The final adjective is teknopoinos and, like so many compound adjectives in Greek, it can have an active and a passive sense, both ‘avenging a child’ and ‘avenged by a child’. What I have translated as ‘avenging’/‘avenged’, namely poin-, is a term that repeatedly occurs in the trilogy and connotes both punishment and payment – central to the social language of exchange and justice. The word ‘child’, teknon, it need hardly be emphasized, is one of the commonest terms in the trilogy: we have already seen how it becomes invested with special force not merely in the discussions of the trial scene, but also in the language of childbirth and of parental characteristics that is used to express the connection between events in precisely the narrative of punishment and payment (poin-).
The ambiguity between active and passive readings of the adjective is highly significant. For the history of revenge is also a history of violence between the generations, where parents and children repeatedly act against each other and to avenge each other. Agamemnon kills his daughter, and Clytemnestra takes revenge for her death. Orestes kills his mother, a child avenging a parent, and even Aegisthus sees his role in the death of Agamemnon as repaying on the child of Atreus the sins of Atreus against the children of Thyestes, Aegisthus’ father. The final adjective of this line encapsulates in its ambiguity the narrative of inter-generational violence, and the narrative of repeated punishment.
The first two words of Calchas’ prophetic statement, then, promise an explanation (gar, ‘for’) and state that something remains. As the sentence progresses, however, both the involved syntax and the layered implications of the vocabulary transform the explanation into an obscure and darkening impression of the motive force directing this narrative. The combination of the lyric compactness and prophetic allusiveness produces an expression that connects a set of terms in a network of inter-relations that continue to find further significance throughout the Oresteia. Such intricate and intense poetry is typical of Aeschylean choral lyric, particularly in the Oresteia: the linguistic texture weaves together with a conceptual patterning to produce a powerful all-embracing expression of things, a cosmology.
