The Eumenides Gender Quotes

The "earth's navel"? What the heck are they talking about? So glad you asked. Actually, the earth's navel—bellybutton if you prefer—was a stone placed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. This stone is commonly called in English by its Greek name, "omphalos," which is just the Greek word for bellybutton. You can see a picture of the omphalos of Delphi here.

Why Delphi? Because the people of Delphi considered themselves the center of everything, that's why. Seriously, we're not kidding.

So, if the omphalos of Delphi was the center of the world, what's that have to do with gender? Well, check out the first quotation from this section. There, you'll see that the Earth is imagined as a female goddess. How do these pieces fit together? Think about it, Orestes, dude who killed his mother, is lying on the omphalos or bellybutton-stone of the Earth, which reminds us of an umbilical cord, which reminds us that the Earth is the mother of us all.

Basically, the way the Greeks thought of the gender of the Earth gives Aeschylus an opportunity to work a really cool metaphor into the Furies' song. By touching the omphalos of Delphi with the blood of his own mother, Orestes is defiling the entire earth, the entire idea of motherhood, and all of nature.

Notice anything weird about this speech? Maybe you won't, if you were raised in a Christian tradition, or another tradition that regards a husband and wife as becoming "one flesh" after marriage. But even if you don't think that's weird, how about the fact that what Apollo says here seems to flat out contradict what he says later in his speech to the jury, about how mothers aren't related to their children?

When he calls sex "the source of what is dearest to mankind" (216), he doesn't mean just sex itself, but also the children that result from it. (This is the interpretation of Christopher Collard, on p. 207 of his Oxford World's Classics edition of the play.) But if marriage-vows make husbands and wives share the same blood, and that union results in children, wouldn't that mean that the children should be blood-relations to their mothers? This looks like Apollo is twisting his arguments around to suit the needs of the moment.

Orestes's words are striking for how they portray Athena in distinctively masculine activities. Athena's predisposition towards typically male activities will become important later on in the play, when she explicitly tells everyone that she is voting for Orestes because she is biased towards men.

We're not asking you to explain the entire belief system and religious history of ancient Greece (even scholars haven't got all that figured out), but do you have any thoughts on why the Athenians might have been fascinated by a goddess like Athena, or why she is so relevant as a main goddess in this play? In thinking about this, you might want to consider the generally patriarchal bent of the play; given these attitudes, doesn't Athena kind of seem like the exception that proves the rule—like, sure, she's a woman, but she's a woman who, more than any other, blurs the gender lines, inhabiting more male characteristics?