An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

by Aeschylus

  [scream] for the offerings my father made to save its towers he

  killed animal after animal it did no good we suffered anyway and I am soon to hit the ground

  I with my thermonous thermonous means hot soul, burning mind, brain on fire

  CHORUS : You’re back on track.

  Some heavy spirit swoops on you and takes your breath—

  out comes Death.

  (Outcomes? I’m not sure where this will end.)

  KASSANDRA : Okay. No longer.

  No longer now out from veils like some firstblush bride shall my oracle glance but as brightness blows the rising sun open it will rush my oceans forward onto light—a wave of woes far worse than these.

  No more riddles.

  Bear me witness:

  I know that smell. Evils. Evils long ago.

  A chorus of singers broods upon this house, they never leave, their tune is bad, they drink cocktails of human blood and party through the rooms.

  You will not get them out.

  They are kin to the Furies and sing of original evil, marriage beds that stink of life gone wrong.

  Do I miss the mark? Am I a prophet of lies?

  Just babbling?

  Or do you admit I’m a pretty good shot.

  Bear me witness:

  I see this place I see its ancient sins.

  CHORUS : You amaze me. It’s as if you were born here.

  KASSANDRA : You can thank Apollo.

  CHORUS : He desired you?

  KASSANDRA : I was ashamed to speak of it before.

  CHORUS : Let’s not be overdelicate.

  KASSANDRA : The fact is we wrestled.

  CHORUS : Had sex?

  KASSANDRA : I said yes but defaulted.

  CHORUS : And you already possessed your gift?

  KASSANDRA : My gift. Oh yes. I was the local prophet.

  CHORUS : So did Apollo punish you?

  KASSANDRA : He made my prophecy never believed.

  CHORUS : But we believed y—

  KASSANDRA : [scream] I lose my screams they find me again!

  The dread work of prophecy buckles me down to its BAM BAM BAM—

  do you see them there those young ones who nest by the door

  like shapes in dreams

  like children murdered

  they hold their own flesh in their own hands

  and the entrails drip where their father tasted deep.

  Yes I can see this and I tell you vengeance is coming—

  a soft lion tumbles in the master’s bed awaiting him—

  how little the great general understands that bitch who licked his hand at the door of the house and what she plans to do.

  She has the nerve, she is a killer, female against male.

  What should I call her—a kind of snake, a Skylla, a plague, a mother who breathes out war against her own loved ones?

  How she shrieked in joy to see that man on her doorstep.

  Yet you know it’s all the same to me if anyone believes this or not.

  Who cares? The future is coming.

  Soon enough you’ll pity me, you’ll say I was a true prophet.

  CHORUS : Thyestes feasting on his children’s flesh—

  I get that one, it makes me cold with fear.

  After that you were unclear.

  KASSANDRA : I say you will see Agamemnon dead.

  CHORUS : Hush, girl.

  KASSANDRA : There is no hushing this.

  CHORUS : Really? Really? I pray you are wrong!

  KASSANDRA : Pray away. They are preparing to kill.

  CHORUS : They? Who? What man do you mean?

  KASSANDRA : You haven’t been listening at all have you?

  CHORUS : Just tell me what he’s planning to do.

  KASSANDRA : And yet I speak Greek all too well.

  CHORUS : So do the Pythian oracles but no one understands them.

  KASSANDRA : [scream] Again! The fire comes on me.

  [scream] For Apollo! [scream] For me!

  Look there—see the lioness who beds a wolf when the lion is gone?

  She’ll kill me, she’s mixing a cup of anger and death even now, she’s whetting her sword on her husband’s head—

  she’ll make him pay for bringing me home!

  So why do I keep this ridiculous costume, these “prophetic symbols” the stick the crown—

  be gone! be damned! Enrich someone else’s life with doom!

  Look, Apollo himself is denuding me—

  he watched them mock me in my little prophet’s dress, my little prophet’s hat.

  They called me gypsy beggar starveling, I put up with that.

  And now the prophet forces his prophetess down to the killing floor.

  Instead of my father’s altar a butcher’s block awaits me and a hot rip of blood.

  I am meat for sacrifice.

  But I won’t go unavenged.

  Another is coming, a son to kill the mother and pay the father’s debt—

  strangered from this land he will go into exile then come back one day to finish it off.

  The gods have sworn an oath on this.

  So why call for pity?

  I saw Troy fall. I see Troy’s victors falling.

  Now I go to die. Hello gates of Hades.

  I pray for an easy death: one clean stroke and then—

  I close my eyes.

  CHORUS : That was a long speech. But your wisdom does not falter.

  On the other hand, if you know you have an appointment with death why stride so calmly to the altar?

  KASSANDRA : There is no escape.

  CHORUS : No, you still have time.

  KASSANDRA : The day is come. Flight would be pointless.

  CHORUS : Brave girl.

  KASSANDRA : People never say that to a lucky person do they?

  CHORUS : What about the glamour of a noble death?

  KASSANDRA : Alas for my glamorous father and his noble children.

  CHORUS : What’s the matter? Why do you jump back?

  KASSANDRA : [scream] [scream]

  CHORUS : Why do you scream? You seem suddenly disgusted.

  KASSANDRA : The house is reeking blood!

  CHORUS : Well yes, they’re sacrificing animals at the hearth.

  KASSANDRA : I know that smell! It isn’t animals!

  CHORUS : Incense maybe?

  KASSANDRA : Here I go. To raise a funeral song for me and Agamemnon.

  My life is over.

  Oh my friends, I’m not making a fuss like a bird at a bush—

  you can testify to that after I’m dead.

  I speak as one about to die:

  there will be other deaths in consequence of me, a woman then a man.

  Remember what I was.

  CHORUS : How I pity you and your death foretold.

  KASSANDRA : One thing left.

  I want to sing my own dirge.

  I pray to the sun, to this last minute of life:

  let my enemies pay with blood for what they did to me—

  I’m just a killed slave, easy fistful of death.

  But you,

  O humans,

  O human things—

  when a man is happy, a shadow could overturn it.

  When life goes wrong, a wet sponge erases the whole picture.

  You,

  you,

  I pity.

  [Exit KASSANDRA.]

  CHORUS : No human ever has enough good fortune.

  No one ever bars it from his door.

  Agamemnon won from gods the right to capture Priam’s city.

  If he must shed his blood to pay for others in the past

  and then by dying pass the debt to others in the future,

  who in the world can say that he is safe?

  [Cry from within.]

  AGAMEMNON : [scream] I am struck!

  CHORUS : Silence! Who cries out?

  AGAMEMNON : [scream] Again! I am hit a second time!

  CHORUS : [severally]—Thos
e screams imply the deed is done but let’s go slow.

  —My advice is summon the townsfolk here.

  —I say burst in and catch them unaware.

  —Something like that, something like that, I agree.

  —It’s obvious they’re laying the ground for tyranny.

  —And we’re wasting time while they defy the goddess named Delay.

  —Oh I don’t know what to do or what to think or what to say.

  —Me neither. Words can’t raise the dead.

  —Do you want those criminals down on your head?

  —Unendurable. Death is better.

  —So from two screams we’re saying the king’s a dead letter?

  —Well let’s not get upset till we clarify this thing.

  —That’s my vote. Find out what’s going on with our king.

  [Dead bodies of AGAMEMNON and KASSANDRA are displayed on the stage with KLYTAIMESTRA standing over them.]

  KLYTAIMESTRA : I said a lot of things before that sounded nice.

  I’m not ashamed to contradict them now.

  How else devise damage for an enemy who passed himself off as a friend?

  How else fence up nets high enough to catch him?

  It’s a long long time I’ve been pondering this.

  Crisis of an ancient feud.

  Finally, I say finally!

  I stand where I struck with the deed done!

  I did it. I make no denial.

  So he could neither flee nor save himself

  I threw round him a cloth with no way out—a sort of dragnet—evil wealth of cloth.

  I strike him twice.

  Two screams and his limbs go slack.

  He falls. I strike him one more time—three for Zeus the savior of corpses!

  And as he sputters out his life in blood he sprays me with black drops like dew gladdening me no less than when the green buds of the corn feel showers from heaven!

  That’s how things stand, old men of Argos.

  Rejoice if you want to. I am on top of the world!

  And this man has the libation he deserves.

  He filled this house like a mixing bowl to the brim with evils, now he has drunk it down.

  CHORUS : Your mouth is amazing.

  Who would boast like this over a husband?

  KLYTAIMESTRA : Don’t squawk at me. I’m not some witless female.

  I am fearless and you know it.

  Whether you praise or blame me I don’t care.

  Here lies Agamemnon, my husband, a dead body, work of my righteous right hand.

  That’s how things stand.

  CHORUS : What poison did you eat or drink to make you so insane?

  You’ve cast off, cut off, everything—you will be cityless,

  accursed, an object of hatred, toxic to your own people.

  KLYTAIMESTRA : Oh now you pull out your code of justice—call me accursed, demand my exile!

  What about them? What about him?

  This man who, without a second thought, as if it were a goat dying, sacrificed his own child, my most beloved, my birthpang, my own—and he had flocks of animals to charm the winds of Thrace!

  Isn’t it this man you should have sent into exile, to pay for that polluted deed?

  Instead you pass judgment on me!

  Well I warn you, threaten me all you like and yes, if you crush me, you’ll be giving the orders.

  But if some god ordains the opposite, however late, old men, I’ll teach you your place.

  CHORUS : You swaggering egotist.

  Your mind is mad with killing.

  I see a stain of blood upon your eye.

  But you know one day when you’ve lost both friends and honor, you’ll have to repay blow for blow.

  KLYTAIMESTRA : Listen and keep listening: this I swear to you.

  By the Justice of my child, by Ruin, by Revenge—

  the three gods for whom I slaughtered him—

  hope does not walk the halls of fear in me so long as Aigisthos lights the fire on my hearth.

  Aigisthos is loyal. A good defender.

  My personal shield.

  Here lies the man who despoiled me, darling of every fancy girl at Troy.

  And by his side the little prophetess who sweetened his sheets.

  Sweetened the whole army’s sheets, I shouldn’t doubt.

  They got what they deserve those two.

  Yes here he lies. And she like a swan that has sung its last song beside him, his truelove, his little spiceberry.

  You know, to look at them kind of excites me.

  CHORUS : How I wish that I could fall asleep and not wake up.

  Our guardian is gone, the gracious man who for a woman’s sake suffered so much and by a woman’s hand is now cut down.

  Helen! wild mad Helen, you murdered so many beneath Troy.

  Now you’ve crowned yourself one final perfect time, a crown of blood that will not wash away.

  Strife walks with you everywhere you go.

  KLYTAIMESTRA : Oh stop whining.

  And why get angry at Helen?

  As if she singlehandedly destroyed those multitudes of men.

  As if she all alone made this wound in us.

  CHORUS : I call upon the evil demon who besets this house,

  who besets the sons of Tantalos, you whose power comes from women, whose voice is like a crow, you perch upon the corpse harshing out your hymn of joy!

  KLYTAIMESTRA : Now you’re making sense—

  to call upon the thricegorged evil demon of this family.

  Deep in its nerves is a lust to lick blood and no wound heals before the next starts oozing.

  CHORUS : This demon you admire sits heavy on the house, heavy with anger,

  a ruinous insatiable thing.

  [scream] For the sake of Zeus!

  Zeus is the cause,

  Zeus is the action.

  Whatever happens for mortals without Zeus?

  What part of all this is not godaccomplished?

  O how shall I lament you O my king?

  My heart is full of love.

  But you lie in this spider’s web leaking out your life—

  a death unholy, a bed unworthy, a blade coming out of your own wife’s hand.

  KLYTAIMESTRA : You call this deed mine?

  And I his wife? You’re wrong!

  Some ancient bitter spirit of revenge disguised as Agamemnon’s wife arose from Atreus’ brutal feast to sacrifice this man for those little children.

  CHORUS : You are guiltless of this murder?

  Who is your witness? I don’t think so!

  Oh yes, some spirit of vengeance may have been your secret sharer.

  Ares is black with wading through blood and he will get justice for the clotted gore of children used as food.

  O how shall I lament you O my king?

  My heart is full of love.

  But you lie in this spider’s web leaking out your life—

  a death unholy, a bed unworthy, a blade coming out of your own wife’s hand.

  KLYTAIMESTRA : His death was nothing unworthy!

  Did he not bring lies and ruin on this house?

  My poor little green shoot Iphigeneia—

  she’s the one who suffered unworthy.

  He has nothing to complain about.

  He paid by the sword for what he himself began.

  CHORUS : I am at a loss. I have no idea where to turn, everything’s falling apart.

  A storm of blood beats on the roof—no more little drops!

  I’m terrified.

  Justice is sharpening a second sword on a second whetstone.

  O earth I wish you had wrapt me away before I saw my king sprawled in a bath! Who will bury him? Who will mourn him—you?

  You’d have the nerve to sing his lament as if you were doing him a favor?

  Who in the world will shed true tears at this man’s tomb?

  KLYTAIMESTRA : That’s not your concern.

  By me he fell, by
me he died, I shall bury him.

  Not with wailing from this house.

  No, Iphigeneia will open her arms and run to meet him in Hades—

  a father-daughter embrace, won’t that be perfect!

  CHORUS : She shoots back taunt for taunt.

  How to judge? The thief is robbed, the killer pays his price.

  But here’s the key: while Zeus sits on his throne the doer must suffer. That is the law. Who could drive the curse out of this family?

  These people are glued to ruin.

  KLYTAIMESTRA : Well, that’s a good point.