The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies (33 page)

131
Fate: Moira
denotes not fate in general, as Fraenkel observes, ‘but the particular fate which causes the appropriate penalty to follow inevitably upon every sin. Moira is the goddess who sees to it that this connection between cause and effect, i.e., in the sphere of moral or legal obligations, between debt and payment, or between guilt and atonement, is safeguarded against any disturbance.’ This moralized conception of fate, and its evolution from a retributive force to a creative challenge - from fate to self-determination, in effect - will dominate the
Oresteia;
see n. 1021, 1025ff.;
E
n. 1055.

135ff
Artemis:
according to the account in the older epic Cycle, later adapted by Sophocles, Artemis was angered when Agamemnon shot one of her sacred deer and boasted that his archery was superior to hers - an act of rashness rather than of tragic destiny and choice. Here Agamemnon’s action provokes Artemis as the goddess of childbirth (ironically invoked to fulfil a prophecy that involves the death of children); but it is as
Potnia Thêrôn,
the queen of wild beasts and a representative of Mother Earth, that Artemis will unleash her fury against the Olympians, the powers of the Sky.

138
The eagles’ feast:
the image will unite Thyestes’ feast, which precipitated the curse, with the violence that follows in its wake, the murders of Iphigeneia, Cassandra and Agamemnon (242ff., 1475, 1531ff.). The image is consistently perverted: as a sacrament it is a slaughter, as a communal joy it nourishes desires for revenge; see 726ff., 813f., 1226ff.;
LB
n. 261,
E
n. 110.

148f
The adjectives for the sacrifice of Iphigeneia make it seem unique; it is ‘unlawful’ or ‘unaccustomed’, but Tantalus and Atreus familiarized Argos with child-murder; it is ‘unattended by feasting’ among the present celebrants, but it is part of the legacy of Thyestes’ feast. The second term may also refer to offerings to the dead, presented to them but never consumed by them.

150
The architect of vengeance:
images of crafts and artistry have a negative effect in A; either the practitioner is distraught (1030f.) or the skill in question makes an art of fear or guilt or death (1154ff., 1189ff., 1594). Orestes the mason (1306) will not have perfected his work until the end of the Oresteia; see
LB
n. 233,
E
n. 308.

156
Calchas invokes the muse of the
Iliad, Mênis,
Wrath or Fury, but here instead of implementing Zeus and Zeus’s will she fights his agent to the death.

158
Calchas clashed
out: the assonance between the prophet’s name and the sound of his cries, suggested in the verb
eklangxen,
is typical of euphonic devices which Aeschylus employs throughout this chorus to give emphasis and solemnity; see n. 688ff.

161
Zeus: the Greek phrase, ‘Zeus, whoever he may be,’ is a formula that points to a religious mystery: the namelessness of the divinity, the blasphemy of naming him at all, and the incomprehensibility, the all-inclusiveness of his power.

169ff
Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus - grandfather, father and son in the embattled generations of the gods; see Introduction, p. 21. This theme of ‘the third victor’, the one who throws his opponent three times to win the contest, will be exemplified in the fates of Agamemnon, Clytaemnestra and Orestes. For the motif of ‘three’, see n. 245. Athletic imagery, drawn from sports like archery and charioteering that are combat skills as well, generally describes defeat in A, or a victory like Clytaemnestra’s in the beacon-relay that spells defeat for her husband; see 346ff., 366ff., 624, 1211f. Archery, a deadlier sport, predominates; see
LB
n. 165,
E
n. 151.

182
Ripeness:
in
A
the great ideal of
sôphrosunê
is degraded from the virtue of self-command (356) to discipline in its punitive sense - learning one’s place or else (1451, 1652).

185ff
So it was that day,
etc. The responsion between this and the preceding stanza yokes the law of Zeus to its example, Agamemnon’s quandary at Aulis. For the relationship between his will and the winds of destiny, see Introduction, p. 26f. The word
pneuma
means both the force of a wind and the vital spirit of a man; their ‘conspiracy’ here may generate not only the present storm (189ff., 218ff.) but all the storms that follow (646ff., 804ff., 1410ff.), ending in the deluge that engulfs the house (1561ff.). In contrast see Cassandra’s inspiration and its effects, 1182ff., 1302ff.; n. 1004;
LB
n. 203,
E
n. 250.

217
The strap of Fate: Anangke
or Necessity as a universal force, though it may also be a compulsion designed to fit the individual. Attempts to derive the word from the verb ‘to strangle’ find support in the traditional metaphor for Necessity, the harness, or as Aeschylus refines it, the strap that fastens the yoke to the neck.

226
A bridal rite: proteleia;
see n. 71f. In Iphigeneia’s sacrifice Lucretius saw a blood-wedding typical of barbaric religion:

In his ‘Dream of Fair Women’ Tennyson describes the victim’s feelings:

232
Like a yearling:
a yearling kid was customarily sacrificed to Artemis for victory.

245
Third libations, sang to Saving Zeus:
the first libation was offered to the Olympians, the second to the spirits of the dead, and the third to Zeus the Saviour, invoked to harmonize the first two groups of deities. See n. 169ff. In A the motif of ‘three’ or ‘triads’ is perverted. Its nadir occurs in Clytaemnestra’s murder of the king, accomplished with three blows (1407ff.) and offered to a trinity of gods (1459ff.). The salvation she administers is death (598, 1249); see
LB
n. 61,
E
n. 4.

248
I cannot see it, cannot say:
there was a tradition, adopted by Euripides, Goethe, and Gerhart Hauptmann, that Artemis intervened to save Iphigeneia, as God intervened to save Isaac from his father’s knife, and spirited her off to the Tauri on the Black Sea, where she served as a priestess of the goddess. This tradition forms an alternative to the
Oresteia,
for according to it Iphigeneia, rather than Athena, later absolves Orestes of his blood-guilt. She represents the darker, sacrificial aspect of Artemis in Euripides’
Iphigeneia in Tauris,
restoring Orestes to his throne in Argos, while migrating to Brauron in Attica, where she continues to safeguard the image of the goddess and conduct a modified version of her bloody rites. Goethe’s Iphigeneia however, represents the Olympian aspect of the goddess; a child of the Enlightenment who has rejected Artemis’ rites entirely, she redeems Orestes through the gentle, beneficent arts of neo-classical humanism. As an archetypal figure, then, Iphigeneia can represent either of the two great powers dramatized by Aeschylus, the Olympians or the Earth, though she gradually inclines towards the gods. In Hauptmann’s modern tetralogy on the House of Atreus, she finally consigns the image of Artemis to Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, and through her own self-sacrifice prepares the way for a total Olympian victory, purged of the Fates and the forces of the Earth, and in marked contrast to the
Oresteia,
where those forces undergo a mutual struggle with the gods and ultimately enjoy a mutual triumph; see Introduction, pp. 86ff; and Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Hauptmann’s
Iphigenie in Delphi:
A Travesty?’,
The Germanic Review,
xxxiv (1959), 105-23.

257
Our midnight watch:
the motif will evolve from Clytaemnestra’s surveillance over Argos to the Areopagus in E (720), the court whose night sessions keep eternal vigilance over Athens.

265
The womb of Mother Night:
also the source of the Furies, who control this day (E n. 322). In A images of infertility predominate, fathers bequeath their crimes to children, and the Olympians derive their lethal power from the legacy of the curse; see 378ff., 745ff., n. 311;
LB
n. 131ff.,
E
n. 322.

271
Expose your loyal
hearts:
more loyal to Agamemnon than to her.

281ff
The beacons illuminate a geography of peril which includes the Euripos Straits where Agamemnon murdered Iphigeneia; Mount Kithairon where the infant Oedipus was exposed; the Corinthian headlands where predators lay in wait for Theseus; the Gorgon-eyed Marsh reflecting the demon that threatened another Argive hero, Perseus (
LB
n. 818); and Spider Mountain which serves as a perfect vantage point for the Black Widow, Clytaemnestra (n. 309). Her beacons may contrast with the beacons set by Hypermnestra, another Argive wife. When the daughters of Danaos were forced to marry their cousins, Danaos instructed them to murder their new husbands on the wedding night. Only Hypermnestra refused. She was in love with Lynkeus, who had spared her virginity, and she helped him escape to the near-by city of Lyrkeia. She asked him to light a beacon when he had reached safety, promising to light a beacon from the heights of Argos in return. It was a testament to their faith, and the Argives commemorated it with a yearly torchlit festival. Clytaemnestra’s beacons, in other words, may evoke a more constructive meaning far beyond this play. They will actually have forecast the final torchlit march of the Athenians and the Eumenides; perhaps they will remind us too of the
lampadêphoria
run in honour of Athena at the Panathenaic Festival - as if even now the queen were acting, quite unconsciously, in league with the gods’ eventual designs.

Although the locations of some of the later stations in Clytaemnestra’s chain are uncertain, the general direction is clear: west from Mount Ida near Troy, to Hermes’ Rock on Lemnos, to Mount Athos in northern Greece; then south to Mount Makistos (presumably in Euboea, the large island off the coast of central Greece), over the Straits of Euripos to Mount Messapion (unidentified but evidently on the mainland), across the plain of Asôpos in Boeotia to Mount Kithairon near Thebes, to Mount Aigiplankton (presumably near the Isthmus of Corinth), and down the Saronic Gulf to Argos.

281
Ida: a mountain range which forms the southern boundary of the Troad; from its summit Zeus surveyed the Trojan war.

286
The Saving Father’s face:
Mount Athos, the weather mountain at the tip of a rocky peninsula in northern Greece, was a seat of Zeus. Its third position in the circuit may suggest it was the seat of Zeus the Saviour, and the beacons may begin, ironically, as an auspicious omen.

303
Marsh, the Gorgon’s Eye:
like Mount Makistos (‘Tremendous’) and Mount Aigiplankton (‘Where-the-Goats-Range’), the marsh has been variously identified, but each site reflects Clytaemnestra’s imaginative power over geography.

307f
The headland beetling down the Saronic Gulf:
perhaps the lower foothills sloping down to the sea near Krommyon in the Megarid.

309
The Black Widow’s face:
Mount Arachnaion, ‘Spider Mountain’, probably now Mount Saint Elias, the peak of the great ridge Arna north of Argos; see 1520. If Aeschylus locates the action in Mycenae, however, ‘Spider Mountain’ may refer to the citadel itself, or to one of the two rocky horns that rise immediately above it. The heights, at any rate, might form a perfect observation post from which to ambush an unsuspecting enemy - hence, perhaps, the association with the spider and its web. Dorothy Thompson tells how she and the Greek foreman of their excavation ’were walking back from the Argive Heraion when the citadel of Mycenae suddenly loomed up at the end of a gorge. Only the sunlight touching the acropolis when the rest was in shadow brought it out clearly in a menacing light. He remarked [in modem Greek] “Mycenae is like a spider-web; it sees, but is not seen.”’

311
The true son,
etc. The genealogical metaphor binds Agamemnon to his father’s crimes and punishments. For the generative, sexual force of this entire passage, see P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ‘Clytaemnestra’s Beacon Speech:
Agamemnon,
281-316,’
La parola del passato,
cliii (1973), 445-52.

316
First in the laps and last,
etc. Applied to the Torch Race this is almost a platitude. But perhaps Clytaemnestra has in mind another race still to be run - a race in which she hopes herself to be the final runner see 346ff.