Abstract/Summary

This thesis discusses the mythical figure of Orestes in Archaic and early Classical Greek literature in order to examine his literary and political functions within the various narratives. The basic argument revolves around the principle that a Close Reading of those texts will show that literary dimensions and political connotations of his function share a common network of vocabulary and imagery which eventually makes them intertwined parts of the narrative. I shall employ Narratology for a connection between such an interaction and the plot-making process. I shall depart from analyses that examine political aspects on the level of historical contemporality, and I shall discuss literary politics, i.e. the political, legal, and social aspects that are shaped within the narrative, depend on and interact with the literary and mythical past. As I shall show, a linguistic roadmap to the hero’s profile will show that such connotations around him become inter-textual and intra-textual features intertwined with literary and metapoetical dimensions of the narrative, the combination of which shapes its generic identity. In the first chapter, I shall discuss Orestes’ political coming-of-age process as a means for the reestablishment of Odysseus’ authority after the Trojan War and for the formation of a metapoetical reading of the Odyssey. In the second chapter, I shall discuss three versions of Orestes as a Spartan hero in order to explore to what extent his profile reshapes as he moves from epic to lyric and historiographic versions. In the third chapter, I shall provide a linguistic map to Orestes in the Oresteia and a specific reading of the trilogy based on his action as well as a narratological approach to his trial and the alliance with Athens. In the fourth chapter, I shall discuss the intertextual and metapoetical relation between the Oresteia and previous versions around Orestes.