Aeschylus, Homer, and the Serpent at the Breast

CLYTEMNESTRA'S.DREAM OF GIVING BIRTH TO A SERPENT and her bare-breasted confrontation with her son have long been at the center of various literary and psycho-analytical interpretations of Aeschylus' Oresteia.' It is generally accepted that Clytemnestra's bare-breasted supplication of Orestes alludes to Hecuba's similar supplication of Hector in the Iliad.2 The abundance of snake imagery applied to Clytemnestra and Orestes in the Choephori has usually been attributed to the influence of Stesichorus, whose Oresteia contains a striking serpent image of its own.3 In this paper, I will re-examine the relationship of Clytemnestra's supplication to the Homeric model, and argue that significant material found in the same context in both works has been passed over by modern scholarship. Building on the allusion to Hecuba's supplication, I will argue that the Aeschylean image of the serpent at the breast has an antecedent in this Homeric passage, creating an important intertextual relationship. Finally, I will show how this intertextual relationship illuminates the inter-personal dynamics of the climactic scenes of the Choephori. Reading has been described as an act of comparison, seeking a text's resemblance to, and difference from, other texts.4 The term intertextuality describes how a text depends on other texts for meaning, and describes the discursive space that a text occupies in relation to other texts. The expansiveness of intertextuality makes it almost impossible to discuss with regard to specific texts without violating the terms of its definition.s It is all-embracing in that a text is read in relation to all other texts. Yet, as soon as a reader compares a text with a single other text, the expansiveness of intertextuality is called into

Ancient history · Art · Serpent (symbolism · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History

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  Richard L Garner, Richard Garner•From Homer to Tragedy•2015

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  William H Gass, Philip Wheelwright•The Philosophical Review•1956

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  Donald Norman Levin, Leon Golden•The Classical World•1966

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  Stephen Scully, Homer Homer et al.•The Classical World•1994

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  Edward H Spieker, Herbert Weir Smyth•The American Journal of Philology•1900

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  John Herington, A W H Adkins•The Classical World•1987

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  Froma I Zeitlin•Transactions and Proceedings of…•1965

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