Zeus’ thunderbolt (Eu. 836-38); (2) that it partakes of a trance-inducing “white magic” no less than the Furies’ song; ⁵² (3) that peitho is a part of the sacrificial ritual’s comedy of innocence in which the animal consents. And peitho cannot be the solution by itself since the plays have also dramatically demonstrated that peitho is as liable to corruption as sacrifice: “miserable Persuasion” (Ag. 385) ⁵³ too fails to attain an enduring resolution and needs redeeming no less than the corrupted sacrifices. But the proper sacrificial ritual includes persuasion, as I have noted, so we can see the way out that Aeschylus provides is through a restoration of sacrifice that requires the victims actually consent – and this is exactly what he shows his audience. The comedy of innocence seeks to articulate a consenting voice for the sacrificed victim through the ritual structure that requires him to nod or shake his head. Aeschylus’ drama imaginatively achieves a completion to the sacrificial ritual that was always (necessarily) outside the ritual though always being pointed toward or deferred. Here, at the end of the Eumenides, the beast can finally speak up. ⁵⁴ It is only this voice, the animal voice of the Furies, that, in consenting, can bring an end to the cycle of corrupted sacrifices that the normal sacrifices cannot accomplish.

Critics place substantial responsibility on the corruption of sacrifice as a causal factor in the endless cycle of violence, yet signally fail to include sacrifice’s restoration as one of the causes of the resolution in the Eumenides. That they do not do so is not surprising, because, following Zeitlin, they emphasize only the final ololugmos as the symbol of restored sacrifice, and this of course comes after the important reconciling of the Furies with Athena and Athens. Yet Zeitlin says that “the motif of sacrifice corrupted . . . plays an important role in the development of the trilogy.” ⁵⁵ How can corrupt sacrifice, to the extent that it drives action in the plays, be righted, if not by propitious sacrifice? But for her the pious sacrifice is an effect rather than a cause, and it remains puzzling how something as powerful as sacrilege and blasphemy could be restored without recourse to their opposites, piety and respect for the gods. ⁵⁶ While one way of achieving this is surely the seeming respect that Athena pays to the Furies, the most natural way of restoring sacrifice to its place between gods and humans is to perform it properly. The only contender for such a pious sacrifice that occurs before the final procession, that brings about the final procession underground, is the one I have proposed.

Aeschylus gives us a number of narrative clues to indicate that the Furies must be sacrificed, in addition to the structural logic that I have just outlined. We know that the only beings who are “semnos” (august/revered/holy) in the Eumenides are the Furies and the animal victims (Eu. 1004), further linking the Furies with the structural function of animal victimage. And there is also the matter of just where exactly the Furies are being sent by Athena; immediately before Athena refers to the “awesome sacrifices” (sphagion semnon) that are to speed the Furies on their way, Athena says that she “must lead the way to your chambers” (Ag. 1003). But this word, normally translated as chamber, thalamos, has a number of different meanings, including bridal chamber, grave, and netherworld, the last of which Aeschylus himself used in the Persians. ⁵⁷ Athena may thus be saying that she will lead the Furies to their grave, to Hades, which implies that the Furies are being killed or at least buried alive. It is also unclear how to interpret what these sacrifices are actually doing, since, while normally the sphagion semnon are taken to be sacrificial victims who accompany the Furies into the earth, if we read thalamos as grave/Hades instead of “chamber” then it is the Furies themselves who become the “awesome sacrifices.” The textual polyvalence here continues the conflation of avenger/victim roles highlighted by Lebeck, and even if there are actual cattle onstage in the original staging ⁵⁸ it would still be the case that the Furies’ path underground is being likened to an entombment rather than a joyous reconciliation. Indeed Athena and the Furies exchange a reciprocal set of chairete (Eu. 1004, 1012, 1023) over the course of this reconciliation, meaning “rejoice” but also “goodbye/farewell,” which fits in with viewing their journey underground as more of a final going-away than a cooptation into the polis.

While the Furies are generally considered to be chthonic figures they themselves violently resist being sent underground, which would be strange if Athena were merely returning them home. They lament being “driven under the earth (kata te gas), condemned, like so much filth” (Eu. 880), perhaps because they are more frequently inclined to “hunt . . . over the wide rolling earth . . . in flock” (Eu. 245-48). Passages in the text that most explicitly link them with the underworld, as in “arai d’ en oikois ges h’upai keklemetha,” which Fagles translates as “Deep in the Halls of Earth they call us Curses” (Eu. 429), evoke more those whom the Furies kill and send underground rather than marking out any particular dwelling place. Given this textual ambiguity, we cannot say conclusively that the Furies do not live underground, and they clearly are associated with darkness and driving their victims to Hades. My interpretation has the advantage of including this polysemy rather than excluding it, however, since associating the Furies with the underworld does not rule out the possibility that they are being entombed in the ground at the conclusion of the trilogy. My rendition takes the laments of the Furies seriously (kata te gas), and also fits with the general tendency of inversion that Lebeck and others highlight . . . in this case the irony being that the Furies who have sent so many to Hades are now themselves being condemned to go there.

We might also ponder Athena’s description of the newly pliant Furies as foinikobaptois, wearing crimson robes (Eu. 1028). Many scholars accept the theory that the Furies were actually reclothed onstage here, and that their new colors indicate their status as Metics (resident aliens) in the Athenian polis. In addition to referring to their foreign origins, however, scholars have also pointed out that red is appropriate to the Furies because of their role in avenging blood guilt and their frequent references to drinking blood, and also serves as a reminder of “the blood-stained robe of the slain Agamemnon (displayed at the climactic moments of both preceding tragedies)” ⁵⁹ and the pain necessary for the pathei mathos. This is surely true, but a more coherent reading of the trilogy comes into view by reading the symbology slightly more literally. Rather than seeing the robes as virtually bloody by way of their reference to Agamemnon they can also stand in for his robes more directly, as being blood-stained because these robes in the Eumenides are actually bloody. And by proudly wearing these bloody garments, the Furies complete the reversal of the corrupt sacrifice of Agamemnon (and all the others), because now for the first time it is the sacrificed who revel in their blood-drenched status (as the proper victim should) rather than the perverse triumphs that Clytemnestra and Orestes staged over their victims.

Finally, it is through a torchlit procession reminiscent of a funeral march that the Eumenides head to their new home, symbolically entombed within the earth. The ololugmos reminds us of the earlier efforts to establish order in the polis, by Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, but the previous events have now been transformed into an amiable ritual because the victims this time (unlike Iphigenia’s gagging by Agamemnon, or Clytemnestra’s inveigling of Agamemnon) have fully consented. In taming the Furies, Athens has removed the most bestial aspects of these creatures while retaining the more gentle, and it is these domesticated creatures who can then be sacrificed and entombed in the earth. The Furies had represented the violent potential of animality to destroy the polis, and it is this power that has now been taken from them.

Viewing the Eumenides as a sacrifice in the Greek context does not render them dishonorable, as we might imagine if we think about the way that animals killed for human needs are often treated today. The Greek polis depended for its daily existence on a plentiful supply of domestic animals available for sacrifice, and while we need not wax nostalgic about how the animals may have been treated, we must also recognize that a certain dignity attached to these animals because they were the direct means of communication with the gods. Their deaths were tied to their purpose in securing the blessings of the gods for the prosperity of the polis, and as long as this larger function was maintained by Greek religion the animals’ place was not without honor.

The triumphal parade that closes the Eumenides, along with the honors that Athena heaps on them to convert them into the protectresses of hearth and Athenian civic unity, seem to vitiate my contention that the Furies are being sacrificed rather than honored at the conclusion. But what if, as I have already indicated with sacrifice and consent, so too are sacrifice and honor (in the Greek context) bedfellows rather than antagonists? If we think of sacrifice as something like scapegoating, in the sense that Danielle Allen uses this term to denote a kind a sacrifice that loads all of the costs onto one particular group that itself gains none of the benefits, we will be inclined to say that the Furies are not being sacrificed, and cannot be seen as sacrificial victims. But this is a secularized conception of sacrifice and is not transferable wholesale to the Aeschylean world—in fact it causes us to misread the resolution to the narrative.

If we consider Aeschylus as a participant in the tradition of Greek sacrifice, following Zeitlin et al., we will instead see that viewing the ending of the Eumenides as culminating in a sacrifice of the Furies actually requires that the Furies receive honors postsacrifice. Rene Girard again helps us to see how this paradoxical operation can work, where a victim laden with the responsibility for the ills of the community actually becomes a later object of veneration for that same community. Recall that the victim, for Girard, is deemed to be a source of pollution to the group though its actual guilt is largely illusory; the group selects the victim as an outlet for its pent-up aggression arbitrarily and then sacrifices it either through killing or exile. However, the arbitrary nature of the victim is immediately obscured by the effectiveness of the purgation: the community does indeed benefit from its death/exclusion through the resolution of the “sacrificial crisis.” This success reifies the victim’s status as the source of pollution, but it also means that the victim has also become the savior of the community through this targeting and sacrifice: “Having plunged the community into strife, the surrogate victim restores the peace through his departure. . . . Because the violence directed against the victim was intended to restore order and tranquility, it seems only logical to attribute the happy result to the victim himself.” ⁶⁰ This logic was persuasive to the Greeks though it sounds strange to the modern ear; gods were frequently identified with the surrogate victims sacrificed to them, and in the case of Dionysus the distinction between god and victim is often difficult to discern since he serves as both simultaneously.

Aeschylus does not tell us explicitly his thoughts on the matter, but at a minimum we can say that the theme of radical inversion pertains to the Furies as they become Eumenides. Both Apollo and Athena describe the devastation that the Furies bring in their wake, yet these same creatures described variously as “hounds,” “Gorgons,” and a plague upon the land suddenly become precisely the opposite: instead of blight they quite miraculously become the agents of fecundity. This transformation is frequently seen as an artifact of Athena’s “white magic,” but Girard’s sacrificial lens gives us a simpler means of understanding the operation of this paradox. It also explains, in part, the erasure of Agamemnon’s crimes through the Libation Bearers. While there are certainly elements of a patriarchal closure in the gradual elevation of Agamemnon’s reputation through the trilogy, ⁶¹ we can also see Agamemnon’s near apotheosis as indicating his resemblance to a scapegoat figure. His crimes, whether the sacrilege in destroying Trojan altars or his corrupt sacrifice of Iphigenia, become irrelevant after his murder since, through his own death and the subsequent death of Clytemnestra, a kind of order is restored to the House of Atreus. This order is incomplete and subject to degeneration, of course, which necessitates the final sacrifice of the Furies, but Agamemnon like the Furies can be likened to “a supernatural being who sows violence to reap peace; a mysterious savior who visits affliction on mankind in order subsequently to restore it to good health.” ⁶²

Conclusion

Democratic theorists find Aeschylus’s solution attractive because it recognizes the complexity of our choice-set in any genuinely political decision and sees in each choice a tragic necessity: that no decision is without cost, and that the side that “loses” is, regardless of the situation, a real loss that cannot be simply balanced out by the “good” gained in making the choice. The novel alternative presented at the close of the trilogy is to “honor that which is chosen against” by including the Furies, the purported losers in the case at hand, in the final settlement. Aeschylus’s solution to violence in the Eumenides thus avoids the mistakes that Agamemnon and Clytemnestra make in the Agamemnon, since the Furies, now as Eumenides, are included in a kind of bargain or compromise offered by Athena. Instead of pursuing their blood-vengeance they will now protect the hearth and family in Athens, but they are not completely defanged in this more placid world. They will still be entitled to honor and sacrifices, and in the event of civil strife, stasis, they can unleash their fury on those who transgress against social unity.

What the standard reading of the trilogy misses, misrecognizes, is exactly the repressive aspect of this seeming resolution—the sacrifice of the Furies that disguises of their loss by including them in the civic life of Athens as purported defenders of the hearth and family. The persuasion of the Furies (by Athena) in fact simply replays the comedy of innocence that we have already had occasion to discuss in the typical Greek sacrificial ritual, in that a sacrifice can only be made pure if the victim assents or incurs guilt. What has misled prior interpreters of Aeschylus is the drama of consent played out between Athena and the Furies, in which honor appears to be granted to the Furies and hence justice more truly enacted. But consent should not be equated with the transcendence of sacrifice. Consent is, in effect, the most important part of the sacrificial ritual, in that without it the deed is rendered a mere murder (and hence is powerless to stop the cycle of mutual revenge). But with consent comes the completion of the rite of pure sacrifice, and the community can go on. Sacrifice (and the violence it necessarily includes) is not refuted, but sublimated and taken up as part of the constitutive logic of the Aeschylean solution.

The important symbolic roles played by animals in the ideology of the Athenian polis do not lessen the basic brutality of a system that depended upon their bodies for its existence while also simultaneously excluding them from any possible place in the citizenry. Actual creatures by the millions, human and animal, were required for the upkeep of Athens, but following a Girardian logic ⁶³ their sacrifice was most effective when misrecognized. This is most evident to us today when we think of the women of Athens who could not actively shape their lives by participating in the political life of the city, and for whom democracy enacted again and again the sacrificial contract laid down by Athena. The sacrifice of animals seems to fit the Girardian logic less well, since the fact that animals were sacrificed daily was perhaps the least hidden aspect of Greek life. What is important from Girard’s standpoint, however, is not that the killing or sacrifice is hidden, but that the motivation for the deed remains unnoticed. Here then matters fit more closely with his theory since the basic motivation for animal sacrifice has more to do with outlets for communal violence than it does with the specifics of the animals involved. Someone has to pay the price, and animals play this role so that humans do not have to.

This imperative to find surrogate victims returns us to the connection between animals, sacrifice, and justice. Aeschylean justice, even in the form most conducive to our efforts to honor two or more conflicting imperatives, requires that some form of sacrifice be enacted; it depends upon it as the sine qua non of the resolution of the conflict. In this sacrifice, animals or animality in some form will likely figure importantly, and for two seemingly opposed reasons. First, because animals cannot speak for themselves (other than primates, perhaps), they can serve as surrogates to be sacrificed whose deaths will not incur the fury of avengers who seek redress for a criminal death (what I have termed their invengeance). Second, animals can serve as the sacrificial underpinning of the community because their very similarity to humans as sentient beings means that they can satisfy the requirements of the pathei mathos for political wisdom. If Euben, Nussbaum, and Burkert are correct about the mutually constitutive relationship between democracy and tragedy, it follows that democracy’s dependence on suffering as an important source of political knowledge produces a desire for invengeant beings. Tragic spectacle provides one vehicle for this learning to occur without animal death, but the speechlessness and sentience of nonhumans is so compelling because the deaths of animate beings move us more directly than most fictional depictions of human suffering. The continuation of animal pain is especially important in this era of biopower, given that politics is now broadly concerned with regulating the production and reproduction of human and nonhuman populations and that this regulation requires the generation of enormous quantities of factual knowledge. ⁶⁴ One of the primary avenues for generating this information, particularly that which is directed toward the prolongation of human life through medical research, takes place in and through the suffering of nonhumans. While it may be possible that the advent of advanced cybertechnologies will one day make the use of animal models in science and medicine useless, that day is far off. Until then, we believe, we will continue to need lives that we can make suffer so that in time we can become wise.

Does this suggest that we must reject the Greeks if we are interested in developing ethical relationships with the nonhuman world? The Greeks conventionally believed that the word tragedy came from goat, tragos, one of the most commonly sacrificed animals in the ancient Hellenic context. ⁶⁵ Tragedy was thus the “goat-song” performed with the sacrifices instituted for the god associated with tragedy, Dionysus, and so the name implicitly brings us back to a goat, to its death, to flaying and eating, and to the union and separation between humans and gods that it attests. ⁶⁶ According to Walter Burkert, the entirety of the sacrificial ritual is to be explained as an expiation of guilt over the death of the animal killed in the hunt. ⁶⁷ Returning to the Greeks then is particularly useful, more useful even than determining whose story about justice, say, Rawls’s or Nussbaum’s, one wants to believe. They allow us a vantage on tragedy, juridical justice, and the theory of consent, in which each of these can be seen in its entwinement with the other two. The guilt and shame over animal death is not not felt, as Nussbaum and other animal rights ethicists have argued—rather it is felt so deeply that the entire weight of civilization (seen as the triumph over barbarism) must be marshaled to counteract and deny the all-too-real feelings surrounding this killing. Tragedy, juridicality, and consent may be good and they may be bad, but first we must take notice of the manner in which they act as masks that screen off our bloody hands from our guilty conscience.

All of this is not to argue that all of our received conceptions of justice are based on sacrifice or the killing of nonhumans as an essential element of the concept. Rather, it is to say that our primary orientation in thinking about justice and democratic politics, at least insofar as our tradition looks back to the Athenian Greeks, draws on the all-too-real killing of nonhuman animals because this tragic vision of politics is produced through a sacrificial economy. If we want to ask critical questions about the boundaries of the ethical community, we must first become conscious of the political subconscious that subtends our idea of community. This idea has, historically and conceptually, been linked with the sacrifice and exclusion of animals, and we continue this exclusion today in the mass production of nonhumans for food, clothing, and scientific research. We also risk eliding this exclusion when we talk, as do Allen, Euben, and others, as if democracy and sacrifice were necessary bedmates, and as if it were so easy to discern the good kind of sacrifice from the bad. ⁶⁸

What might it mean for democratic theory to come face to face with this legacy? At a minimum it demands that we ask whether “the People” require that other beings be made sacrificeable. And perhaps more troublingly, it requires that we consider how democracy can reconcile its commitment to those who are voiceless but also sentient with its continuing dependence on the production of voicelessness. What would such an awakening look like?