Aeschylus

“ Up from the dark to flow?
’Tis but a weaving of words, a craft of woe,
To make mankind afraid.
CASSANDRA.
Poor woman! Poor dead woman! ... Yea, it is I,
Poured out like water among them. Weep for me....
Ah! What is this place? Why must I come with thee....
To die, only to die?
LEADER.
Thou art borne on the breath of God, thou spirit wild,
For thine own weird to wail,
Like to that wingèd voice, that heart so sore
Which, crying alway, hungereth to cry more,
“Itylus, Itylus,” till it sing her child
Back to the nightingale.
CASSANDRA.
Oh, happy Singing Bird, so sweet, so clear! ”

“ CLYTEMNESTRA.
Nay, pray not for the hour of death, being tried
Too sore beneath these blows
Neither on Helen turn thy wrath aside,
The Slayer of Men, the face which hath destroyed
Its thousand Danaan souls, and wrought a wide
Wound that no leech can close.
CHORUS.
—Daemon, whose heel is set
On the House and the twofold kin
Of the high Tantalidae,
A power, heavy as fate,
Thou wieldest through woman’s sin,
Piercing the heart of me! ”

“ The fire of the avenging star.
CHORUS.
(This is God’s judgement upon Troy. May it not be too fierce! Gold cannot save one who spurneth Justice.)
The stroke of Zeus hath found them! Clear this day
The tale, and plain to trace.
He judged, and Troy hath fallen.—And have men said
That God not deigns to mark man’s hardihead,
Trampling to earth the grace
Of holy and delicate things?—Sin lies that way.
For visibly Pride doth breed its own return
On prideful men, who, when their houses swell
With happy wealth, breathe ever wrath and blood.
Yet not too fierce let the due vengeance burn ”

“ How know we—are we seers?—that one is slain?
ELDER L.
Oh, let us find the truth out, ere we grow
Thus passionate! To surmise is not to know.
LEADER.
Break in, then! ’Tis the counsel ye all bring,
And learn for sure, how is it with the King.
[They cluster up towards the Palace Door, as though to force an entrance, when the great Door swings open, revealing CLYTEMNESTRA, who stands, axe in hand, over the dead bodies of AGAMEMNON and CASSANDRA. The body of AGAMEMNON is wrapped in a rich crimson web. There is blood on CLYTEMNESTRA’S brow, and she speaks in wild triumph.] ”

“ And a wrath was on her harbouring, a wrath upon her friending,
When to Priam and his sons she fled quickly o’er the deep,
With the god to whom she sinned for her watcher on the wind,
A death-bride, whom brides long shall weep.
(Men say that Good Fortune wakes the envy of God; not so; Good Fortune may be innocent, and then there is no vengeance.) ”

“ The deed that was first an ecstasy of delight becomes an “affliction” (pp. 72, 76) . The strength that defied the world flags and changes into a longing for peace. She has done her work. She has purified the House of its madness; now let her go away and live out her life in quiet. When Aigisthos appears, and the scene suddenly becomes filled with the wrangling of common men, Clytemnestra fades into a long silence, from which she only emerges at the very end of the drama to pray again for Peace, and, strangest of all, to utter the entreaty: “Let us not stain ourselves with blood!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seems to me that Aeschylus’ imagination realized all the confused passions in Clytemnestra’s mind, but that his art was not yet sufficiently developed to make them all clear and explicit. She is in suspense; does Agamemnon know her guilt or not? At least, if she is to die, she wants to say something to justify or excuse herself in the eyes of the world. A touch of hysteria creeps in; why could he not have been killed in all these years? Why must he rise, like some monster from the grave, unkillable? ”

“ With avenging hand and spear upon Troy was guided
By the Bird of War.
’Twas a King among birds to each of the Kings of the Sea,
One Eagle black, one black but of fire-white tail,
By the House, on the Spear-hand, in station that all might see;
And they tore a hare, and the life in her womb that grew,
Yea, the life unlived and the races unrun they slew.
Sorrow, sing sorrow: but good prevail, prevail!
(How Calchas read the sign; his Vision of the Future.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only they whose hearts have known
Zeus, the Conqueror and the Friend,
They shall win their vision’s end;
Zeus the Guide, who made man turn
Thought-ward, Zeus, who did ordain
Man by Suffering shall Learn.
So the heart of him, again
Aching with remembered pain,
Bleeds and sleepeth not, until
Wisdom comes against his will.
’Tis the gift of One by strife
Lifted to the throne of life.
(AGAMEMNON accepted the sign. Then came long delay, and storm while the fleet lay at Aulis.) ”

“ Aeschylus employs none of the devices of later playwrights to make her interesting. He admits, of course, no approach to a love-scene; he uses no sophisms; but he does make us see through Clytemnestra’s eyes and feel through her passions. The agony of silent prayer in which, if my conception is right, we first see her, helps to interpret her speeches when they come; but every speech needs close study. She dare not speak sincerely or show her real feelings until Agamemnon is dead; and then she is practically a mad woman. ”

“ There is no doubt somewhere a πρώταρχος Ἄτη, 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. ”

“ Stand best apart. When one with shuddering brow,
From armies lost, back beareth to his home
Word that the terror of her prayers is come;
One wound in her great heart, and many a fate
For many a home of men cast out to sate
The two-fold scourge that worketh Ares’ lust,
Spear crossed with spear, dust wed with bloody dust;
Who walketh laden with such weight of wrong,
Why, let him, if he will, uplift the song
That is Hell’s triumph. ”

“ Greek tragedies do not care to be exact about this kind of detail. There may well have been a tradition that Agamemnon, like the Great King of Persia, used a chain of beacons across the Aegean.—Note how vividly Clytemnestra’s imagination is working in her excitement. She seems to see before her every leaping light in the chain, just as in the next speech she imagines the scene in Troy almost with the intensity of a vision.
[P. 14, l. 314, Victory in the first as in the last.] —All are Victory beacons; the spirit of Victory infects them all equally. ”

“ But the craft of Calchas failed not.—’Tis written, He
Who Suffereth Shall Learn; the law holdeth well.
And that which is to be,
Ye will know at last; why weep before the hour?
For come it shall, as out of darkness dawn.
Only may good from all this evil flower;
So prays this Heart of Argos, this frail tower
Guarding the land alone.
[As they cease, CLYTEMNESTRA comes from the Palace with Attendants. She has finished her prayer and sacrifice, and is now wrought up to face the meeting with her husband. The Leader approaches her.] ”

“ 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” (pp. 15, 20) .
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 believe, they try to understand, they are really convinced of Cassandra’s powers. ”