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    The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Furies
    The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Furies
    The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Furies
    Ebook209 pages2 hours

    The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Furies

    By Aeschylus

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    Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He is often described as the father of tragedy: our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived into modern times. Fragments of some other plays have survived in quotes and more continue to be discovered on Egyptian papyrus, often giving us surprising insights into his work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilder Publications, Inc.
    Release dateAug 14, 2015
    ISBN9781515400851
    The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Furies

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    Reviews for The Oresteia

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    • 4/5
      A piece of advice. Always refuse an invitation to an Agamemnon family reunion. Just say no. They are people to leave your mouth agape, and not in the Greek and Biblical senses of the word either. You needn’t take only my advice on this. Ask Aeschylus. Oh, wait . . . he’s gone. You’ll have to read his Oresteia instead to understand. And you should.
    • 3/5
      Three Greek dramas by Aeschylus, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Furies make for an interesting trilogy. An understanding of what went on before the Agamemnon was important; I got a lot out of the Introduction and Notes.Agamemnon returns victorious from the Trojan War and meets a tragic fate. In the second drama, Orestes, Agamemnon's son, returns to avenge his father's murder (Apollo told him to...).The conclusion of the trilogy is the trial of Orestes, presided over by Athena, with Apollo as a witness for the defense and the Furies for the prosecution and 12 citizens of Athens are the jury.I'm not sure I can say I enjoyed these dramas. I did find them interesting - to see the murder of a husband compared to the murder of a mother, to see Apollo argue that the true parent is the father not the mother, as the mother only 'hoards the germ of life' (WOW!) and makes a comparison to Athena, who did not come from a mother's womb. Also, I found it very interesting to see a newer god (Athena) arguing with older gods (the Furies) and essentially assuage them through bribery...
    • 4/5
      It started out a bit uninteresting, but it became better once Cassandra was introduced.
    • 3/5
      An interesting trio of 3 plays that make up a traditional Greek tragedy set--the only one extant.The play looks at Athena's using a jury trial to determine Orestes' guilt in the murder of his mother Clytemnestra, in the required act of vengeance for her killing his father Agamemnon. Traditionally,Greek law allowed/required a family member to seek revenge for any killing--leading to a never-ending multi-generational series of revenge murders. As had been going on in this family.In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and her lover (and nephew) Aegisthus murder Agamemnon and his new concubine Cassandra.In The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon's son Orestes comes how to seek the required vengeance, meeting with his sister Electra.In Eumenides, he flees Clytemnestra's Erinyes (ancient gods, who seek revenge and will hound him until he is killed in turn), seeking cleansing from Apollo. Apollo and Athena protect him and convince the Erinyes to participate in a jury trial. They then provide the Erinyes with a new option--to live below Athens in a huge area where they become the Fates. If I am understanding correctly.Jury trials were fairly new to Greece when this was first performed, it would not have seemed standard to the Greeks, but would have given an example of why this new method was better than the old.
    • 5/5
      A fine translation by Richard Lattimore.
    • 4/5
      In Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra plans and carries out the murder of her husband Agamemnon with the aid of Aegisthus. Clyatemnestra is angry with Agamemnon because he allowed their daughter Iphigeneia to be sacrificed to Artemis so the goddess would allow the Greek ships to sail to Troy. Aegistthus is angry with his cousin Agamemnon because of a feud between their families. Agamemnon's father, Atreus fed Thyestes some of his children at a banquet in retaliation for Thyestes trying to seduce his wife.The Choephori or Libation Bearers carries on with the return of Orestes, Agamemnon's son who had been banished from Argos. He returns to avenge his father's death as he has been ordered to do so by Apollo's oracle. With the help of his sister Electra he plans and carries out the murder of his mother and Aegisthus. In the Eumenides, the Furies haunt and chase the guilt ridden Orestes for matricide. Orestes seeks asylum at Apollo's oracle, but Apollo sends him to Athens to Athena's shrine. The Furies say that Orestes must suffer as the rule has always been that someone who murders a family member must be punished. Athena gathers together a jury of Athenians and holds a trial for Orestes, the first of its kind ever held. The judges tie in their decision as to whether or not Orestes should be punished, so Athena casts the deciding vote and Orestes goes free. To placate the Furies, Athena offers them sanctuary in Athens and guarantees that they will always be honored by the Athenians. They then become known as the Eumenides.
    • 4/5
      These are great to read - full of humanity, but also a bit confusing - translating thousands year old drama to a modern audience can always be hit or miss. These are the stories are the stories of the Agamemnon and his family - full of tragedy, damned if you do, damned if you don't. The first play that makes up "The Oresteia" starts when Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War. Clytaemnestra is still upset at the sacrifice of her daughter (understandable so). When Agamemnon returns with a captured Cassandra, it tips Clytaemnestra to murder her hustband.The second play has Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, in a bind - he is charged with avenging his fathers killer, but matricide is one of the big sins in Ancient Greek Culture. The last book, "The Eumenides" is a tale of redemption, kind of. Orestes has been hounded by the Kind Ones for the crime of killing his mother. But Apollo takes pity on him, and purifies him. Orestes is put on trial, and at the end, everybody survives.
    • 5/5
      I tried to read 'Prometheus Bound' years ago, and couldn't finish it. Clearly I should have waited a while- The Oresteia, in the Fagles translation, is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read. Darker and more violent than anything the 20th century could come up with, it's also brighter and more hopeful than anything from the 19th century. It's as if someone had written both Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' and Eliot's 'Waste Land', and it was one book, only there was far deeper social, political and religious thought involved (this is no slight to those two poems). A less edifying, but funnier joy was finding the original 'better to live on your feet than die on your knees' statement being made by an old codger running around like a headless chook while the 'tyrant' murders the 'innocents.'

      Otherwise, the introductory essay is a little hand-wavy for my tastes, and the notes are often too detailed and insufficiently informative. Fagles' translation is modern in that it accepts and respects difficulty, while not being utterly obscure. It'll take you some time to read, but it's well worth it.
    • 5/5
      Aeschylus's The Oresteia my not contain the landmark Greek play Oedipus Rex within its cycle but it also doesn't contain the less impressive Antigone. Instead you get three plays that act as three acts, a beginning, a heightened middle, and a denouement. Agamemnon has little of the title character taking up its breadth of lines and none of Orestes, for which the cycle is named. It does set up the action of events, however, as Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra conspire together and kill Agamemnon. The Libation Bearers is set a few years later and features the son of Clytaemnestra and Agamemnon exacting revenge under the guidance of Apollo. The Eumenides is then the tale of the furies' attempt to get revenge on Orestes following his mother's curse in a short but literally divine trial. I do have my complaints about the amount of filler featured at the very beginning of these three plays but that quickly evaporates once the action sets moving at full bore over a course perhaps even shorter than the shortest of Shakespeare's plays. The crown jewel of Greek Tragedy will always be Oedipus Rex (or Oedipus The King) but it's doubtful these three plays would let any but the most stringent auditors down.
    • 5/5
      The Oresteia tells the story of the slaying of Agamemnon, Orestes avenging his father's murder, and his trial. From any online source or introduction to his plays you'll glean that Aeschylus is the earliest playwright whose plays we have. Only seven out of the dozens he wrote survive to the present day. The Oresteia is the only extant trilogy, a form he might have originated. It's listed fourth in Top 100 Plays and is on the Good Reading's "100 Significant Books" list. Critics trace Aeschylus' influence from classic French and Elizabethan drama to Wagner's Ring cycle. The title of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is taken from a quote from the first of the trilogy, Agamemnon. Robert Kennedy, who called Aeschylus his "favorite poet," quoted a line from Agamemnon in a speech dealing with Martin Luther King's assassination. Even JK Rowling prefaced the final Harry Potter book with a quote from the middle play, The Libation Bearers.The last of the trilogy, The Eumenides, was my introduction to Aeschylus in high school. I remember it, and the comments of my teacher, making quite an impression on me. That play includes a trial and deals with such issues, not only of justice and reason, but those of gender as well, as it deals with who has greater claim, a man's mother or his father? Or whether really the claims of a mother have any validity at all. The ending says a lot about how the Ancient Greeks saw women--and it isn't pretty. Thus the Eumenides is one of those plays that bears close study in the classroom, even if less moving than the first two dramas. In fact, the whole bit of a trial, with Apollo as defense council and Athene as one of the jurors seems a bit... bizarre to a modern reader compared to the realistic, yet mythic contents of the other two.I can't speak to the dramatic value of the plays, since I've never seen one performed, but in the various translations I've read, Aeschylus' works are striking and beautiful as poetry, though they feel more stylized than Sophocles or Euripides; they make me think of an ancient frieze. Of course, it depends on a good translation for its beauties to emerge. I'd recommend comparing sections side by side before choosing one. If Lattimore's translation comes across as stilted, Weir-Smith's is downright flowery with archaic language and Slavitt strikes me as far too slangy contemporary. Hughes, Meineck, and Fagles read better I think.
    • 5/5
      This is a modern (circa 1999) translation of one of the greatest of the Greek Tragedies that has survived. It is even rarer in that it is a complete trilogy which was common in the age of the great Greek tragedians but few have survived in tact. n the last year of his life, Ted Hughes completed translations of three major dramatic works: Racine's Phedre, Euripedes' Alcestis, and the trilogy of plays known as at The Oresteia, a family story of astonishing power and the background or inspiration for much subsequent drama, fiction, and poetry. The Oresteia--Agamemnon, Choephori, and the Eumenides--tell the story of the house of Atreus: After King Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, their son, Orestes, is commanded by Apollo to avenge the crime by killing his mother, and he returns from exile to do so, bringing on himself the wrath of the Furies and the judgment of the court of Athens. The culmination of the tragedy addressed the question of the nature and origin of justice and the civil state.Hughes's "acting version" of the trilogy is faithful to its nature as a dramatic work, and his translation is itself a great performance; while artfully inflected with the contemporary, it has a classical beauty and authority. It is a good choice among modern translations.
    • 3/5
      I liked Aeschylus' treatment of the myth (with Fagles' translation) a lot more than Euripedes. Lines like "lull asleep that salt black wave of anger," terrific.
    • 5/5
      This trilogy of plays begins just as the Trojan War ends. It focuses on the House of Atreus, the war hero Agamemnon’s family. **Because each section of the trilogy depends on the events in the previous section there will be SPOILERS**Agamemnon, the first part of the trilogy, tells the story of his triumphant return home after the Trojan War. In order to gain favor with the gods before embarking on the journey to Troy to fight the war, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. Tricking both her and her mother into believing she was about to be wed to Achilles, Agamemnon instead murdered her to honor Artemis and receive the gift of winds to carry their ships. Agamemnon’s cruel actions towards his daughter come back to haunt him when he returns. His wife Clytemnestra welcomes him home with open arms, inviting him to walk on a red carpet and honoring him with gracious speeches. All the while she is secretly planning his demise with the help of Agamemnon’s cousin Aegisthus. Cassandra, King Priam’s daughter, was taken as a spoil-of-war by Agamemnon and is caught up in this horrible scene. She has the gift of sight and so she knows about the impending murder, but she is also cursed by Apollo so no one will believe her when she warns them of it. Cassandra has always been one of my favorite characters in Greek mythology. Her life is such a tragic one and her presence in this player added an extra layer of futility. Part Two, The Libation Bearers is about Agamemnon’s son Orestes’ return to his home land. He quickly learns of his father’s murder and wants to avenge his death. Apollo’s oracle has instructed him to kill his mother in order to achieve this. With his sister Electra’s help he kills both his mother and Aegisthus. They trick Clytemnestra into thinking Orestes is already dead and then follow through with Apollo’s decree for her death. Almost immediately Orestes is haunted by The Furies and he is plagued with guilt for committing matricide. The final section, The Eumenides, is about Orestes’ trial. The Furies have hounded Orestes for years. The gods must decide if he will be punished for his mother’s murder and so Athena arranges a trial with jurors from Athens. There was no blood connection between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon’s, so his murder was not considered as heinous a crime as her’s. Murdering a blood relative is a more punishable offense, hence Orestes’ trial. During the play we learn the details of Agamemnon’s murder. Apollo comes to Orestes’ defense, explaining that he is the one who told him to avenge his father. Athena is the deciding vote in the trial, deciding to acquit Orestes of all guilt, but not truly giving him peace of mind from what he has done. Greek mythology is all about cycles. You killed so-and-so, therefore I must kill you. You raped my wife, so I will curse you. You tricked me or refused me, so you will be fated to live in some form of agony. The more the gods meddle in human affairs the worse the cycle becomes. This trilogy is a perfect example of this cycle. One murder leads to another until almost everyone is dead. No one is truly spared from the horrific events. BOTTOM LINE: I thought this one would be much denser and hard to read, but I found it relatively easy. I think that a big part of that is reading it while being immersed in the world of Greek mythology. I didn’t have to stop and try to remember who was who and how they were all connected because it was fresh in my mind. I would highly recommend reading this one along side The Odyssey and The Iliad as it provides closure for Agamemnon’s part of the Trojan War story.
    • 3/5
      Interesting enough, but a little slow in some areas.
    • 3/5
      I am not a classical scholar. Only a person who likes a good story. This is that. It has some of the most vivid language I've read in a long time. The Furies are absolutely terrifying. The rage and venom of Clytemnestra is touching and nauseating. I have very little to no sympathy for Agamemnon, and not much for Orestes. It is purported to be a wonderful example of the first show of justice and mercy in its day. Well, not so far as I can see. To me, it seems to say that the murder of a man is more important than that of a woman, and even the darkest avenging gods can be bought if you know their price. Still, a rattling good tale.The presentation of this by the actors was very good. I liked hearing it more than reading it.
    • 3/5
      Book 1: AGAMEMNON - the fat chauvinist from TROY returns home to his wife, who kills himBook 2: THE LIBATION BEARERS - Orestes comes home to find his front yard littered with little beanie babies and his father murdered by his crazy-weird mother. He avenges the murder and is chased around by Mrs. Dodds, before she became a math teacherBook 3: THE EUMENIDES - Apollo drives Orestes to Athens in his Maserati Spyder. Orestes tries to take the wheel but nearly crashes the car, but Apollo is in the middle of a haiku and doesn't take notice. Orestes goes before Athena, who stares him down with her intense grey eyes. Mrs. Dodds gives testimony against Orestes, but Apollo's ultra-cool snakes George and Martha speak in Orestes' defense. Athena finds in favor of Orestes and all his well.
    • 5/5
      I took the opportunuty to peruse the other comments before my review just to see the focus of the comments. I don't find fault with any but the review should be about Hughes' adaptation. The story is 2500 years old no need to retell it here.Hughes is not chained to the original as Fagles is. But in fairness to both their reasons for translating are different. Ted did it for a stage performance by the royal National Theatre and Fagles has done it for academia. Hughes' poetic background shines throughout this "translation". Clytemnestra dialog is outstanding and Agamemnon's dialog is perceptive, raw and refreshing. C-- You are afraid of the rable's disapproval. A -- Do you mean the rabble or the people. Seeing this on stage must have been a real treat to the ears and the mind. Most interesting to me through is Hughes' portayal of the Furies in The Eumenides. Hughes portays them as so perceptive and cutting in their insight. The ending -- which all the classics experts love because it shows that raw vengence has been supplanted by law and community blah blah blah thank god for tenure -- is trite even in Hughes's able hands. I don't care what all the pundits say. This play should end with the Furies unsympetheitc to Athene's sophist arguments. I do understand the play functioned as an instructional tool for society at that time but the ending is sophmoric and I'm sure the viewers felt this way 2500 years ago. Go back in your hole but we will love you. I believe Hughes' really hints at this by not repeating the furies comments which has a tendency to make them mechanized and less perceptive. I would have loved Hughes to take the liberty of doing as Racine had done in Phaedra: retell the tale and prove to everyone that Orestes and Athene and Apollo's arguments are casuistic. Oh well, we will have to leave it to the next set of able hands. Wonderful book a great read!
    • 2/5
      I love Agamemnon. I don't know if it's because I read it in high school, so it has a special place in my heart, but I really just love Agamemnon.
    • 3/5
      Freaky stuff. I'd like to see these actually staged sometime. And I got some great dramatic Cassandra quotes from Agamemnon.
    • 5/5
      This was my introduction to Greek tragedy. It's the only complete trilogy by Aeschylus, the first and perhaps most eminent of the Greek tragedians (and even a few parts of this are missing). The tragic works were divided into specific parts with few actors and a chorus playing a variety of important roles. You see the consistency of Greek myth across their various works; Homer is referenced frequently. This play was all at once entertainment, religion, and cultural exposition.
    • 4/5
      I definitely liked Aeschylus's style better than Euripides' (in "Iphigenia at Aulis"). There's something that he did that brought me right up close, face to face with each character. He made things intimate. It was as if I was having a conversation with the guard at the beginning, and with the herald, with the chorus, with Clytemnestra and then Agamemnon and definitely with Clytemnestra again. When she ranted on about how she was right to kill her husband, it was as if I was standing over her shoulder, nodding away. And then, when the chorus rebuked her and told her why she was abhorrent and should be exiled, I moved next to them and was nodding again. And then back again. And again. I don't know what it was. Perhaps it was the depth of the characters. I thought that they had much more soul than in "Iphigenia at Aulis." Aeschylus paid attention to each character, whether they were main or not.There was also a kind of sly wit in the Agamemnon which was lacking in Iphigenia. I won't say that I laughed out loud, because I didn't. No chuckling was involved. It just made me smile; the subtle turns of phrase which he peppered all around the play. Definitely amusing, to say the least.Agamemnon is surely my favorite of the three in the Oresteia. I didn't really like "Libation Bearers," actually. Agamemnon simply seemed to have more drama and problems in it. Libation Bearers had people whining, 'Woe is me! Whatever am I to do?' with Big Good Orestes killing the Evil Villains With No Heart in the end. It was too predictable and, to me, didn't even come close to the depth of Agamemnon, with its turns and twists and deceit and intimate wishes for personal...personal something. Saving. It sounds bad to say that. Perhaps I can come about this a different way.In Agamemnon, every single character seemed involved and (to me) interesting. We could peer into their soul and see who they were, and why they should be spared from harm. The Libation Bearers seemed too two-dimensional. I thought that it was all right, as far as these things go, but the others which I've read before were much more satisfying.I knew that Clytemnestra was going to kill Agamemnon (as the play-goers in Athens would have known, who went to see it performed for the first time). I was still gripped by the tension. In Libation Bearers, that tension wasn't there for me. Orestes comes back and saves the day by being male and being able to kill two women. (If we're assuming that Aegisthus is female in marrow.) Granted, two harmful women who killed his father, but the issue of Iphigenia wasn't addressed at all, not even by Clytemnestra.I think it was just of Orestes to kill Clytemnestra, but only because it seemed that Clytemnestra had done wrong in the way she managed the people. She misused them, her own daughter included. Her killing Agamemnon wasn't *right*, but it wasn't all that terrible (for fiction), considering Iphigenia.I suppose I just rooted a lot more for Clytemnestra than Orestes. "Bring me my man-killing axe!" If that doesn't say it all for Clytemnestra, I don't know what does."Eumenides" was ok. I loved the part where Clytemnestra yells at the Eumenides/Furies for sleeping on the job. The whole play is sort of a let-down at the end, though, with its deus ex machina. Meh. Anyway, the four stars I gave for the Oresteia are almost completely for "Agamemnon." It is my favorite Greek play, and there is much delight to be found in it. And blood. Lots and lots of blood and massacre.
    • 4/5
      The plays themselves are pretty good. This edition loses a half star in my rating, though, because a) the translation, while it reads fairly well, is opaque/difficult to understand at times, and b) Fagles inserts stage directions that sometimes quite bias the way in which a given line would be interpreted.
    • 2/5
      Lattimore's translation of the Oresteia is today almost unreadable. After battling with the stilted, turgid prosody, I gave up and found a couple much clearer translations. 5 stars for Aeschylus, 2 for Lattimore.

    Book preview

    The Oresteia - Aeschylus

    The Oresteia

    Agamemnon

    The Libation Bearers

    The Furies

    by Æschylus

    Translated into English Verse by

    E. D. A. Morshead, M.A.

    late fellow of new college oxford, assistant master of winchester college

    ©2015 SMK Books

    All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

    SMK Books

    PO Box 632

    Floyd, VA 24091-0632

    ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-0085-1

    Table of Contents

    Introduction

    Agamemnon

    Preface

    Dramatis Personae

    Agamemnon

    The Libation Bearers

    Dramatis Personae

    The Libation Bearers

    The Furies

    Dramatis Personæ:

    The Furies

    Introduction

    Of the life of Æschylus, the first of the three great masters of Greek tragedy, only a very meager outline has come down to us. He was born at Eleusis, near Athens, B. C. 525, the son of Euphorion. Before he was twenty-five he began to compete for the tragic prize, but did not win a victory for twelve years. He spent two periods of years in Sicily, where he died in 456, killed, it is said, by a tortoise which an eagle dropped on his head. Though a professional writer, he did his share of fighting for his country, and is reported to have taken part in the battles of Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea.

    Of the seventy or eighty plays which he is said to have written, only seven survive: The Persians, dealing with the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis; The Seven against Thebes, part of a tetralogy on the legend of Thebes; The Suppliants, on the daughters of Danaüs; Prometheus Bound, part of a trilogy, of which the first part was probably Prometheus, the Fire-bringer, and the last, Prometheus Unbound; and the Oresteia, the only example of a complete Greek tragic trilogy which has come down to us, consisting of Agamemnon, Choephorae (The Libation-Bearers), and the Eumenides (Furies).

    The importance of Æschylus in the development of the drama is immense. Before him tragedy had consisted of the chorus and one actor; and by introducing a second actor, expanding the dramatic dialogue thus made possible, and reducing the lyrical parts, he practically created Greek tragedy as we understand it. Like other writers of his time, he acted in his own plays, and trained the chorus in their dances and songs; and he did much to give impressiveness to the performances by his development of the accessories of scene and costume on the stage. Of the four plays here reproduced, Prometheus Bound holds an exceptional place in the literature of the world. (As conceived by Æschylus, Prometheus is the champion of man against the oppression of Zeus; and the argument of the drama has a certain correspondence to the problem of the Book of Job.) The Oresteian trilogy on The House of Atreus is one of the supreme productions of all literature. It deals with the two great themes of the retribution of crime and the inheritance of evil; and here again a parallel may be found between the assertions of the justice of God by Æschylus and by the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. Both contend against the popular idea that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge; both maintain that the soul that sinneth, it shall die. The nobility of thought and the majesty of style with which these ideas are set forth give this triple drama its place at the head of the literary masterpieces of the antique world.

    Agamemnon

    Preface

    The sense of difficulty, and indeed of awe, with which a scholar approaches the task of translating the Agamemnon depends directly on its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendour. Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the same great music, and a translator who should strive ambitiously to represent the complex effect of the original would clog his own powers of expression and strain his instrument to breaking. But, apart from the diction in this narrower sense, there is a quality of atmosphere surrounding the Agamemnon which seems almost to defy reproduction in another setting, because it depends in large measure on the position of the play in the historical development of Greek literature.

    If we accept the view that all Art to some extent, and Greek tragedy in a very special degree, moves in its course of development from Religion to Entertainment, from a Service to a Performance, the Agamemnon seems to stand at a critical point where the balance of the two elements is near perfection. The drama has come fully to life, but the religion has not yet faded to a formality. The Agamemnon is not, like Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women, a statue half-hewn out of the rock. It is a real play, showing clash of character and situation, suspense and movement, psychological depth and subtlety. Yet it still remains something more than a play. Its atmosphere is not quite of this world. In the long lyrics especially one feels that the guiding emotion is not the entertainer’s wish to thrill an audience, not even perhaps the pure artist’s wish to create beauty, but something deeper and more prophetic, a passionate contemplation and expression of truth; though of course the truth in question is something felt rather than stated, something that pervades life, an eternal and majestic rhythm like the movement of the stars.

    Thus, if Longinus is right in defining Sublimity as the ring, or resonance, of greatness of soul, one sees in part where the sublimity of the Agamemnon comes from. And it is worth noting that the faults which some critics have found in the play are in harmony with this conclusion. For the sublimity that is rooted in religion tolerates some faults and utterly refuses to tolerate others. The Agamemnon may be slow in getting to work; it may be stiff with antique conventions. It never approaches to being cheap or insincere or shallow or sentimental or showy. It never ceases to be genuinely a criticism of life. The theme which it treats, for instance, is a great theme in its own right; it is not a made-up story ingeniously handled.

    The trilogy of the Oresteia, of which this play is the first part, centres on the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of

    The ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong.

    Every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every punishment becomes a new wrong, calling for fresh vengeance. And more; every wrong turns out to be itself rooted in some wrong of old. It is never gratuitous, never untempted by the working of Peitho (Persuasion), never merely wicked. The Oresteia first shows the cycle of crime punished by crime which must be repunished, and then seeks for some gleam of escape, some breaking of the endless chain of evil duty. In the old order of earth and heaven there was no such escape. Each blow called for the return blow and must do so ad infinitum. But, according to Aeschylus, there is a new Ruler now in heaven, one who has both sinned and suffered and thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his gift to mankind is the ability through suffering to Learn.

    At the opening of the Agamemnon we find Clytemnestra alienated from her husband and secretly befriended with his ancestral enemy, Aigisthos. The air is heavy and throbbing with hate; hate which is evil but has its due cause. Agamemnon, obeying the prophet Calchas, when the fleet lay storm-bound at Aulis, had given his own daughter, Iphigenîa, as a human sacrifice. And if we ask how a sane man had consented to such an act, we are told of his gradual temptation; the deadly excuse offered by ancient superstition; and above all, the fact that he had already inwardly accepted the great whole of which this horror was a part. At the first outset of his expedition against Troy there had appeared an omen, the bloody sign of two eagles devouring a mother-hare with her unborn young…. The question was thus put to the Kings and their prophet: Did they or did they not accept the sign, and wish to be those Eagles? And they had answered Yes. They would have their vengeance, their full and extreme victory, and were ready to pay the price. The sign once accepted, the prophet recoils from the consequences which, in prophetic vision, he sees following therefrom: but the decision has been taken, and the long tale of cruelty rolls on, culminating in the triumphant sack of Troy, which itself becomes not an assertion of Justice but a whirlwind of godless destruction. And through all these doings of fierce beasts and angry men the unseen Pity has been alive and watching, the Artemis who abhors the Eagles’ feast, the Apollo or Pan or Zeus who hears the crying of the robbed vulture; nay, if even the Gods were deaf, the mere wrong of the dead at Troy might waken, groping for some retribution upon the Slayer of Many Men.

    If we ask why men are so blind, seeking their welfare thus through incessant evil, Aeschylus will tell us that the cause lies in the infection of old sin, old cruelty. There is no doubt somewhere a πρώταρχος᾿' Ατη, a first blind deed of wrong, but in practice every wrong is the result of another. And the Children of Atreus are steeped to the lips in them. When the prophetess Cassandra, out of her first vague horror at the evil House, begins to grope towards some definite image, first and most haunting comes the sound of the weeping of two little children, murdered long ago, in a feud that was not theirs. From that point, more than any other, the Daemon or Genius of the House—more than its Luck, a little less than its Guardian Angel—becomes an Alastor or embodied Curse, a Red Slayer which cries ever for peace and cleansing, but can seek them only in the same blind way, through vengeance, and, when that fails, then through more vengeance.

    This awful conception of a race intent upon its own wrongs, and blindly groping towards the very terror it is trying to avoid, is typified, as it were, in the Cassandra story. That daughter of Priam was beloved by Apollo, who gave her the power of true prophecy. In some way that we know not, she broke her promise to the God; and, since his gift could not be recalled, he added to it the curse that, while she should always foresee and foretell the truth, none should believe her. The Cassandra scene is a creation beyond praise or criticism. The old scholiast speaks of the pity and amazement which it causes. The Elders who talk with her wish to

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