abandon their course. She says, “Put to sleep the bitter strength in the black wave and live with me and share my pride of worship.” (The Eumenides 832) In this situation, they are aware, but not pursuing revenge. Sleep thus represents the ongoing struggle one feels between acting on impulse and exercising restraint. Sleep plays a significant but different role in each play of The Oresteia. Its role as a clear division between aware and unaware in the first two plays is representative of the value system with which the play begins. Its clear role mirrors a clear system of justice, one based on vengeance. A wrong can be set right by another wrong, as shown by both Clytaemestra and Orestes when they seek revenge for the deaths of Iphiginia and Agamemnon, respectively. However, in the third play, the role of sleep becomes more ambiguous—it no longer represents a division, instead it is a struggle. Similarly, the third play calls for a new system of justice, one that weighs the right and wrong of each side to come a fair conclusion, as seen in Orestes’ trial. Just as the clear separation of right and wrong is emphasized by a clear meaning of sleep in the first two plays, this more ambiguous definition of justice is complemented by a more ambiguous definition of sleep. Thus, while emphasizing the awareness of different characters, the image of sleep throughout the trilogy also serves to distinguish the old system of justice from the new. Works CitedAeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953....
