The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, the Eumenides

by Aeschylus

  but not without some honour from the gods.

  There will come another to avenge us,

  born to kill his mother, born

  his father’s champion. A wanderer, a fugitive

  driven off his native land, he will come home

  to cope the stones of hate that menace all he loves.

  The gods have sworn a monumental oath: as his father lies

  upon the ground he draws him home with power like a prayer.

  This is Cassandra’s first constructive prophecy, her first to be believed, and through it she herself becomes empowered. Now her death fulfils her with a strength she offers to the elders. She approaches the doors, she smells the reek of blood and cries, but she turns her cry into evidence that can convict her murderers in a later court of law, like the Areopagus towards which the Oresteia turns. Cassandra has a genius for conversions. She converts destructive images into their opposites: she is a bride of death like Iphigeneia. but she bears a prophecy that lives. In her closing lines she turns her personal misery into a vision of the human condition. She has suffered into truth. Under Apollo she is the Peitho that is pathos ; under the Furies she acquires mathos too, the Peitho of compassion. She has turned the Furies’ harsh incriminations into kindness - a prophetic turning-point indeed. Through Cassandra we turn from the eagles killing the mother hare, the father killing the daughter, and the warlord razing Aphrodite’s Troy, to the queen who kills the king, and the mother’s vengeance that pursues the son until this clash between male and female is resolved in the union of Athena and the Eumenides, Zeus and Fate. It is a turn, in short, that is creative as well as destructive, like Cassandra’s growing kinship with the queen. Both are destined to be murdered, yet as they die they may predict a crucial balance. Cassandra sees that Orestes must be ‘born to kill his mother’ - her Fury must impel him in his mission. That will be the crux of the trilogy, yet even at this point, while summoning Clytaemnestra’s vengeance, Cassandra surrounds it with the aura of its offspring, justice. She is both the victim of the queen and her vitality, the Eumenides in Clytaemnestra’s Fury. Cassandra is the redemptive heart of the Oresteia. She is the agony of vision. She is the tragic muse.

  Throughout the trilogy Aeschylus will dramatize her power. As she goes to her death, the chorus can finally accept Agamemnon’s murder and its cause: his excess, and his place in a great triad of murders, his father’s, his own, and soon his wife’s, ‘a threefold hammer blow’ like the three blows about to be dealt by Clytaemnestra. When the death-cries of the king ring out, the old men are terrified ; they scatter into individual voices - daring, cautious or disengaged - but a majority favours what Cassandra would have urged. They storm the doors to ‘see how it stands with Agamemnon’, and what they see unites them once and for all.

  Rising over the bodies of the king and the seer, Clytaemnestra speaks the truth at last, magnificent in her defiance as she reveals what lay behind her ironies: a murder as climactic as any in the Iliad, a welcome more perverse than any in the Odyssey. As she re-enacts the trapping and the killing of the king, she impersonates Artemis the Huntress in effect, but she rebels against her fellow Olympians, she devotes her victim to Zeus, whom she demotes to the God of Death, and triumphs over Agamemnon:So he goes down, and the life is bursting out of him -

  great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower

  wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel

  like the Earth when the spring rains come down,

  the blessed gifts of god, and the new green spear

  splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory!

  Clytaemnestra represents the Earth, and behind her words we may hear a famous Aeschylean fragment:The clear pure Heaven yearns to wound the Earth

  and yearning seizes the Earth to wed the Heaven -

  rain comes down from the throbbing skies

  and pierces the Earth, she teems with flocks

  and Demeter’s full rich life that strengthens men,

  and from that drenching marriage-rite the woods,

  the spring bursts forth in bloom. And I, I cause it all.

  Aphrodite is defending Hypermnestra, the one daughter of Danaos who refused to murder her husband, acting in the name of love that weds the Heaven and the Earth each spring. Without the echo of Aphrodite, Clytaemnestra is a grim perversion of nature - the joy of the cornfields in the gift of rain, so precious in parched Argos, is twisted into the euphoria of a wife drenched with her husband’s blood. The echo makes her all the more terrifying and universal, but it has a further resonance, however distant, that may lend the queen a measure of the goddess’ fruitfulness as well.

  By the end of the Oresteia we may see Clytaemnestra yield to the spirit of Hypermnestra, vengeance yield to justice, Earth and Heaven join in bonds of marriage. The legends say that from the bloody wounds of Ouranos, god of the Sky, came both the Furies and Aphrodite, vengefulness and love. And the more demonic Clytaemnestra grows, the more she will become a mother, human, vulnerable. Even now she labours with the spear at spring, the son who will destroy her. Even before the end of Agamemnon we may sense her creativity, the Great Mother within the Terrible Mother - love-in-hate personified - but for the present, of course, the Terrible Mother that Calchas first invoked and Cassandra just envisioned has come rushing to the fore - ‘the womb of Fury child-avenging Fury’.

  She appals the chorus. The old men rise in outrage - poison has made her criminally insane - and sentence her to exile. For a moment she makes a rational self-defence; she indicts the king for murder and the old men for criminal neglect in failing to pursue him. But she revels in the carnage of her husband and his lover - she is sadistic, as oblivious as Agamemnon to the meaning of her actions. And so far we have a mistrial; she is lost in self-indulgence, the jury is reduced to threats. We need a change of venue, and the interchange that follows takes us to a higher court. It is not an easy form to grasp by reading; performed, it has increasing impact. Gradually the chorus realizes that the queen’s act is another manifestation of the curse, but like Agamemnon’s decision to kill Iphigeneia, her act involves both free will and predestination. At the end, the chorus and Clytaemnestra seem to reach a deadlock: how can curses be reconciled with prayers, blood feuds with communal justice, the Olympian theology with the Furies? How can a family that ‘has been welded to its ruin’ be redeemed? Certain answers come to light in the course of the trial, but it is not a cold debate; its music builds operatically, in a series of emotional crises, shocks of recognition.

  We begin in the depths. The old men pray for a painless death, lamenting, almost appealing to Helen, the spirit of destruction. Seeing a chance to deflect blame from herself, Clytaemnestra rises to her sister’s defence in sudden lyric power, as if they were in league. Their kinship, in fact, forces the chorus to recognize the kindred spirit working here - the curse that has impelled the sisters from the start, and counteracts the initial omen sent by Zeus. Now the old men see the spirit in command and not the gods, twin Furies and not twin kings, a raven, not an eagle, with its victim. Clytaemnestra seizes on their vision, since it exonerates herself and Helen too. They can be nothing more than carriers of the spirit raging through the generations of the house. Yet the spirit seems amoral, and the next stage of the trial changes that. The old men return, de profundis, to their faith in Zeus: ‘What comes to birth that is not Zeus?/Our lives are pain, what part not come from god?’ Full circle from the opening hymn, Zeus is the anguish in their hearts; and as they mourn their king they may even mourn the death of faith itself, but Clytaemnestra gives them something to believe in. She declares the spirit lives within her body; more, he is the spirit of revenge and he is right - he has murdered Agamemnon for the murder of their daughter, indeed for an enormous legacy of murders. The conspiracy between the queen and her spirit, her freedom and her fate, is just as total as that between the king and the winds at Aulis, but her conspiracy is more deeply, more lastingly self-aware. And the chorus finds it so retributive that
its moral impact cannot be denied: ‘revenge will stride, /clots will mass for the young who were devoured.’ Clytaemnestra glories in her work. All can see it now for what it is: homicide justified by the law of retaliation.

  But her Fury is a staggering moral force. ‘The heavy rains of blood will crush the house.’ The old men pray to Mother Earth for their own oblivion and burial for the king, and Clytaemnestra will conduct the rites of death, hand Agamemnon back to their daughter waiting in Hades to embrace her father’s ghost. And the chorus breaks into a hymn for even more destructive unions: the law of Zeus reverts to the lex talionis, the prayer to Zeus becomes an invocation of the curse. It is a bold verdict. Zeus can be the arbitrary king no longer; if he wants to be panergetos, all-achieving, he must be panaitios, all-responsible too. He cannot use the Furies without suffering their recriminations, the Titanic law he had suppressed, yet his complicity here will mark his first step towards a more conscientious, communal form of justice. And the verdict is not without some credit to the judges. Brought face to face with the hopelessness of trying to foresee - much less effect - an end to the chain reaction of murder, the old men also suffer into truth. It is the Furies however, not the gods and the cautious precepts of Olympus, that have inspired them. Through Cassandra they have seen that history is a process; through the queen that process shatters them yet serves to make them whole. For her private crime has become a tremendous public burden, yet as they accept it the elders build their greatest lyric outburst in the play. They ‘sing of human unsuccess/in a rapture of distress’, in Auden’s words, and they end the trial by insisting on their own complicity in the misery of the race. ‘Broken husks of men’ at first, they could only narrate Calchas’ prophecy - now they are the prophets.

  Clytaemnestra commends them for their vision, then acts to save them all from ruin. Her confidence leads her to strike a pact with the spirit; a lavish sacrifice should persuade him to depart, ‘once I have purged/our fury to destroy each other - /purged it from our halls’. What she tries to form, in short, is a marriage contract with the curse. And all the blood-weddings that went before - of Iphigeneia, Helen and Troy, even Agamemnon and herself - become proteleia like the slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey that consecrates the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope. But here the king is murdered, the suitor weds the queen, and the queen assumes command; and here the crux of Agamemnon lies. The master of irony has become its target - Clytaemnestra’s ‘marriage’ is a death pact. She is locked within the chain, another instrument of revenge who must become a victim in return. That is what it means to dedicate oneself to vengeance. The queen is a repetition of Agamemnon, as Kitto sees her; she vainly hopes ‘that the Dikê now achieved shall be final’, provided only that she lives a pious life. Yet there is a difference too. As she accepts her yoke she may also express a premonition of the Fury that will end her life and purge the house at last. Standing in her husband’s steps, she may repeat his weakness less than she enacts her own potential. Witness the moral power she generates in the chorus, and her position in the closing scene.

  We have reached a vision almost too intense, as if we were looking at the sun in its eclipse. We must come down to earth, and in a later Greek tragedy a deus ex machina, a god swung down from Olympus to resolve the future, might have intervened. But Aeschylus is composing on a larger scale than Sophocles or Euripides. The curse has far to go before it is laid to rest, and here he introduces a prologue to a new play. Called forth, it seems, by Clytaemnestra’s evocation of the spirit, Aegisthus enters with his bodyguard, praising the gods because they bring him glory, gloating over Agamemnon’s body as a product of the curse. We have never heard its history told so fully, not because Aeschylus has been saving it for last but because Cassandra, Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra have embodied it so uniquely. Aegisthus relies on the common version ot its origins - Thyestes’ feast - and it reflects his vulgarity. What a confusion it is. He tells it to indict the Atreidae and justify himself, but he seems to relish both the virtuoso cookery and his father’s vomiting and trampling on the children’s flesh. He is trampling on his father, degrading the curse, the human complexity of Thyestes who was both abusing and abused.

  History is cannibalism to Aegisthus, and he tramples on his victim too. He and Agamemnon are related in their excess, yet Aegisthus is mere front: he claims to have planned the murder, then he claims the throne, but he has done precisely nothing. He is a parody of the traditional Aegisthus, the hardy swordsman who shares the killing of the king with Clytaemnestra, and his recital of the curse is finally self-defeating: ‘Now I could die gladly, even I.’ Yet his entrance marks the dawn of a mediocre present that is hard to limit; when he says, ‘Let me make this clear’ (and the Greek made this translation almost irresistible), we may hear our own political leaders, too, and run for cover. When he alludes to culture, he is reaching for the knife. He speaks political language in Orwell’s sense; it is ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’, and it may usurp the place of poetry itself. The chorus is speechless for a moment, but they are so revolted by Aegisthus’ cowardice they quickly rise against him. Troy left them behind, not this conflict. Now they seize on the coming of Orestes like a weapon - fighting, in their old age, with the courage of the liberator.

  What keeps them from striking out against Aegisthus is the queen, for as he declines in power she increases. Contrary to legend, she is the single-handed executioner of her husband, and she alone suspends hostilities at the end, girding for a conflict that will rage around herself. She has tried to form a liaison with the spirit of the house. Her lover makes a mockery of that spirit, yet he may also represent how low the queen has had to stoop. To lash herself into an act of murder may have required valid rage and guilty passion, Fury and the curse. Now she accepts her union with Aegisthus for what it is, a coupling of righteousness and degradation. Without him she is a self-deluded victim like her husband. With him she becomes a combatant struggling to transform her guilt into a kind of strength:If we could end the suffering, how we would rejoice.

  The spirit’s brutal hoof has struck our heart.

  And that is what a woman has to say.

  Can you accept the truth?

  She cannot end the suffering, she knows that she must suffer most, and she rises to a majesty of endurance. Her language has become as clear as what awaits her, and her clarity is a legitimate source of pride. Clytaemnestra is at last no more conciliatory than Oedipus or Lear. She undergoes a change in awareness, not a change of heart. True to herself, she blazes out against the chorus calling for Orestes, and together they bring the play to its grating but prophetic close. Orestes will arise from the clash between his fatherland that cries for justice and the Fury of his mother, and hers may be the greater force. She alone can generate her destiny in the person of her son. That will be her achievement years from now, but we may sense it here as she embraces her fate. From that union comes her death, from her death the liberation of the race. The play is named for Agamemnon, but the tragic hero is the queen.

  All that now remains of the Oresteia is the written word. We should remember that the text leaves much unsaid about the total impression of a Greek dramatic work. Its religious, social and theatrical impact greatly increased its power. The Athenians who attended the Oresteia came to worship Dionysus and receive the sensuous fullness of the performance - perhaps to be overwhelmed, as Yeats was overwhelmed, as if he were present at ‘a terrible sacrament of the god’. The Greeks used every medium they had. And now so much is irretrievably lost - the music, the choreography, the scenery, the timbre of the actors’ voices, what must have been their memorable gestures. But we have not lost the essence. Our text, Aristotle encourages us to believe, is not a thin libretto. The words alone may hold the life of the thing itself. The music they create, the scenery, the acting, the complete consort dancing together in the theatre of our minds may well be all we need. Perhaps - but this may be too daring - a performance of the Oresteia in the mi
nd of a twentieth-century reader may be even more moving than it was in that crowded, often restive Theatre of Dionysus at the first performance. At least we can do with the written words what no Athenian could do when they were spoken on the stage; we can stop and wonder and look back and tease apart the subtleties and pregnancies of Aeschylus’ style, so that while we lose theatrically we gain in imaginative power. As Keats has said about a different genre of Greek art, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter.’ And perhaps with Greek drama, richer, too.

  But injustice to Aeschylus, no summary of his tragedy, or translation, can convey the sensuous impact of his language, the superbly rich and flexible language of fifth-century Greece which he employed with a power few other languages could achieve. It is the flesh and blood in which his meaning lives. We cannot forget its vitality any more than we can hope to reproduce it. It threatens, always, to make our reactions to his work as lifeless as a paraphrase of The Wreck of the Deutschland or The Bridge. Hart Crane found the substance of Aeschylus ‘so verbally quickened and delivered with such soul-shivering economy that one realizes there is none in the English language to compare him with’. He is so far from us, and further from our ingrained, often cramped and icy standards of classicism than almost all of his successors. He is as far from the lucid control of Sophocles as a Gothic cathedral from a Doric temple, Michelangelo from Leonardo. There is reason for his eccentricities, to be sure; he uses archaisms to root his action in the past, and neologisms that serve to make it new. But he uses them so freely that at times he is bizarre, his metaphors grotesque. At times he gives the impression of finding the Greek language, despite its richness, inadequate to the flood of his characters’ feeling in a crisis. Poets have felt this inadequacy before and since - Homer, Virgil, and Tennyson, for instance - but they generally speak of it in terms of calm regret. The old men of Argos (probably speaking for Aeschylus in his later years) feel it viscerally, like a woman in childbirth. They fill with terror, they strain to give it voice, but their cries erupt in silence at the last, ‘never to ravel out a hope in time/and the brain is swarming, burning—’