The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies (34 page)

339
Off guard at last:
Clytaemnestra’s adjective can mean ‘unprotected’, even ‘indefensible’, as well as ‘released from standing guard’, and so prepares us for her warnings that follow.

350
The avenging dead:
her rhetorical plural may refer equally to the dead at Troy and to her daughter.

351
Clytaemnestra’s ironies here may be prophetic not only of Agamemnon but of herself - driven to kill her husband yet somehow reluctant - but her personal torment will not emerge until she meets him at the gates; see Introduction, p. 31.

378ff
The passage is corrupt in Greek, but the general sense is that the gods repay the fathers’ crimes by visiting them upon their children’s heads. Such inherited guilt will bring down Agamemnon as well as Paris. Indeed the same forces overwhelm both men.
‘Atê
is Harm or Ruin,’ as George Thomson explains, ‘or the blind infatuation . . . that leads man to commit some rash act which causes ruin. . . . When
Atê
is minded to destroy a man, she lays temptation [Peitho, Persuasion, Allurement] in his path to induce him to commit some definite and overt act of
hubris -
to play in fact the part of an
agent provocateur.’
There is a strange equivalence between Iphigeneia and Helen as such agents (see the metaphor for their glances, 238f, 737f.), as if the sacrifice of his daughter were as irresistible to Agamemnon as the abduction of Helen was to Paris (see 220ff., 387ff). He and Agamemnon become equal targets of the gods, while the king’s offence - violating the sheer innocence of Iphigeneia - becomes that much worse.

Peitho
recurs throughout the
Oresteia
in a range of personifications: the persuasive power of the chorus (n. 113), Helen’s and Clytaemnestra’s power to seduce and ruin, Orestes’ power to deceive his enemies and avenge his father in LB, and finally Athena’s power to reconcile the Furies in
E.
As a moral concept
Peitho
gradually evolves from a destructive to a constructive force; see Introduction, pp. 24, 33, 39, 63, 84;
LB
n. 714,
E
n. 893.

408ff
Prophets of the house
, etc. In describing Helen they recall the Trojan elders in the
Iliad
(Book III, 146ff.), but are they at the gates as she arrives in Troy, or are they Argives watching what she leaves behind, the harried preparations for the war? Both, perhaps, and Helen’s victims either way.

436
The balance:
contrast the balance scales of justice, in which the elders have placed their hopes (250ff.); see 165, 567;
LB
n. 61,
E
n. 539.

474f
Just like a woman,
etc. A refrain that increases the shock of the queen’s defiance later; see 587f.

479-92
Here we follow the majority of modem editors, against the ms. tradition, by giving these lines to the leader of the chorus.

483ff
A herald running
, etc. Aeschylus places time at the service of dramatic time; he telescopes the action to make the climax swifter.

500ff
No more arrows
, etc. Perhaps a specific allusion to the plague which Apollo visited on the Greeks when Agamemnon refused to release the daughter of Apollo’s priest
(Iliad,
Book I, 43ff.).

505
Hermes
: invoked as the patron of heralds, who carries messages and in particular the word of Zeus. Some hint of his chthonic power as the Escort of the Dead, specified in LB, may also be implicit; see
LB,
notes 1, 126, 803;
E
n. 93.

516
Zeus who brings revenge:
Zeus
Dikêphoros,
who brings vengeance to completion.

517
Dug Troy down,
etc. Images of agriculture, like those of husbandry, have a destructive force in
A.
The breaking of Trojan soil will yield to the harvest of Agamemnon’s house (1688f.), inexhaustible (959f.) and a perversion of the earth (1413ff.); see 197f., 491f., 658f., 967ff., 1043f.;
LB
n. 205,
E
n. 494.

518
The shrines of her gods,
etc. Some editors would delete the line, which resembles a line in Aeschylus’
Persians
(811) spoken by Darius when he condemns the Persians for their desecration of the Greek shrines. The present line, to any members of the audience who remembered its earlier context, would have stressed the brutality of Agamemnon, while fulfilling Clytaemnestra’s warning (342) and preparing for the king’s demise.

528
Pay the price twice over:
while Paris pays doubly with the loss of Helen and his home, the destruction is so complete that Troy pays double damages, the penalty for theft according to ancient Greek law. For the theme of ‘doubleness’, see Introduction, pp. 49f., 68f., 90;
A
820, 871, 1497ff.;
LB
notes 61, 373;
E
n. 4.

580
I can taste the riches:
according to custom, the bearer of good tidings was rewarded; cf.
LB
685ff.

598
Open wide the gates:
which Cassandra will identify with the Gates of Hell (1314).

600
The people’s darling:
an erotic word in Greek and offensive when applied to the returning commander-in-chief.

606
Our
seal:
perhaps a reference to the royal treasures sealed up during the king’s absence; but an erotic symbolism may also be implied - a denial of adultery with Aegisthus, which the chorus knows to be a fact; see 1660.

608
Dyeing bronze
, etc. See 960, and Introduction, p. 29.

609
That is my boast
: in distinction to the herald’s (568ff.).

613
She only says what’s right
: an intentional irony (the queen’s words are appropriate but false), yet a modest one compared to hers.

620
He’s lost
: for Menelaus’ subsequent adventures, see Introduction, p. 94;
LB
n. 1041.

632ff
The herald’s incoherence reflects his anguish and may indicate the confusion between the public purpose of the war and its heavy private toll.

648
Fire and water:
lightning and the sea. The elemental opposites may also serve, though this is doubtful, as symbols for Athena (entrusted with Zeus’s lightning-bolt) and Poseidon, who fought on behalf of the victorious Greeks throughout the war and now unite against them.

688ff
Helen . . . hell
: see Introduction, p. 29. The Greek exemplifies the ‘etymological figure of speech’ by which two similar words (one of them often a proper name) were taken to be similar in meaning. This belief was sanctioned by the superstition that a proper name could contain an omen of its owner’s destiny (the
nomen-omen
principle, this Latin phrase itself being a
nomen-omen
)
:
so in other Greek tragedies
Ai-as
(= Ajax) is compelled by fate to cry out
ai! ai!
in agony, and Pentheus is reduced to tragic grief (
penthos
). The belief is critically scrutinized by Plato in his
Cratylus.

Here as elsewhere there is an implicit comparison between Clytaemnestra and Helen and, less obviously, Penelope. They form a curious pattern of contrasting and combining qualities: Helen abandoned her home and husband but returned in the end to live affectionately with him, as described in the
Odyssey;
Penelope was left at home by her husband and remained faithful to him through many trials; Clytaemnestra also was left at home but finally betrayed him. So Penelope and Clytaemnestra stand at the two extremes of loyalty and disloyalty, while Helen shares the qualities of both.

723ff
It was the custom for children when they reached maturity to make a thank offering to their parents.

744ff
An ancient saying
, etc. Wealth and its dangers recur (4571f., 525, 804ff., 943ff.), until
E
543ff., where the positive effects of legitimate prosperity are praised.

769ff
How to salute you
, etc. The chorus is apparently (the text is very uncertain in places) hinting to Agamemnon that he must be on his guard against hypocritical expressions of loyalty, primarily of course from Clytaemnestra. Many commentators have looked on Agamemnon as an admirable, though somewhat limited character - courteous, magnanimous, majestic, all in all a good man done to death by an evil woman. But others have questioned this, more persuaded by Agamemnon’s background and his presentation here. He may be a brave man in the
Iliad
but not a man of self-control; he is a reckless monarch who vacillates between professions of piety and self-aggrandizement, a general who risks defeat by refusing sound advice; see Introduction, pp.25, 30.

779ff
The good shepherd
: a trope, traditional since the time of Homer, for a defender of the people, but as applied to Agamemnon it may recall his husbandry as well - he sacrificed his daughter as he would a yearling kid (232) or lamb (1441f.).

796
My accomplices,
etc.
Metaitioi;
see Introduction, p. 30;
LB
n. 100,
E
n. 102. Clytaemnestra is
sunaitia,
responsible for Agamemnon’s murder (118); Zeus is
Panaitios,
responsible for all the violence in the play (1514).

799
Their lots:
in the Athenian law courts each voter, having been given his voting-pebble, placed one hand over each of two urns (one to receive votes of acquittal, the other, condemnation). In this case the urn for acquittal, personified as a sentient being, is disappointed at not receiving the voting-pebble from the hand placed over it; see n. 45.

810
The wild mare
: an allusion to the Greek warriors in the Trojan horse. Animal imagery, like that of husbandry, illustrates the brutalization of a victim and occasionally of the victimizer too; see 54ff., 604, 1063, 1127ff., 1237ff., 1500ff., 1694, and n. 49;
LB
n. 252,
E
n. 94.

827
I dragged that man to the wars
: Odysseus tried to evade conscription for the Trojan War - out of prudence, more likely, than from any cowardice. Agamemnon is priding himself on his own prudence; society holds out a flattering mirror to the proud, but he knows a hypocrite when he sees one. The one loyal man he saw at Troy was Odysseus, and Agamemnon sings his praises - but as anyone in Athens would have known, Odysseus was an arch-deceiver.

828
Trace-horse
: stronger and better fed than the yoked horses at the centre of the team, the trace-horse was depended on for effort in a crisis, as when the chariot would swerve round the post; see 1673.

838
Right hand:
the customary gesture of worship.

859
Geryon:
the tenth labour of Heracles was to fetch the cattle of Geryon, a mythical giant who, because he had three bodies, had to be killed three times before he died. As described in an Aeschylean fragment (37 [74]): ‘he brandished three spears in his [right] hands, and, holding out three shields in his left and shaking his three crests, came on like Ares in his power.’

869ff
Our loyal brother-in-arms will take good care of him:
Clytaemnestra has sent Orestes away to give herself and Aegisthus freer rein, but she may also have wished to ensure the safety of her son. Her agent ‘Strophios’ (the name perhaps implies ‘a man of turns’) lives in the deme of Delphi, and his words are Delphic indeed. As Clytaemnestra repeats his ambiguous warning here, his subject ‘you’ may apply to herself and Aegisthus or to herself and Agamemnon; her hint of treason may also stir with lingering loyalty to her husband: see Introduction, p. 31;
LB
n. 661f.

902
Let the red stream flow:
as Robert Goheen reports, ‘For the performance of the
Agamemnon
at Syracuse shortly after World War I, Ettore Romagnoli as director sought the effect by having the carpet represent blood almost as literally as possible. The colour was attained by dyeing material in the blood of an ox, producing a dark reddish brown. Instead of running the carpet straight back to the palace door, it was unrolled to form a sinuous track “like a vein running down a muscular arm.”’ (‘Aspects of Dramatic Symbolism: Three Studies in the
Oresteia,’ American Journal of Philology,
lxxvi [1955], 116n.)

903
The home he never hoped to see:
his father’s house, which is the house of death.

908
Leda:
Agamemnon’s association of Leda with her daughter Clytaemnestra may remind us of Leda’s legendary surrender to Zeus.

957ff
With this speech Clytaemnestra not only avoids a sinister silence in which Agamemnon might reconsider his choice; she empowers him to ‘pursue it’; see Introduction, pp. 34f., and notes following.

964
I would have sworn to tread
, etc. In contrast to him (928f.).

966
To bring that dear life back!
A strong encouragement if the life is Agamemnon’s, a death sentence if it is Iphigeneia’s.

967ff
He is like the root of a tree returned to leaf, shading the house against the Dog Star’s heat, but he is actually the root of crime that re-invigorates the bloodlust in the race.

972
The bitter virgin grape
: a reference to the blood of Iphigeneia, the unripe virgin girl, that may also imply a reversal of the natural order of things; see 1410ff.

995
Not fit for the lyre:
morbid, not associated with festive songs inspired by the lyre-god Apollo; see n. 1077.

1004ff
Even
exultant health
, etc. According to the doctrine of the Golden Mean, the ancient Greeks believed that excess and deficiency should be avoided (see 748ff.), even in matters of health (i.e., too much health was dangerous, or in terms of Shakespeare’s pun: ‘goodness, growing to a plurisy,/Dies in his own too-much’). One should reduce such excess, as the wise sea-captain (in the following lines) jettisons some of his excessive freight. Behind the passage may lie the metaphor of the ship of state (see 185ff., 786ff.), but Agamemnon’s role as captain is undermined by his association with another metaphor, the storm; see n. 185ff.;
LB
n. 203,
E
n. 250.