This trial is made up of a group of twelve Athenian citizens and is supervised by none other than Athena herself. Pages with related products. There are no reliable sources for the xgamemnon of Aeschylus. Unfortunately, only seven of an estimated 70 plays by Aeschylus have survived into modern times; one of these plays, Prometheus Boundis sometimes thought not to be the work of Aeschylus. When he stood trial for his offense, Aeschylus pleaded ignorance and was only spared because of his brave service in the Persian Wars.
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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. And as she seizes command from the warlord, she is seizing fire from heaven - not only do her beacons rival the relay race of torches run for Hephaistos and Athena; they mark the end of a heroic, Olympian age and the dawn of an age primordial, matriarchal, everpresent.
Zeus's eagles began the war; Clytaemnestra's flaming omen ends it and begins its repercussions, since she is a prophet too. She reads her sign with such immediacy that Troy and Argos seem to merge as cities struck by war. She is here and there, ranging through the streets like the winning general, but more sensitive than Agamemnon, she can see the victims are so pitiful, the victors so pitiless that their victory may recoil, If only they are revering the city's gods, the shrines of the gods who love the conquered land, no plunderer will be plundered in return And even if the men come back with no offence to the gods, the avenging dead may never rest -Oh let no new disaster strike!
Prophetic warnings that incriminate the king. He will desecrate the Trojan shrines and commandeer a priestess, adding the gods to Clytaemnestra's stronger motive, 'the avenging dead' themselves.
But now, conscious that she may have started suspicions, she breaks off with some conventional womanly phrases not without their muffled warnings and goes inside to prepare for Agamemnon. And so the trap begins to close at the first approach of Agamemnon in his triumph. She is the bride whose dowry is death for Troy, and death for Greece as well. She plunges both sides into grief, a demon of retaliation who, with Ares the 'gold-broker of corpses', leads the people of Argos against the 'defenders' who led them into war.
Now those who died in victory demand vengeance as surely as those who died in defeat. And the victory hymn becomes a moan of fear, as the old men fall back on a muted prayer for peace; they try to reject Clytaemnestra's message women are gullible, they murmur, over-sanguine but it is too late. The leader sees a herald fresh from Troy. A victorious spray of olive 'shades' his face, and he tells a double story: though the Greeks have won the day, the king has desecrated Troy.
There is little reason to rejoice. Argos and the armies longed for each other, but as the leader hints, the citizens needed the men to save them from repression. In his joy the herald fails to understand, yet as he recollects the miseries that the army has escaped abroad, he contributes them, like echoes from another country under siege, to the growing miseries of Argos.
The more he revels in the spoils of Troy, the more he provokes the envy of the queen, absent but listening, or so her triumphant entrance would suggest She taunts the old men with their doubts. She meant what she said, and she gives the herald a message for the king that means the opposite of all it seems to say. She rushes to welcome him in 'the best possible way', to 'open wide the gates' - her husband has been saved by the Saving God, whom she will identify with Death.
She has heard 'no joy or blame from another man' as surely as 'dye will not stain bronze' - a proverb for the impossible, but you can dye bronze with blood, as she intends to do. She all but tells the herald so. Her closing words would seem to mean 'Such is my boast, filled with truth and not disgraceful for a noble woman to utter,' but their more sinister meaning is 'I am not just twisting the truth; I am proclaiming my determination to take revenge on Agamemnon.
Her scorn of dull conventionality forbids that, and so does her demonic nature. She is no loyal Penelope; she is a female Odysseus waiting at home to murder her husband and marry the suitor - a grim travesty of epic events, cloaked in all the warped familiarities of a nightmare.
The loving wife's words mask hideous infidelities; the pious prayer becomes a witches' Sabbath; the palace gates become the Gates of Hell; 'the best possible way' to welcome a husband is to kill him in the name of Artemis and the Furies.
Clytaemnestra's ironies, more than strong deceptions, conjure up the supernatural - she becomes infernal, the terror that walks in darkness, and what speeds her husband home is the tempest she releases in effect.
A storm, the herald admits, has struck the returning fleets, 'and not without the anger of the gods'. Not only does it carry off Menelaus, leaving his brother less protected; it makes Agamemnon seem the lone survivor of the victory. Worse, the north wind has come howling for another victim, ten years later; but now the storm is Clytaemnestra's spirit, as lethal as the spirit of her sister.
The old men sing of Helen who has 'realized' the meaning of her name, fatal to the Greeks Helena from hele, implying 'to destroy', -na, implying ships but far more fatal to the Trojans. Her marriage is a kedos, both a tie-by-marriage and a grief that ravages their city. For it leads to a birth as painful as that of the lion cub in the parable, 'adopted by the house to lend it warmth' until the savagery in its blood broke out and it massacred its hosts. So Helen was captivating at first and then a Fury to the Trojans in their pride.
And the moral of the story is a fundamental of early Greek ethics. In all prosperity there is a seed of insolence that matures and leads to ruin, or so the common man believes, oppressed by a sense of guilt for every kind of gain. But the old men stress the importance of responsibility; A Reading of 'The Oresteia': The Serpent and the Eagle it is not opulence alone but outrageous acts that breed disaster.
And they foresee that righteous acts bring justice shining through the darkness - the paramount message of the Oresteia. The elders are prophetic but premature. They have overrated Zeus from the start, forgetting his alliance with the Furies in the Furies' first, vindictive form. To rationalize the storm above their heads they have sublimated Helen into a principle of justice, but the grim revenge she takes on Priam reminds us that her sister waits to take even grimmer revenge on Agamemnon.
In fact the cue for his entrance at this moment, laden with plunder, may be their warning against the riches got in excess. The first half of the play, an Iliad of the king's triumph, is all an ominous prologue to his Odyssey, his reunion with the queen.
He is driving towards his 'destined end' - his death at the hands of Fury. This conflict between justice and the Furies builds to the clash between the king and queen at the centre of the play. Agamemnon is a mass of contradictions. The old men salute him as the scourge of Troy and the saviour of Argos, and despite his excesses in the past, they see him as the hero of the Mean who can distinguish enemies from friends - he will have to now, they warn him - and they praise him as the shepherd of his flock.
As an Athenian audience would have known however, he is a brave but reckless king in the Iliad, and Aeschylus presents him here as majestic in his power but inhuman. His destruction of Troy is a sacrilege equal to Xerxes' desecration of the Acropolis.
Worse, he may even be the archetype of the native tyrant so recently expelled from Greece. More than the justice of the gods, he has become a law to himself. He reduces his gods to metaitioi, now lieutenants who must insure his lasting triumph - and so, in less than an hour, they insure his death.
Certain he can restore his city as conclusively as he demolished Priam's, he calls for a trial to test his people, appealing to Victory to 'speed [him] to the last'. And Clytaemnestra will. She is the far more potent force - like Milton's Satan in her in-geniousness, her arrogance, though Milton gradually undermines Satan's heroic energies while Aeschylus is building Clytaemnestra's.
Not only does she have the right of retaliation on her side; she is one of the towering figures in European drama, diabolic yet strangely touching as her ironies portray her here.
In self-defence she testifies to 'how she loves the man', and the man must be Aegisthus, unless it is also Agamemnon, for she reveals an embattled love for him. It is the war she fights at home, within herself, and has been losing.
For all her resistance to solitude, her love for Agamemnon has yielded to infidelity, then to resentment, but it has not ceased to be a kind of love as well. It lingers between her lines like one of the old men's memories that brings delight and pain: I'd watch till late at night, my eyes still burn, I sobbed by the torch I lit for you alone.
I never let it die The torch goes to the heart of Clytaemnestra's darkness, flickering like her feeling for her husband - now the lamp beside their bed, now the light for her paramour, now the beacon burning for revenge.
Again she means what she says, but now her meanings multiply and blend. Through her war she gains what he has lost through his: sympathy for the victim and something even deeper. Empowered by a love that makes her hatred stronger - by an admiration for his prowess that makes her prove 'that heaven had made her such a man' - she manipulates her husband, the elders and ourselves: And so our child is gone, not standing by our side, the bond of our dearest pledges, mine and yours; by all rights our child should be here In defending herself for the absence of their son, she suspends his name until we recall their daughter Iphigcneia too, and so she indicts the king for murder.
He is the victim of irony, she is the master. She 'would salute' him as a public defender, but he is indefensible, and he is standing trial in her court.
Clytaemnestra's welcome, the tapestries she spreads before him are the grounds for his incrimination. These were fabrics sacred to the gods; to walk on them would be an Oriental excess and, to a man like Agamemnon, a strong temptation. They glitter with silver embroidery ; they are also dyed with the red dye from the Murex snail, 'sea-purple' dark as blood - a visual paradox of deadliness and richness.
At first Agamemnon rejects the queen's temptation. He knows hubris when he sees it, he reveres the gods. He protests too much.
Clytaemnestra knows hypocrisy when she sees it. Turn that piety inwards, you have selfdestructive pride. She overpowers him in a tense, brusque dialogue - less than a minute in performance - that seals Agamemnon's doom. She begins by challenging him as the man who knows his limits.
She asks him if he will speak his mind frankly. Clytaemnestra then attacks on another front, turning adroitly to the war itself, and asks, 'What would Priam have done if he had had your success? Clytaemnestra is too skilful to draw the obvious conclusion - 'Why not you, then? He seems to fear popular condemnation, she insinuates, but would Priam? Agamemnon is superior to Priam, isn't he? Indeed he is, as he replies.
He is morally superior, and he stands his ground in good democratic style. He respects the vox populi. Now she takes the offensive, as only a woman can.
A victorious soldier can quite properly yield to a woman, she insists, and her appeal from apparent weakness to apparent strength makes him waver: 'Do you really value victory in this contest of ours?
The shifts of the queen's attack have outwitted him. The victor of the ten-year siege of Troy is defeated in a moment of psychological warfare with his wife. It is all so swift, so simple. Yet behind the king's cliches we hear his sacrifice of Iphigeneia and his own imminent death, more terrible than Priam's.
Behind the queen's cajolery we hear the great impersonator play the prophet Calchas, while dominating this struggle between male and female, justice and the Furies. As her final imperative suggests pithou - 'be persuaded! As he consents, idly hoping to appease the gods by taking off his boots before he treads their vestments, he demonstrates his moral blindness once again.
Yet at Aulis he had to choose between two acts of outrage, both fatal to himself, as well he knew, and so the choice was torment.
At Argos, ten years later, he may choose an act of abstinence. It will not save him, but it will not incriminate him either.
Instead he chooses outrage because it seems so innocent - a scrap of ceremony, not the flash and stab of a knife. This outrage, thanks to the insight of the queen, can appear as superficial as the conscience of the king has actually become. The war has deified the man. His potential as a tragic hero is defeated. With his first step on the fabrics he displays Cassandra as the model of his piety, unaware that her abduction is a sacrilege and her presence is an insult to the queen.
The 'flower and pride of all the wealth [he] won', Cassandra epitomizes what he always does with wealth. He triumphs over it, lending it fatal power over himself, and he does so of his own free will.
Only after he consents does Clytaemnestra rise, in a wild, whirling speech, and speed him to the last: There is the sea and who will drain it dry? Precious as silver, inexhaustible, ever-new, it breeds the more we reap it — tides on tides of crimson dye our robes blood-red. The sea is both the reservoir of their riches and the incarnation of their never-ending strife, a harvest and a grisly reaping both.
Thus the sea reflects the tapestries and Clytaemnestra's victim, the deadliness beneath the surface grandeur of the fabrics and the man.
The sinuous red line they form is in the vein of Agamemnon - they fuse his slaughters and his bloodline, his will and his hereditary guilt. And at every step he takes upon them he exceeds his limits and retraces his descent; he commits an Olympian outrage that will be punished by the forces of the Earth.
For as he tramples on the gods he re-enacts his trampling on the innocents of Troy and on his daughter -just as his forebear trampled on the banquet of his children - and so the king reactivates the curse. As if caught in a slow-motion camera, all his murderous acts dissolve into a single act, deliberate and majestic and profane, that accelerates towards the murder that awaits him.
An entire history of violence marches towards its violent but valid retribution. Clytaemnestra has created a theatrical triumph that is also a solemn moral judgement. Through her words and tapestries the assassination of her husband becomes an execution, a sacrifice. She is the great artist of ritual. And this ritual not only incriminates her victim; it exhilarates herself with sacramental power - whipping the priestess into fury, even yoking the gods beneath her fury as she drives her husband towards his destination.
She hails him as a sun-king whose arrival ushers in a greater darkness. Zeus-Agamemnon has arrived to trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. Agamemnon is teleios or fulfilled, 'arrived at perfection' and also 'ripe for sacrifice'. Zeus is Teleios too, as we hear in the queen's closing prayer, the lord of fulfilment who will consummate her rites.
Now for the agony of that event. The king and queen go in, the doors close - the sense of disaster is electric, and the old men cry out as never before. They had made deeper and deeper sweeps into the past; now there is no escaping from the present. Their hopes for justice have collided with the Fury that is 'real, true, no fantasy', and their song is torn in half. First an explosive dirge the Furies thrust upon them, then a manual of Olympian platitudes.
They cling to their old safeguards, the virtue of moderation, the doctrine of the Mean - if only it were asserted now, Agamemnon might be saved. But he has trampled on the Mean, he must pay the price, and so must they. The more they try to exceed their limits, to pour out words that match their feelings, the more they choke and mutter through the nights, while the 'burning' in their hearts goes unexpressed. Struck dumb by the gods on one hand, powerless to sing without the Furies on the other, they are at the threshold of a new awareness.
At this point in a Greek tragedy the audience would expect to hear the death-cry ringing out, but Aeschylus will delay it for more than three hundred lines, building its suspense and its significance through Cassandra.
Clytaemnestra enters, unctuously invites her to share the sacrifices of thanksgiving for a husband's safe return - offered to Zeus Ktesios who guards, the possessions of the house - though of course she means the murder of Agamemnon and his mistress. Cassandra remains impassive, and Clytaemnestra goes inside, exasperated. In this brief clash of wills the silence of Cassandra seems to defeat her argumentative opponent. But she is impervious to outside events, in the grip of a higher power and entranced, like a medium on the verge of vision.
Cassandra breaks her silence with a scream that turns the house of Atreus into an echoing torture-chamber - a scream for Apollo, the god of enlightenment and prophecy, that makes his very name Destruction. And through his seer there flows - in language that could be clear only to 'those who know' - a pageant of disaster. The collective, curse-ridden past of the house is streaming into Thyestes' murdered children, streaming into the murder of Agamemnon, streaming into the murder of Cassandra, into Argos are streaming all the murders done at Troy.
Apollo's vision is a crescendo of shattering impressions. For all its seeming order of events, each stands out in isolation, unrelated in human terms, unmotivated, unbearable. Through the eyes of Apollo, history is a chronic nightmare, and Cassandra is at the mercy of the god, forced to endure his piling impositions.
Her vision breaks apart. She is wrenched from Agamemnon's death to prophesy her own. And although she subsides into an elegy, her suffering only grows.
First Apollo exploits her as his medium, then he destroys her, 'treads [her] down' - his service is a rape. At first the chorus is confused, as Aeschylus increases the pathos of Cassandra: Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy but added, 'No one will believe you. They turn from terse disclaimers to a more coherent, lyric form of protest, and they do so when Apollo's seer invokes another power.
A phrase from the Odyssey, Agamemnon 'cut down like an ox at the trough', erupts into a kind of religious, mythological upheaval. At the core of Apollo's vision may stand the shattering of the god himself and his original triumph over Mother Earth; she rises up again, in effect, to claim her sacramental bull.
And Apollo's perspective shatters into tragedy and deeper human feeling. The old men reach towards Cassandra, they cry out to her, silent and about to die, to live and sing a more prophetic song. Now she repeats her declarations, with a difference. The old men ask for clarity, so she engages them in discourse, iambics and normal syntax, much as at Delphi the interpreters turned the outcries of the Pythia into conventional language.
But Cassandra does not lose intensity; she gains. She has been like a bride who hides behind a veil, a song of innocence. Now she calls for a song of experience and the only force that can inspire it: These roofs - look up - there is a dancing troupe that never leaves.
And they have their harmony but it is harsh, their words are harsh, they drink beyond the limit. Flushed on the blood of men their spirit grows and none can turn away their revel breeding in the veins - the Furies! They cling to the house for life. They sing, sing of the frenzy that began it all, strain rising on strain, showering curses on the man who tramples on his brother's bed.
A brutal irony and a brutal truth. The Furies' revel, passing through the house, becomes as permanent as the roaring in the blood. They offer a form of recreation, which re-creates our pain and makes it inescapable.
That is the curse, so human it is a perennial menace and, as we shall see, a well-spring of compassion. It is mortality itself that can, at any time, consume one's offspring and one's future, but it may provide a kind of sustenance as well. Live with the curse and with the Furies, and we may live intensely, even perhaps invigorated by their force. Apollo is oblivious to our origins; the Furies are our origins. Through them we may articulate ourselves, if we can bear to sing their song and take Cassandra's lead.
The old men are struck by her knowledge. She has passed the customary test of seers; she can report events she never witnessed. And she owes her vision to Apollo, but not its credibility. She committed a breach of faith herself, she explains; she deceived the god, and that is why he aborted his gift of prophecy.
What added pathos to her lyrics, in other words, now gives her kinship with the story of fallibility she is telling, and increases her effect. Again she approaches Agamemnon's murder, but now she begins at its source, Thyestes' children, holding out their entrails Here she assembles her own vision, basing it on insight, not the lightning of the god. In her eyes history becomes a living force, a continuum of movement and motivation.
The suffering children, more than victims, have a new potential; it is less the macabre crime of Atreus than their grief and the grief of Thyestes, even of his insensitive son, that breeds the murder of Agamemnon.
And Cassandra sees other human factors, too. There is the blindness of the king who, by obliterating Troy, destroys his own perception. Above all, there is the queen's manipulation of appearances. Detest her as she may, Cassandra sees as Clytaemnestra sees, and brings to light her terrifying powers. There is a relationship between the murderess and the victim, as if Cassandra's vision might inspire the queen's revenge, the queen's revenge fulfil Cassandra's vision.
The old men cannot accept the murder of the king. Hoping against hope, they look for a man to do the work and cannot see the woman, but this is a matter for the matriarchal hearth, as Cassandra's third, climactic speech implies. Indignant at Apollo's cruel indifference, she revolts against the god.
She rips off his regalia, stamps it into the ground - an act of trampling that is the opposite of Agamemnon's. She is not surrendering to her destiny, she is struggling to create it; not committing an outrage but decrying the abuses of the god. As she tramples on his robes she re-enacts his trampling out her credibility at Troy and now her life in Argos.
And, by implicating Apollo so severely, she may strip him of his power in this play. Not until she has revolted against the Prophet can she prophesy what is to come.
Not until she bares herself to the Furies can she foresee the coming of Orestes the promise of the future rising from the torment of the present: We will die, 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. See and discover other items: Stay in Touch Sign up. Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus. The Oresteia focuses on the legend of the family of Atreus as raw material for examination of different aspects of the theme such as questions about the nature of justice, methods of establishing and maintaining justice, the relationship of justice to vengeance, mercy, the gods, fate, and the social order.
Feb 07, Pages Buy. He is also the object of central focus between the Furies, Apollo, and Athena. Read it Forward Read it first. Customers who bought this item also bought. I was very curious several times throughout reading this as to how the play would actually be staged to avoid the kind of overshadowed clumsiness staged productions tend do to the text.
The main characters of this classics, plays story are Orestes, Io. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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