The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies (35 page)

1017ff
A man’s life-blood,
etc. A recurrent theme that stresses not only the fragility of life but the futility of vengeance as a way of life. It will contrast with the rejuvenation that men enjoy under the new dispensation of Athenian justice; see
LB
66ff.,
E
655ff.

1021
The master-healer
: Asclepios acquired such skill as a physician that he restored a dead man to life, and was consequently struck dead by Zeus with a thunderbolt because his action disturbed the natural order, personified as
Moira,
Fate, who dominates the remainder of this chorus. The notion of a kind of settled ‘departmentalization’ of the functions of gods and men is a logically necessary element in polytheism. Asclepios trespassed on ‘the department’ of
Thanatos,
god of death (as his father, Apollo, does in Euripides’
Alcestis
), and being mortal, is sacrificed to
Thanatos
for his transgression. Similarly (in the following lines) it is not within the ‘departmental’ powers of the human heart to speak out for itself; the principle of
Moira
forbids it.

1036f
The god who guards our dearest treasures
: apparently a reference to Zeus
Ktêsios,
who protects the house and its possessions. Later, as Clytaemnestra’s intentions become clearer, the god will yield his domestic authority to the ancestral spirit of revenge.

1038
Heracles,
etc. Heracles was sold in bondage by Hermes to Omphale, queen of Lydia. Gourmandizer that he was, he accepted his slave’s rations and served his mistress well by ridding her kingdom of the dangers that beset it.

1056
Clytaemnestra’s hearthstone rivals Apollo’s Navelstone at Delphi.

1066
The cutting bridle:
a sharp-edged bit used in the breaking-in of high-spirited horses.

1077
Who wants no part of grief:
Apollo required songs of joy, not mourning and the dirge.

1079
Apollon = apollon
(‘destroying’); an example of
nomen-omen;
see n. 688ff.

1085
Where have you led me now?
Apollo
Aguiatês,
Guardian of the Highways, has led her to her death.

1105
Rescue’s far away:
probably a reference to Orestes; see 1679ff.

1115ff
No no, look
there! etc. Cassandra’s broken utterances draw the chorus into her train of thought, forcing them to supplement her fragmentary vision; see Introduction, pp. 36ff., and the comparable power of Ophelia’s broken utterances in
Hamlet
(IV.v.7-13):

1120
Stone them dead
: a death reserved for the most infamous criminals, since it denoted an expiation of their crime by the entire community; see 1648f.

1145
Her son
: Itys, son of Philomela (or in another version, Procne). Philomela was turned into a nightingale after she had inadvertently tricked her husband, Tereus, into eating his son’s flesh. The allusion reinforces the earlier allusion to Thyestes’ feast, but it also distinguishes Philomela from Cassandra, and she insists upon the difference. Philomela was saved by the gods from internecine strife and made immortal with her song - in Keat’s words, ‘thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!/No hungry generations tread thee down.’ But Cassandra is condemned to the house of Atreus, her god will abandon her and make her sing in hell.

1182f
Clear and sharp
, etc. As the wind drives a wave towards the rising sun, so Cassandra’s prophetic powers bring catastrophe to light.
Lampros
can mean ‘keen’ for wind and ‘clear’ for oracles.

1196
The frenzy that began it all
: see 222, 387f., 808f., Introduction, pp. 37f., and D. H. Lawrence’s observation to Lady Ottoline Morrell, I March (?), 1915 (
Collected Letters
, ed. Harry T. Moore [New York: The Viking Press, 1962], I, 326): ‘Do you know Cassandra in Aeschylus and Homer? She is one of the world’s great figures, and what the Greeks and Agamemnon aid to her is symbolic of what mankind has done to her since raped and despoiled and mocked her, to their own ruin. It is not your brain you must trust to, nor your will - but to that fundamental pathetic faculty for receiving the hidden waves that come from the depths of life, and for transferring them to the un receptive world. It is something which happens below the consciousness, and below the range of the will - it is something which is unrecognized and frustrated and destroyed.’

1218
Once I betrayed him I could never be believed
: possibly too (but this is only a conjecture) Apollo then added the cruel condition that if anyone did say he believed her, it would be a sign that she was about to suffer a violent death: this would explain her outburst of woe when the chorus accepts the truth of her divinations shortly afterwards.

1232
A lion,
etc. Aegisthus.

1237ff
That detestable hellhound:
like Cerberus (
Theogony
769-74), the warder of Hell, but Cerberus could be drugged and so eluded; no one returns from Clytaemnestra’s ‘Gates of Death’ (1314).

1243
Viper,
etc. The
amphisbaina,
a terrifying mythical snake with a head at both ends of its body. Its name means ‘going backwards or forwards’, and it has been seen as a symbol of inconstancy and adultery.

1244
Scylla:
a female monster with six ravenous dog-like heads and twelve feet, lurking in a cave above a narrow strait of the sea, as described in the
Odyssey
(Book XII, lines 85-100). Aeschylus relocates the outlandish, superhuman dangers of the
Odyssey
within the confines of Agamemnon’s hearth and personifies them in his wife; see n. 1391ff.

1261
The Healer
: presumably Apollo. Agamemnon is now apportioned to
Thanatos,
Death.

1266
I don’t see who,
etc. The leader is reluctant, perhaps obtuse, but Agamemnon may seem well defended, and his only male opponent, Aegisthus, is inept.

1279
Trappings:
over Cassandra’s body she might have worn the
agrênon,
the net-like woollen robe worn by soothsayers; its resemblance to a hunting-net would reinforce her image as a victim (n. 129).

1297
Not to serve at my father’s altar
: Cassandra, the daughter of Agamemnon’s enemy, resembles his own daughter, Iphigeneia: both are his victims; both are brides of death and prophets in effect, but Cassandra’s impact on the future is more constructive.

1299
The first blood drawn:
the
prosphagma,
the blood-offering to the dead which was preliminary to a hero’s funeral, or the victim itself.

1302ff
There will come another
, etc. On the relationship between suffering and regeneration in Cassandra’s vision, see Introduction, pp. 39ff. Agamemnon’s body will be
huptiasma,
‘laid low’ in death and ‘upturned’ like hands in supplication, calling forth his son.

1337ff
I cried out, not from fear,
etc. According to Attic custom, ‘only if . . . the cry of distress has been raised, can evidence of the deed of violence be later laid before a court of law’ (Fraenkel).

1391ff
Clytaemnestra’s speech is a phantasmagoria of Homeric images, distorted as in a witch’s mirror that turns the queen from a triumphant warrioress in the
Iliad
to a hostess more sinister than any in the
Odyssey.
Agamemnon resembles both Greek and Trojan warriors in their agonies (Diomedes,
Iliad,
Book V, line 113; Hippodamas, Book XX, line 403f.) - as if he were vulnerable to friend and foe alike. Vaunting over his body Clytaemnestra travesties the delight of Menelaus (the brother Agamemnon needs) when he receives a prize at Patroclus’ funeral games: ‘his anger/was softened, as with dew the ears of corn are softened/in the standing corn growth of a shuddering field’ (Book XXIII, lines 597-9, trs. Lattimore), an image of fresh and unsophisticated joy. As Clytaemnestra revels in Agamemnon’s blood she recalls the rains of blood that Zeus hurls down when Hector is about to rout the Greeks (Book XI, lines 52ff.). And each stage in her rites of welcome, her bathing and cloaking of her guest, perverts the rituals of the
Odyssey.
Her ‘feasting’ in revenge is a violation of an Odyssean code that prohibits boasting over one’s fallen enemy. Perhaps her greatest perversion overturns the ‘marvellous simile’ which celebrates Odysseus’ reunion with his wife, ‘his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,/longed for/as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer/spent in rough waters where his ship went down/ under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea’ (Book XXIII, lines 232-5, trs. Fitzgerald). Her cup of welcome, customarily sacred to the gods, is a vessel of the curse (1420ff.); see 1275f., and n. 71f.;
LB n.
17,
E
n. 110ff.

1431f
What poison
, etc. Madness was often attributed in antiquity to the eating of some noxious plant or mineral.

1456
Loved ones
: probably her friends and allies in general.

1467
The golden girls
, etc. Clytaemnestra’s sarcastic plural enlarges on Chryseis, whose name derives from the word for gold, the daughter of Apollo’s priest. Agamemnon appropriated her and incurred Apollo’s anger at the outset of the
Iliad.

1472
The swan:
the bird of Apollo, reputed to sing only when about to die.

1497
The twinborn sons of Tantalus:
here Agamemnon and Menelaus.

1517ff
Oh my king
, etc. Repeated 1542ff.; the second line may echo the elders’ greeting of the king (769). In these closing scenes they display the more admirable side of Agamemnon (1575ff.) to dramatize their resistance to Clytaemnestra and their former dependence on the king (1479f), and perhaps to provide the rites of burial he requires. They are his only hope since, as Rose explains, his successor is an enemy, his son a child and an exile, and his widow his assassin, who will deny him rites and mutilate his body; see
LB
428ff.

1539
Black war
: the elders return to the themes of the opening chorus. Here the god of war (53) is internecine, not international, and even harder to appease.

1582ff
Our daughter,
etc. Clytaemnestra’s omission of the fact that Agamemnon murdered Iphigeneia only heightens her irony; the dead were thought to find an affectionate welcome in the underworld from the loved ones who had gone before them.

1585
The ferry:
Charon’s ferry across the river Styx.

1588
Charge meets counter-charge:
the chorus’ charge that Clytaemnestra murdered Agamemnon has been met by her charge that he murdered Iphigeneia.

1592
The one who acts must suffer:
the maxim, a commonplace since Hesiod, summarizes the
lex talionis
, the law of retaliation. In
A
it has a retaliatory force indeed, striking both at Agamemnon’s enemies and at himself; see 523f., 1555ff., 1691f.;
LB
n. 320,
E
n. 877.

1603
Purged
, etc. Perhaps an allusion to the purgations of the Mysteries.
Agamemnon
may be seen as a savage parody of these rites. The queen supplants the king of death, the sacred marriage weds her to the curse, the sacred birth revives her daughter’s ghost at the Styx, and men and gods unite in mutual destruction; see
A
n. 1,
LB
n. 950,
E
n. 494.

1610ff
The Furies’ tangling robes
: For the interweaving of the Furies and the justice of the gods, see Introduction, pp. 21ff., 30, 40, 43, 51, 59, 65, 70, 78. It is a paradoxical relationship, and Aegisthus, ironically, is one of the first to introduce it; as he boasts he wove the fatal plot together, he shuttles from ‘the Furies’ tangling robes’ to ‘the nets of Justice’.

1612ff
Atreus, this man’s father
, etc. Despite Aegisthus’ claims to clarity and precision, his antecedents blur and his ironies are so indiscriminate that one may wonder where his loyalties actually lie - with Thyestes who suffered outrage, or with Atreus who committed it. See Introduction, pp. 44ff.

1614
Atreus’ brother challenged him,
etc. Thyestes, after seducing Atreus’ wife, Aëropê, stole the golden lamb which was the warrant of Atreus’ title to the throne.

1623
A feast for gods
: the precedent for Thyestes’ feast was the cannibalistic feast that Tantalus presented to the gods.

1634
Pleisthenes:
since the name of this unidentified ancestral figure means ‘having the most strength’, it may have been a title of Atreus himself or a dynastic title for the sons of Pelops.

1662ff
Orpheus,
through the power of his song, could enchant the animals and rocks and trees, and they would follow in his footsteps. The irony Aegisthus trains on the chorus is well summarized by Denniston-Page: ‘Orpheus
led on
all that heard him, you will be
led off
to execution;
he
delighted with the charm of his voice,
you
infuriate me with your barking.’

1690
Our lives are based on pain:
see 961.

1695
A muted echo of her former exultation (352).

1706
Cock
: the type of swaggerer that fights with his own kind, a figure of licentiousness and strife; see
E
870ff.