INTRODUCTION
Aeschylus, often described as the Father of Tragedy by both his Greek contemporaries and modern scholars, was born in c. 525 BCE in Sicily, and helped the beginning of the Classical Age flourish with his numerous plays. While it is estimated that he wrote between seventy and ninety of these plays, only seven survive: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, Euripedes, Prometheus Bound, Persians, Seven Against Thebes and Suppliants. The first three listed comprise the “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ only complete trilogy to survive. The authorship of Prometheus Bound is a subject of ongoing debate, as many scholars believe it was perhaps written by the playwright’s son, Euphorion. Breaking the tradition of only having one actor on the stage at a time, Aeschylus had, by the time of his death in c. 455 BCE, included another two actors, to better the communication between characters. He also gave the Chorus a much higher role in his plays than his predecessors had. Aeschylus, together with Sophocles and Euripedes (who were born shortly after his death), made up the three great tragedians of Ancient Greece. Aeschylus’ feats as one of the greatest playwrights of Classical Athens won him the ivy wreath of the City Dionysia competition thirteen times, making him second-best to Sophocles, who won twenty-four times. These great achievements considered, it is strange that on Aeschylus’ epitaph, only his military feats at Marathon, in the first Persian War, are alluded to; there is no mention of his status as one of the greatest Greek tragedians of all time.
Agamemnon is the first play in Aeschylus’ famous trilogy, The Oresteia, which the Greek playwright originally wrote alongside a non-surviving satyr play for a religious festival called the Dionysia. The first play, Agamemnon, tells the story of that Ancient Greek commander in the Trojan War who, after returning home to his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra, was murdered by her and the man she was having an affair with. The second play, The Libation Bearers, tells of how Agamemnon’s son Orestes avenged his father by killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Finally, in the third and final tragedy called The Eumenides, Orestes is acquitted of his crimes at a court ultimately judged by the goddess Athene.
Throughout the Oresteia, we see a common cycle of retribution: an act of bloodshed leads to vengeance, which leads to justice. In this case, the act of bloodshed is the killing of Agamemnon, the revenge is the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus by her son Orestes, and the act of justice is the acquittal of Orestes in The Eumenides. And so the fate of Agamemnon fits perfectly into this cycle of justice and vengeance, as do the deaths of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and the clearing of Orestes’ name, making the Oresteia as a whole feel satisfactory and complete.
BACKGROUND
The City Dionysia
The Ancient Greeks worshipped many different gods and goddesses, but one that was perhaps the most instrumental to daily Greek life and culture was Dionysus, god of wine, drama and revelry. The lives of the Greeks revolved around acting, storytelling and plays, the latter of which were predominantly classified into three genres: satyr plays, comedies and, most importantly, tragedies. It was these three categories that made up a key feature of Athenian society: Greek drama.
These stage performances were so widely enjoyed that they were a vital part of the Athenian polis in general. Plays were only performed during religious festivals that, typically, worshipped the god Dionysus. Though many of these festivals were held, the three most well-known for their marvellous entertainment were the Lenaea, the Rural Dionysia and the City Dionysia. At the latter of these festivals, competitions were held among the playwrights whose productions had honoured the stages. These contests determined the best play performed during that year’s festival. Three tragic and five comic playwrights were required to compete in each annual competition; a selection of tragic writers would present the synopsis of three tragedies and one satyr-play, while comic dramatists only had to provide the synopsis of one sole comedy. The “eponymous archōn,” a wealthy Athenian politician in charge of running the Dionysia, would pick some of the more promising synopses, and these were the plays that would be performed. The audience would vote on their favourite production, the creator of which would win a wreath of ivy─and a distinguished reputation.
Costumes
The staging of an Ancient Greek play would have differed greatly from a modern-day performance. For a start, all the actors were male and masked. We only truly know this because of depictions on vases and mosaics that show male actors wearing the faces of women on masks (though male actors playing male roles were masked too). The Chorus, who are mainly used to commentate on or narrate the play, all wore the same mask because they represented one character. The masks were used to instill a sense of horror in the audience, with their grossly accentuated facial features and countenances, but also to enable the actors to play multiple roles without being recognised by spectators. Masks also allowed characters to have facial changes throughout the performance, such as when Oedipus blinds himself (“blood” is simply painted onto the eye sockets of his mask).
Those male actors who were selected to play female characters used many tricks to appear more feminine-looking. They wore a posterneda, or a wooden ridge, on their chests to make it appear as though they had breasts; they then wore a progastreda, a similar wooden structure, on their stomachs to make them appear softer (the most bizarre idea by far, in my opinion!); and they also wore pale stockings to imitate a fairer skin colour. All costumes, both male and female, were brightly coloured to be visible to all members of the audience.
Without, of course, the technology for any kinds of special effects, and with all Greek performances live, any acts of violence had to be committed off-stage. When in the Oresteia Agamemnon is murdered, we hear his screams, the prognostications of Cassandra and the running commentary of the Chorus, but we never see the act being committed.
CHARACTERS
Unlike most modern plays, Greek drama was not a realist medium. Hosted in large outdoor theatres with many spectators watching from a great distance, the actors had to get across their character’s personality through the masks they wore and the distance at which they were acting. To engage the audience, the playwright had to create characters that were deeper than simply the words they spoke, and in turn, the actor had to interpret their role to represent an even more individualised character. Aeschylus especially was interested in presenting different personalities in women, who were often portrayed very similarly in the works of the poet’s contemporaries. A worthy comparison is that of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife and ultimate murderer, and Cassandra, the Trojan princess whom Agamemnon brought home from Troy.
Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra has often been thought of as the most individualised and multidimensional character in the whole of the Oresteia. Unlike many of her fellow female characters, she is strong-minded, decisive, and mercilessly aggressive to the point where her femininity becomes questionable. Her determination to kill her husband on his return could almost be justified by her own conviction that she is in the right, as Agamemnon did kill her daughter; but her affair with Aegisthus, and the strange enjoyment she seems to derive after the murder of her husband, encourage the readers to doubt her innocence.
Her masculinity is noticed, and hence brought more clearly to the audience’s attention, by the other characters in Agamemnon. Indeed, in the very first speech of the play, the Watchman muses on her lack of femininity with these words:
“Queen Clytemnestra ─ who wears
A man’s heart in a woman’s body,
A man’s dreadful will in the scabbard of her body
Like a polished blade. A hidden blade.
Clytemnestra reigns over fear.”
In The Libation-Bearers, the Chorus also comments on her masculinity:
“Women are physically weak.
But the strongest man, and the most violent,
Is weaker than [Orestes’] mother.”
Even Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra notes, after the murder of her father, that her mother was never who she seemed:
“Tell them the story of our mother.
She smiles and wants to stroke us.
She wants to smooth the tangles of my father’s murder out of my hair.
The she-wolf suckles a wolf
That will rip out her throat.”
In Robert Fagles’ translation, the quote is slightly different but worth alluding to for its humorous content: “So she commands, full of her high hopes, / That woman ─ she manouevres like a man.” Here, Fagles has twisted the original Greek a little to include a small pun which Ted Hughes missed in his translation. Look more closely at the word “manouevres”: it begins with the syllable “man”, which would indicate that only men can manipulate others. But Clytemnestra, “who wears a man’s heart in a woman’s body,” is obviously capable of persuasion too, as we can see from the very beginning of the play when she convinces Agamemnon to walk the luxurious red carpet. Her craftiness, her skills in manipulation, her genuine lack of mercy and feminine emotion will lead to the death of her husband, her lover Aegisthus and, of course, herself.
However, Aeschylus does hint near the end of Agamemnon that Clytemnestra is beginning to feel a little guilty. While in the beginning, she revelled in the murder of her own husband, she now seems quite deflated. While Aegisthus is gloating over what he considers a great triumph, Clytemnestra interrupts him with these words:
“Stop. Stop.
The killing is over.
Beloved Aegisthus ─
We have planted enough
Of this horrible fruit…”
Here is where we see Clytemnestra’s conviction that her actions were entirely justified wavering. The mercilessness that her character so tirelessly displayed is suddenly being put to the test. When watching Agamemnon being performed, Clytemnestra, who previously dominated the stage by standing at its centre throughout, now backs away, almost completely hidden by Aegisthus, the new controller of events. After her speech highlighted above, she lets the Chorus and Aegisthus continue to argue amongst each other for a while longer. Then she concludes the play with these uncertain words, which sound almost as though she were trying to comfort herself with them:
Whatever comes from their mouths ─
It amounts to nothing.
Their feet are kicking in the air.
You and I, Aegisthus, we are the law.
… At last, the throne of Argos is ours.
Agamemnon
Throughout the Oresteia, there are many instances in which Aeschylus presents us with a recurring cycle, detectable within the worlds of many different characters: a cycle of justice, a cycle of vengeance and, besides many others, a cycle of folly. This last sequence of events can be most easily seen in the case of Agamemnon himself. The most basic breakdown of this cycle of folly is that an act of injustice leads to some kind of profit. The victim of the cycle becomes a little more greedy from this result, perhaps a little insane; their insanity leads to susceptibility, which leads to their inability to resist the temptation to commit a new, greater crime, and at the end of the cycle, they commit this atrocity in the hope of making yet another profit from it.
When Agamemnon returns to the House of Atreus after ten years in Troy, he is persuaded by his scheming wife Clytemnestra to enter their home on a red carpet that she offers to spread out before him. At first, he denies this luxury, claiming that it would anger the gods (“Greet me as a god and the gods / Will punish us all”). But he is eventually persuaded as a result of his wife’s manipulation. Looking back at our cycle of folly, we can see that Agamemnon, having committed his injustices at the sack of Troy, profited from them with his new victorious reputation and the prizes he has brought back with him and, eventually, turned more than a little mad, is now in the stage of susceptibility. Having now become so arrogant, he struggles to fight the temptation of walking on the carpet and eventually succumbs to it. He does not fully realise his impending doom, but we readers are aware of the last stage of the cycle.
THEMES
Justice
In order to fully understand this recurring cycle, we must look at each of its properties in detail. Acts of justice and references to it can be seen throughout the Oresteia. There are multiple quotes that highlight the ever-looming presence of justice, revenge and fate, but I selected a few that best serve this purpose. One such example is when the Chorus are speaking to Aegisthus following the death of Agamemnon. They cry out for Clytemenstra’s son to arrive and avenge his father with the words, “Orestes! Fate ─ find Orestes!” Aegisthus replies, “No doubt he’s chewing the cud of exile somewhere.” The Chorus make a clever comeback: “While you gorge here on the carcase of Justice ─ / Fatten while you can.”
We see another example when Aegisthus is speaking, again following the death of his lover’s husband. He says, rather darkly:
“Justice guided my steps a long way round
To this palace,
Carrying the noose in my hands.
Now, seeing justice so perfectly done,
I think I could die happy.”
The Chorus seem to have an eerie understanding of the future, and how the events narrated in the Oresteia will eventually play out. They warn Aegisthus of his impending doom with the ominous words:
“Aegisthus, you have condemned yourself.
If this whole plot was yours
Then your life is the price.
You will be stoned to death
By the people of Argos.”
Interestingly, this is not, in fact, the way in which Aegisthus dies, as we shall see in The Libation Bearers─but the importance of this quote lies in the unnerving sense that the Chorus have of what is yet to occur.
When reading ancient literature, one will often notice how the names of the fathers are sometimes attached to those of the sons: take “Agamemnon, son of Atreus,” or “Odysseus, son of Laertes.” This was because the amount of prestige a man was automatically born with was based on the achievements of his father: Homeric, Aeschylian and other characters of ancient literature will recognise each other based on the deeds of their ancestors.
A man’s children slip through the net of his death.
Their bodies leave his body, and bear his life
Back into life, with his name and fame.
His memories are alive in their bones.
Like the corks that buoy up the net of the fishermen
A man’s children buoy up the weave of his life.
They buoy up the warp and weft of all he achieved.
Without them it sinks, lost in the depths of ocean.
[Electra, The Libation Bearers]
But, perhaps annoyingly, it is not only miraculous achievements and feats that are passed down through Ancient Greek generations. The sins, too, of the fathers are often visited upon the children; a kind of inherited liability can be detected throughout the Oresteia, especially in the case of Agamemnon. The House of Atreus is reputed in Greek mythology to be cursed, because Tantalus, Agamemnon’s grandfather, once served his own son Pelops to the gods at a banquet, to test their omniscience (all of the gods realised at once what they were eating, apart from Demeter). The gods laid a curse on Tantalus’ family as punishment, a curse that still haunted the House of Atreus in Agamemnon’s generation. This curse is referred to many times in the Oresteia, such as in these two quotes from The Libation-Bearers:
I am afraid of offering these bribes
To the blood
That howls under the dark stones.
What prayers can wash that howl?
Or wash this accursed royal house
That bathes in the putrescence of its murders…?
[Chorus, The Libation Bearers]
This house has been the goblet
That the demon of homicide, unquenchable,
Has loved to drain.
Today let it swallow its third
And last fill of the blood
That has poisoned us all.
[Orestes, The Libation Bearers]
Fate, Free Will & Human Responsibility
An idea commonly explored in Ancient Greek literature is that of “multiple determination”─the Greek idea that a person’s actions are a product of many factors at once: the person’s own choices, the will of the gods and fate. However, it seems counterintuitive that if the future is already decided and cannot be changed, there can be any genuine choice in what happens next. Intuitively, free will and determinism seem to be incompatible.
However, the Greeks saw no conflict with the idea that an action might have “multiple determiners”. They would have considered it completely natural that a man could make a free choice even if that choice had been fated from the beginning, or if the gods had intervened to ensure he made that choice, or to prevent him from choosing differently.
A worthy example of this can be seen in Agamemnon when the Chorus think back on the time that Agamemnon witnessed an omen sent from the gods while trying to leave for Troy. The omen was of an eagle killing a pregnant hare. The death of the leverets angered the goddess Artemis and Agamemnon was required to sacrifice his daughter, Iphegenia, to appease her.
On the face of it, this appears to be quite a bizarre and extreme demand for Artemis to make of Agamemnon, considering that what an eagle chose to eat for supper had nothing to do with him. In explanation, it could just be the case that gods work in mysterious ways, and insignificant mortals are in no place to understand or to question them. It is for the gods to make demands of humans and for humans to obey them without question, irrespective of how preposterous or unfair those demands appear.
Some scholars believe that the death of the pregnant hare itself symbolises the atrocities that the Greeks will commit at the sack of Troy, for which Agamemnon as their leader would bear ulimate responsibility─namely the rape and enslavement of the innocent women (particularly the princess Cassandra and Hector’s wife Andromache), the cruel death of Hector’s infant son Astyanax, who was thrown off the Trojan ramparts to the rocks below, and the murder of Priam as he fled to an altar. Looking at it through this lens, one can see how what Artemis asked of Agamemnon could actually be considered a justifiable and almost small price to pay in recompense.
If the sacrifice of Iphegenia is taken to be an early punishment for actions Agamemnon will commit in the future, this could explain why Artemis was so offended by the eagle omen. But while it’s justifiable to mete out punishment for an action already committed, surely it’s a little presumptive to punish them for someone in advance of their crime? How is it reasonable to hold someone responsible for something that it is fated that they will do, and punish them accordingly, when it is impossible for them to choose to act otherwise because these future actions are already determined?
Here is where we see this awkward balance between fate and free will come into play. For the Greeks, the fact that an action is going to happen doesn’t absolve Agamemnon of responsibility for that action because, they believe, he still has to freely elect to do it as well─the core premise of “multiple determination.” Clearly, his electing to do it or indeed anything else is itself determined, if everything is determined; but this doesn’t seem to have bothered the Greeks. Thus, it would be considered perfectly reasonable that one could be punished for one’s future actions.
And yet, even if we concede that multiple determinism is correct, even if we agree that someone can be punished for an action they can’t avoid doing, in my opinion, it is still doubtful that this is truly just. When Agamemnon was ordered to sacrifice his daughter, he hadn’t done any of the atrocities he was fated to do; he was not, in the true meaning of the word, a bad man. It could be argued that justice isn’t achieved by laws such as “an eye for an eye”, but by punishing people for the intention behind the crime: this explains why we don’t punish people for killing someone by accident, even though the result is the same as if the murder had been premeditated. Agamemnon, at the time of his punishment, had not intended to do the crime yet; perhaps this is why an early punishment seems so unjust to us modern-day readers. He was being punished for being the man he was going to become, not for the man he was at the time. In our modern legal system, we don’t judge people like this. A man is not nowadays imprisoned before he has committed a crime, so that he can come out and be, as it were, “owed” the crime for which he was incarcerated. It is almost as though by punishing Agamemnon for his future deeds, the gods had given him permission to do them.
There are plenty of examples of Aeschylus’ characters talking about fate; mostly in reference to the vengeance of Orestes, and subsequently the murders of the culprits (Clytemnestra and Aegisthus). Some examples can be seen here:
And when she hits the wall
That screaming mouth will stiffen in its mask.
Her dream is our fate ─ hers and mine.
She must die and I must murder her.
[Orestes, The Libation Bearers]
But now I have arrived
To do what must be done.
[Orestes preparing to avenge Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers]
The bow, justice,
The arrow, vengeance,
Surprise him. He wakes just in time
To die transfixed.
[Chorus, The Libation Bearers]
Father, your avenger,
Let him come with a blade
Remorseless as the blade they pushed through you.
Let him measure it out, the length and the breadth
Of death for death,
Justice for murder. …
Bring his avenger ─
Bring the resolving blade
To cut the heavy
Coagulated
Rope of guilt
That chokes this house,
The strangling cramp
Of the two bodies
Knotted in their crime.
Hack them apart.
[The Chorus calling for Orestes to avenge Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers]
When she is dead, my life
Will have served all its purpose.
[Orestes, speaking of Clytemnestra, The Libation Bearers]
Clytemnestra: Do not blame me. I was in the hand of Fate.
Orestes: And now the same hand holds this sword.
Clytemnestra: Will you murder your own mother?
Orestes: Me murder you?
Mother, you have already murdered yourself.
I merely hold the sword as you fall.
[Orestes & Clytemnestra, The Libation Bearers]
Justice is the anvil where Fate
Forges the blade.
Murder begets murder.
A life must pay for a life.
The avenger,
The demon of patience and cunning,
Waits for the moment,
Then demands the full price.
[Chorus, The Libation Bearers]
Fate holds every man
Of these two embattled armies
By the scruff of the neck
And jams his face, helpless,
Into what has to happen.
[Chorus, The Libation Bearers]
Your sword is the tool of Fate.
You cannot be blamed.
[Chorus, The Libation Bearers]
LANGUAGE
It is difficult to comment accurately on the language of a book that was originally written in Ancient Greek, because every translator has interpreted the Greek in his own way. However, I can comment on Ted Hughes’ translation, which is the version I read. As a poet─and one of my personal favourites─Hughes twists the original Greek into a very poetically written play, using short, powerful sentences for drama and suspense, making every line the type you have to read over and over again because of the sheer beauty of it.
That said, there are many instances in which Aeschylus uses language as all kinds of mediums, something which is detectable in any translation of the Oresteia. Critics, modern and ancient alike, have often denounced Agamemnon as having too many words and not enough action. Some scholars believe that Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia in this way deliberately, in order to better express emotion and intention through dialogue, essentially creating a new style of theatre that the Greeks had never seen before.
One of the ways in which Aeschylus uses language to change his characters’ behaviour is through persuasion. From the very beginning of the play, at which point Clytemnestra manages to persuade Agamemnon to walk the royal carpet, the characters manipulate and deceive one another solely through the medium of language, and not action: a difficult feat which Aeschylus has managed to achieve very well.
There are other ways in which the playwright uses dialogue to attain what action normally would. For example, the use of ominous, foreboding langauge ultimately builds up to a murder that the readers were almost expecting. Throughout, characters begin to speak of Agamamenon’s past, but actually trail off when they reach his future, as though they had an odd, ominous sense that it was not going to be pleasant. An example of this can be seen in Robert Fagles’ translation, but not quite as clearly in Hughes’:
Watchman:
“Master’s luck is mine. A throw of the torch
Has brought up triple-sixes ─ we have won!
My move now ─
*Beginning to dance, then breaking off,
Lost in thought*
Just bring him home. My king,
I’ll take your loving hand in mine and then…
The rest is silence.
Thus it can be seen that, through use of the aforementioned media and many others, Aeschylus craftily uses language (and deliberate lack of scripted action) to elucidate points, create different atmospheres and build up suspension, ultimately leading to Agamemnon’s almost expected death.
There are other examples of recurring metaphors in Agamemnon, but the metaphor of the hounds is the most commonly referred to by metaphors. In this way, the playwright better captures the attention of the audience with metaphors that they are subconsciously already familiar with, thus enhancing his points and the spectators’ recognition of them.
AESCHYLUS’ STYLE
Aeschylus, as is the case with many playwrights of the classical age, has been recognised for his distinctive and captivating writing style. Ever since the ancient times, scholars and other playwrights have been criticising, evaluating and even parodying Aeschylus’ style. There are two more characteristic properties to this style: the use of compound words (only easily seen in the original Greek), and also of metaphors (particularly recurring ones).
Compound words are words that are composed of more than one separate word (some good examples in English are “sun + flower = sunflower”, or “some + times = sometimes”). Though it is difficult to find examples of this in a translation of Aeschylus’ Greek play, the traces that do come through in an English translation can add a sense of interest and ambiguity to a speech.
The use of metaphors, recurrent ones in particular, is more easily detectable in English translations than compound words are. An example of these recurring metaphors can be found in the repeated mentions of hounds in varying contexts, such as in hunting or guarding scenarios. For instance, Orestes is once described as being a dog who is hunting down his mother and Aegisthus. Cassandra is compared to a bloodhound; she can smell the trace of blood lingering in the palace from the previous cursed generations, hunting not to kill, but to expose information about the House of Atreus. In almost the very first line of the play, the Watchman pleads with the gods:
“You Gods in heaven ─
You have watched me …
Tethered on the roof of this palace
Like a dog.
It is time to release me.”
In this case, the Watchman is neither a dog hunting for the kill or one trying to expose information, but simply a faithful guard dog who has “stared long enough into this darkness / For what never emerges” (what never emerges in this case is Agamemnon).
Another recurring metaphor is that of the net. Being trapped in a net connotes both control over the victim and a sense of helplessness and weakness on the victim’s part. Once ensnared in a net of the gods’ craftsmanship and will, one can know that they are doomed unless they follow the path asked of them by the gods, in which case they can escape the net’s clutches. An obvious example is when Agamemnon has to sacrifice his daughter to appease Athene; he becomes caught in this net of necessity, to which he “surrenders” after being reminded that he is entangled in “the cords of the net where you jerk like a fish.” He kills Iphegenia, thus disentangling himself from the net.
By using these recurrent metaphors, Aeschylus better captures the attention of the audience with imagery that they are subconsciously already familiar with, thus enhancing his points and the spectators’ recognition of them.
CONCLUSION
Although justice is primarily served for a physical act of wrongdoing, such as the murder of Agamemnon (for which Aeschylus and Clytemenstra both paid), Aeschylus also punishes his characters for flaws in their personalities. For example, Agamemnon, whose fatal flaw was his heightened sense of his own importance─his hubris─is his ultimate downfall. Aeschylus is here relaying a moral message to his audience: not to become so excessively arrogant that it becomes your own undoing.
As a trilogy, Aeschylus is almost compelled to leave his spectators with a feeling of satisfaction that the events of the plays are complete─that the cycle has concluded. He accomplishes this excellently with his Oresteia; his characters have paid for their flaws, justice has been served, and we are left with a sense of the beginnings of fairness and democracy, with the official opening of Athene’s law-court.