*75 It’s not clear what “the sea’s headland” refers to, but the stanza goes on to make a broad sweep of the Aegean.
*76 The reference is unclear.
*77 Not the site of the recent battle but a city on Cyprus, supposedly founded by colonists from the other Salamis.
*78 The coast of Asia Minor.
*79 There is an unintelligible word in this line.
*80 The people of Mariandya, a region on the south shore of the Black Sea, were famous in antiquity for their wild lamentations.
*81 Much of this line and the next two have become garbled.
*82 Tyrians, Phoenicians from Tyre, supplied much of the manpower and vessels for the Persian navy.
*83 The Greek word translated “oar-sweep” denotes any kind of rhythmic or circling movement, and could refer here to the flailing arms of the drowning Persians, metaphorically associated with the oars they once rowed.
*84 The King’s Eye was a high official charged with overseeing the administration of the empire.
*85 A single line has fallen out of the manuscript text.
*86 See line 98 and note.
*87 The end of the line is mangled.
*88 Xerxes’ quiver, rescued from the debacle. The term “arrow-holding” does not imply it is full.
*89 It’s not clear what the Chorus means by “this, too.”
*90 Mysia is a region in western Anatolia. The Greeks thought of the music from western Asia, especially from Phrygia, as ecstatic, shrill, and emotional.
*91 With his last words, accompanied by inarticulate cries of pain, Xerxes recalls his defeat at Salamis, where Greek triremes—here obliquely referred to as “triple-oared ships”—bested his navy.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO AESCHYLUS’ ORESTEIA
Each of the three plays that make up the Oresteia—the Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides—can be read separately, and each will be introduced separately, but it’s also important to consider them, and if possible read them, together. For Aeschylus wrote them to be seen together, on a single day in 458 B.C., in effect making them into one long drama with three constituent parts. Of the surviving tragic playwrights, only Aeschylus, to our knowledge, created such connected trilogies, adapting the three-tragedy format of the City Dionysia at Athens to triple his scope and range; and the Oresteia is the only such triptych that survives.
Scope was what Aeschylus needed in the Oresteia, for its story, as he conceived it, spans all of human, and even divine, evolution. Though its dramatic action occupies perhaps only a decade, its central question—whether justice is to be administered by way of retribution and revenge, or some other, less violent process—goes back to the beginning of time, to the sequence of overthrows by which Cronus took power from his father Uranus and then Zeus from Cronus. Aeschylus effectively brings these primeval usurpations onstage, first in the sweeping, soaring poetry of Agamemnon’s opening choral ode, then, in Eumenides, in the person of the Erinyes or Furies, ancient creatures aligned with the pre-Olympian order that Zeus has displaced. That order is not yet at peace with Olympian rule; the question of justice has not yet been settled among the gods. The Oresteia will see it settled, for gods and for humans alike, and so resolve a dilemma as old as the cosmos itself.
Just as it stretches backward into mythic prehistory, so the Oresteia stretches forward, far past the Trojan War era in which it is set, into the very time and place of the original performance. Its final scene is staged in Athens and depicts a murder trial, played out before a board of nameless jurors. These jurors represent the court of the Areopagus, an Athenian political institution that, thanks to reforms enacted only a few years before performance took place, now held a newly confirmed jurisdiction over murder trials. For Aeschylus’ audience, the setting was modern, the issues contemporary. The world of myth had become transposed onto that of the polis, the social unit in which (as the Greeks believed) justice, the highest marker of human progress, could best flourish.
Only ancient Athenian spectators, for whom tragic theater was an all-day, nonstop event on a festival day when all business had ceased, could have the experience Aeschylus intended when he composed the Oresteia. Most modern productions break up the trilogy into three separate plays, staged at different times or on different days, or drastically truncate them to fit the whole sequence into a single evening. The first play, Agamemnon, suffers particularly from this truncation, since Aeschylus made it more than half again as long as the other two and, to the frustration of many a modern director, set a giant choral ode, more than two hundred lines long, right at its outset—an ordeal for audiences anticipating speech and action, not dance and verse.
Paradoxically it is the reader, rather than the playgoer, who today can best take in the totalizing vision of the Oresteia. On the printed page it can remain whole and unsegmented, a monument to the unique moment, in 458 B.C., when the Theater of Dionysus was made to encompass the cosmos itself.
INTRODUCTION TO AESCHYLUS’ AGAMEMNON
The Oresteia trilogy begins and ends with the kindling of fires. Its final scene, at the end of the Eumenides, will be a torchlight procession that mimics the festivities of an Athenian marriage. The flame seen at the start of the Agamemnon, by contrast, is a beacon signifying military conquest: a signal fire, the last in a chain of such fires, bringing news back to the Greek city of Argos (sometimes also called Mycenae) that Troy had fallen. Hundreds of miles away, the beacon signifies, other fires are blazing. A great city is burning, and the corpses of its warriors lie atop funeral pyres. The flames that, in the trilogy’s third play, will celebrate a joyous union arrive here as messengers of downfall and death, but also of victory for the Greeks.
The beacon relay has been set up by Clytemnestra, queen of Argos, and she describes its operation in nearly ecstatic tones in her first long speech (lines 281–316). She is fiercely proud of the mastery it demonstrates, the capacity of royal power to overcome time and distance and even bridge the divide between Europe and Asia. Her husband, too, had crossed that divide, when he led an army of invasion across the Aegean ten years before. But the crossing required a blood sacrifice: trapped by contrary winds on the shores of Aulis, on the island of Euboea, Agamemnon, instructed by the seer Calchas, had killed his own daughter Iphigenia to appease the goddess Artemis. Only then had the winds turned and the fleet set sail.
The tale of that killing is retold in this play’s opening choral ode, the longest and most ambitious ode found in any extant Greek play. The old men of Argos—left behind, like the Chorus of Persians, after the departure of the troops—describe a bird omen that was seen by the army: two eagles ripped apart a pregnant hare, representing, in the reading of the seer Calchas, the coming sack of Troy by the two sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Seers often demanded that special sacrifices be made before battle; it was said that some young Persian captives were sacrificed before the battle of Salamis. But here Agamemnon must sacrifice his own child. The Chorus describe, in horrific detail, the agony of a father as he makes his horrendous choice, the desperate last struggles of Iphigenia, the gag thrust in her mouth to keep her from uttering curses and ruining the rite—all except the final knife thrust. They seem, for a while, to sympathize with Agamemnon, until the moment he resolves to kill his own daughter:
Her pleading, her shrieking for her father,
the girl’s short life—these were worth nothing
to the lovers of battle, her judges. (228–30)
Woven into the Chorus’s account of the murder at Aulis are meditations on more ancient events, going back to the beginning of time. Over three generations of gods, the cosmos has been ruled by Uranus, then Cronus, then Zeus. The victory of Zeus deserves celebration, the Chorus claim, though they are not sure what Zeus is or how to address him. But Zeus gives mortals the ultimate gift, the ability to find meaning in the tragic universe around them:
Zeus puts us on the road
to mindfulness, Zeus decrees
we lea
rn by suffering.
In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead
pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling
minds circumspection comes. (176–81)
Aeschylus will return throughout the Oresteia to Zeus’ triumph in the third generation of gods, implicitly comparing it to other three-part movements: the three generations leading from Atreus to Agamemnon to Orestes, the three murders of Iphigenia, Agamemnon, and Clytemnestra. The Oresteia itself forms a tercet that parallels these others, telescoping into a daylong drama the different time scales of cosmogony, myth, and history.
As the Chorus conclude their great ode—in a sense, the overture to the entire Oresteia—they greet Clytemnestra, emerging from the palace, as “the chieftain’s wife.” There is palpable tension in their dialogue with her, partly stemming from their obvious discomfort with female rule. But there is also an unspoken worry on their minds. Like the watchman who opened the play, they are aware of an interloper in the royal house: Aegisthus, the last surviving son of Agamemnon’s uncle, Thyestes. In the long years the army has been at Troy, Clytemnestra has taken Aegisthus as lover, a move that portends nothing good for her husband. Because of a long-ago quarrel between his own father, Thyestes, and Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, Aegisthus has been exiled from Argos and the sovereignty he might have enjoyed there.
Aegisthus stays hidden while Clytemnestra goes out to greet her returning husband, though “greet” hardly seems the right word; both spouses coldly talk past each other and make formal speeches to the Chorus. When wife finally addresses husband, it is to urge him to step from his chariot onto a purple-dyed cloth she has spread—a delicate tapestry he is reluctant to walk on, but his wife insists. In a trilogy in which colored cloths of all kinds have special meanings, this luxury item, stained with the precious secretions of a marine snail, is especially meaningful. It evokes the wealth of Asia, much of which the Greek armies have just plundered, as well as the blood they have shed and the sea they have crossed. As he steps onto it, Agamemnon reenacts the many roles he has had to play as leader of a great invasion, and he behaves, as he himself observes, more like a god than a man.
As he walks this tapestry of doom, Agamemnon gestures to the silent woman accompanying him, bidding the servants bring her inside. This is Cassandra, a daughter of King Priam, a seer fated to utter prophecies that will not be understood or believed. The army has given her to him as a prize of war, meaning in this case a concubine. A foreigner, she seems unable to speak or understand Greek, and the audience must have assumed she was only a muta persona (nonspeaking character), though later she bursts into frenzied, hallucinatory speech.
As he goes inside the palace, Agamemnon has earned dikē, punishment, on multiple counts: the murder of Iphigenia; the sack of Troy with its attendant atrocities; and, by the Greek notion that guilt can be inherited, the crimes of his father, Atreus, who butchered his brother Thyestes’ children (all except Aegisthus) and fed them to him in a cannibal stew. The question is how he can be punished syn dikēi, with justice. Dikē can be translated as either “punishment” or “justice,” reflecting two different phases of Greek social evolution: a prelegal stage in which victims exacted their own revenge on wrongdoers, and the world of the polis, or city-state, in which law courts and juries took charge of such matters. At the start of the Oresteia, the code of eye-for-an-eye vengeance still prevails, but its inadequacies are becoming glaringly apparent. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, both wronged by Agamemnon or his father, can enact only punishment, not justice. The brutal pleasure they take in their murder—especially Clytemnestra, who compares the shower of her husband’s spurting blood to the warm rain of spring that nourishes the fertile earth (lines 1388–92)—and the power and wealth they gain by it taint their deed with impiety.
By the conventions of Greek theater, the murder of Agamemnon could not be shown onstage. Aeschylus allows us to hear rather than see it, as Agamemnon cries out under the blows of his wife’s blade. In a unique moment among surviving tragedies, the Chorus divide into small groups and the members agonize over whether to intervene—the audience knows they cannot, but their indecision adds tension to this taut scene. Then the doors are opened and Clytemnestra emerges, with two bloodied corpses on the ekkyklēma that now rolls forward. Cassandra has been killed along with Agamemnon, as she herself had foreseen in her prophetic visions. Clytemnestra describes, with unseemly glee, how she used her husband’s royal robes to immobilize him, as though trapping fish with a net—part of a pattern of net and cloth imagery that, in typically Aeschylean fashion, recurs throughout this play and also helps bind it to the two that will follow.
In a final scene, Aegisthus enters, heavily guarded, to remind the Chorus that this family murder has also been a coup d’état. Argos is now ruled by a new regime, and force will be used to control the populace. The city has descended from monarchy to tyranny, and the scornful way Aegisthus refers to the Chorus as those “down on the rowing bench”—meaning, in Athens, those without property—shows that it also now belongs to the rich. For an Athenian audience in 458 B.C., who had just seen their own city enact sweeping democratic reforms (see the introduction to Eumenides), this was a hateful turn of events.
As the drama ends, the Chorus unsheath their swords, and civil war is only narrowly avoided by the intervention of Clytemnestra. The Chorus’s question—“But is Orestes living somewhere?”—haunts both the Argive people and their bloodstained rulers. The next play in the trilogy will see it answered.
THE ORESTEIA
AGAMEMNON
Translated by Sarah Ruden
Throughout the translation, I have used the following Greek text of the play, indicating in footnotes where and why I have felt it necessary to depart from the text: West, Martin L., ed. Aeschylus: Agamemnon (Berlin and New York: Teubner, 2008). I owe profound thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its generous support of this work.
CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
WATCHMAN belonging to the royal house of Argos
CHORUS of elderly male citizens of Argos
CLYTEMNESTRA, wife of Agamemnon
HERALD belonging to the Greek army
AGAMEMNON, king of Argos
CASSANDRA, daughter of the Trojan king, Priam, and Agamemnon’s war captive
AEGISTHUS, cousin of Agamemnon and lover of Clytemnestra
Setting: Before dawn, on the hill of Mycenae over the town of Argos; the scene opens on the roof of the palace.
WATCHMAN: I beg the gods to free me from this hardship.
Doglike—my head laid on my arms—I’ve watched
on the Atreides’ rooftop through this long year.
Now I’m familiar with the stars’ assembly,
potentates shining and distinct on high,
heavenly bodies bringing, as they perish
or in their risings, frost and heat to mortals.
I’m still on lookout for that beacon’s pledge,
by fiery ray and oracle from Troy—
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news of its capture. This is her stern pleasure,
her womanly hopeful-hearted man-strong purpose.
My dew-soaked bed, my pacing—which is worse?
Dreams never care for me, they never keep
a vigil—fear, not sleep, is at my side,
so steadfast slumber never shuts my lids.
When I decide to sing, or chirr as birds do,
agony, out of tune with rest, seeps in;
I cry and groan then for this home’s condition,
with things not run—the best way—as before.
20
Still—may my effort find a lucky end
when the good news shines through in murky flame.
(Rises up, looking off into the distance.)
Oh, welcome, lamp as powerful as daylight,
gleaming announcement! Think of all the dancing
prompted in Argos by this joyful blessing!
(Gives a h
igh-pitched cry.)
To Agamemnon’s wife I give the clear sign
to rise from bed, swift as a star appearing,
and lift her voice in honor of the lamp
throughout her halls—if truly Ilium’s city*1
30
is taken: but the beacon’s news is clear.
And on my own account, I’ll dance a prelude.
My masters’ luck is reckoned up as mine:
the signal fire has thrown me triple sixes.
For all that, let me feel, when he comes home,
the well-loved heft of my lord’s hand in mine.
I have no more to say. A giant ox
stands on my tongue. But if the house weren’t mute,
you’d hear, and no mistake. My choice is this, though:
if those who don’t know ask, I’m empty-headed.
40
CHORUS: (entering) A decade now, since the great plaintiffs, Lord Menelaus
and Agamemnon, took their fleet against Priam.*2
By Zeus’s will, two honored thrones and scepters,
Atreus’ sons, like a strong yoke of oxen,
set out with Argives on a thousand ships
as a relief force from this country.
In their souls’ rage, they shrieked for the great god Ares,
50
shrieked in preposterous pain, like eagles
high up over their children’s bed, eddying, wheeling,
sweeping fast on their oars of wings,
since the work of guarding their chicks’ pallet turned out worthless.
Up above, somebody hears—maybe Apollo or Pan or Zeus—
the bird-wail, howl, sharp shout of the settlers in his country,
and he sends the violators their late penalty: a Fury.
60
So the overlord, the guest-god Zeus
inflicts the children of Atreus on Alexander*3—
for the sake of a woman bound to many men. He lays on
The Greek Plays Page 8
