Engels: The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State! (7)
The Origin of the Family! P7: (網友提供; 如有錯誤, 請原諒!)
Bachofen finds the proofs of these assertions
in innumerable passages of
ancient classical literature,
which he collected with immense industry.
According to him, the development from
hetaerism to monogamy and from mother-right
to father-right is accomplished,
particularly among the Greeks,
as the consequence of an advance in religious conceptions,
introducing into the old hierarchy of the gods,
representative of the old outlook,
new divinities, representative of the new outlook,
who push the former more and more into the background.
Thus, according to Bachofen,
it is not the development
of men’s actual conditions of life,
but the religious reflection of these
conditions inside their heads,
which has brought about the historical changes
in the social position of the sexes
in relation to each other.
In accordance with this view,
Bachofen interprets the Oresteia of Aschylus
as the dramatic representation
of the conflict between declining mother-right
and the new father-right that arose
and triumphed in the heroic age.
For the sake of her paramour,
Clytemnestra slays her husband,
Agamemnon, on his return from the Trojan War;
but Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and herself,
avenges his father’s murder by slaying his mother.
For this act he is pursued by the Furies,
the demonic guardians of mother-right,
according to which matricide is the gravest
and most inexpiable crime.
But Apollo, who by the voice of his oracle
had summoned Orestes to this deed,
and Athena, who is called upon to give judgment
the two deities who here represent
the new patriarchal order
take Orestes under their protection;
Athena hears both sides.
The whole matter of the dispute is briefly summed up
in the debate which now takes place
between Orestes and the Furies.
Orestes contends that Clytemnestra
has committed a double crime;
she has slain her husband and thus
she has also slain his father.
Why should the Furies pursue him, and not her,
seeing that she is by far the more guilty?
The answer is striking:
She was not kin by blood to the man she slew.
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