THE WRATH OF ARTEMIS (AND MENIS!) IN AG. 122-159

Abstract

In the parodos of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus an omen appears in which two eagles kill and eat a female hare as well as her unborn young. This is seen by the seer Calchas to symbolize that Agamemnon's fleet wil destroy Troy and all its inhabitants. But the goddess Artemis is angry at something about this portent, and there is fear that she will demand a sacrifice of atonement. Opinions have differed widely as to the cause of this anger. Some scholars (e.g. Page and Lawrence) limit Artemis to the physical portent, while others (e.g. Peradotto, Lebeck, Whallon) involve her in the imagistic side of the portent. At the end of Calchas' speech there is an apparently loosely connected and unmotivated reference to a Menis as also being the cause of such a sacrifice. If the roles of Artemis and this Menis are not clearly distinguished, the whole problem of the extent of Artemis' reason for the sacrifice cannot be resolved. Lack of distinction between these two personae is evident in Whallon's absurd confusion of the roles of Artemis and Menis: "The visitations of her (i.e. Artemis') wrath produced an endless continuance of teknophagy. For like the Erinyes she was a deity whose punitive actions became predacious and necessitated further punishment" (1961 :87). Since Erinyes and the Menis are of the same type, Whallon implies that there is little difference between Artemis and Menis. The. problem about the extent of Artemis' anger can be solved if it can be proved that Menis is textually motivated by the imagery, which will make it unnecessary to involve Artemis in the imagery. Lawrence showed how the imagery has been applied to Artemis without any reflection on the validity of the method, but he actually did not prove that it is wrong to make such a link. In his opinion Artemis is angered by the omen itself and not by its interpretation through the words of the seer Calchas.