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This notion of the climactic struggle to be free from the burden of the past is clearly a dominant characteristic of Aeschylean tragedy. The conclusions of the Danaid trilogy and of the Prometheia may well have asserted on a cosmic level the Oresteia's dramatization of mankind's perennial task of overcoming the personal, familial, and political past. As Dodds said "the liberation of the individual from the bonds of clan and family is one of the major achievements of Greek rationalism" (1951: 34). But this liberation is not simply a negation of the past. The past is ambiguous in its effect and so also is that which breaks the hold of the past and forms the future. In a vision that went beyond morality, Aeschylus saw that on every level, from the psychic to the cosmic, the hope and shape of the future was contained in the effort to overcome the past. Because all possibilities are ultimately rooted in the past, the focus of the struggle contains a necessary ambivalence: whether the outcome will be beneficial or not depends on how the weight of the past is experienced and confronted in the present, whether it is allowed to carry everything with it to destruction or is transformed as the basis of a new life. |
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In the Danaid trilogy, the transition from past to future is centered on the transfer of love from father to husband. Eros, which appears everywhere else in the plays of Aeschylus as irrational and destructive, appears in the trilogy first as completely indeterminate, then as a tentative alternative to the Danaids' fanatic chastity, finally as the vindication of Hypermestra. In the first instance (521), Eros is the desire of the Danaids for the undefined object of their prayers, presumably that they will be successful in obtaining help from the citizens of Argos. In the second (1042), the Erotes are connected with Aphrodite in the servant girls' warning to the Danaids that marriage is the natural lot of women. In the third instance, from the Danaids, it is Eros which compels the earth to marry the sky, a universal sanction of Hypermestra's choice. The phrasing in the first and third instances is virtually identical, with one important exception: |
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 Suppliants 521 |
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 , fr. 125M |
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In the former, the object of Eros is the indefinite  in the latter, it is  (marriage). |
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The tragedy of the Danaids is that they separate themselves from the universal love which alone can do what Danaos, Pelasgos, and even Zeus cannot do, that is, rescue from their self-imposed isolation the  , the fugitives in flight from themselves. The Danaids can no more easily cut themselves off from men than Zeus in the Prometheus can cut himself off from mortals; love is as necessary for them as compassionate reason is for him. This does not mean that Zeus will necessarily change, nor does it mean that the Danaids will change. An evolution which allows no |
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