Olfactory Theater: Tracking Scents in Aeschylus's Oresteia

Abstract

Vivid imagery of dripping fluids proliferates in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and there is also a distinctive smell attributed to one of these liquids: human blood.1 Cassandra and the Erinyes are capable of sniffing out this odor with their non-human senses of smell, which liken them to hounds on the scent in a metaphor that is repeatedly applied to both of them (e.g., Ag. 1093–94, 1184–85; Cho. 924; Eum. 244–47). A powerful sense of smell is portrayed as both bestial and divine, irrational and omniscient, enabling these characters to make accurate identifications without recourse to sight: Cassandra viscerally reacts to Agamemnon’s imminent slaughter through her confrontation with the smell of blood (Ag. 1308–12), and the Erinyes are able to track Orestes by means of smell even after he has purified himself (Eum. 244–47). The miasma of the house of Atreus thus assumes an olfactory form that proves impossible to fumigate, in spite of the incense and burning sacrifices that feature prominently in the Agamemnon in particular.2 The smell of bloodshed, then, tracks the course of the house’s curse,