Agamemnon by Aeschylus - Find some other blood-glutted / Family tree of murder

Agamemnon by Aeschylus.  What a quotable play.  Here’s a two-line summary:

CHORUS:  Where is the right and wrong

In this nightmare?  (77, tr. Ted Hughes)

War is over.  Queen Clytemnestra is thrilled that her husband Agamemnon is coming home after a decade of war, because it will finally give her the opportunity to murder him in revenge for his murder of their daughter Iphigenia, killed in a ghastly human sacrifice that, if we stick to my schedule, we will see with our own eyes sometime next fall.  How horrible; who would want to see that?  The chorus on the sacrifice of Iphigenia:

Some called it a monstrous act

But it seemed to work.

Anyway, that’s all in the past. (40)

Agamemnon’s family history is so cursed and blood-soaked that this is just usual business.  Here Clytemnestra welcomes Agamemnon home, laying out carpets dyed with “all the colours of blood”:

You have come like a spring day, opening the heart

After locked-up winter.

When Zeus treads the unripe grape

And lets the wine flood out

Then the whole house is blessed.

As it is now

When you step through your own doorway. (45)

In one of those masterpieces of Greek irony, she openly tells Agamemnon that she is about to murder him.

I had forgotten the unrelieved violence of Agamamnon.  We get not just the murder of Agamemnon, described in detail before it happens by the traumatized prophetess Cassandra, plus her murder, but also graphic descriptions of the cannibalistic murder of the sons of Thyestes, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the sack of Troy.  These descriptions take up most of the play.  Horror literature.

Or other kinds of literature.  The quality of the little parts is so impressive.  Agamemnon is arguably the worst part in the play, the most minor.  The watchman who begins the play has some superb lines – “And then – what follows, / Better not think about it” (6) – smart man; the arrogant tyrant Aegisthus is pure ham; and the Herald briefly turns Agamemnon into war literature:

Then on the beaches it was worse. Dug in

under the enemy ramparts – deadly going.

Out of the sky, out of the marshy flats

the dews soaked us, turned the ruts we fought from

into gullies, made our gear, our scalps,

crawl with lice…

But why weep now?

It’s over for us, over for them.

The dead can rest and never rise again;

no need to call their muster.  We’re alive,

do we have to go on raking up old wounds?

Good-bye to all that.  Glad I am to say it.  (124, Fagles)

I have mostly been using the 1999 Ted Hughes translation of Agamemon, which simplifies but also clarifies the language of Aeschylus, but I could not resist Robert Fagles in this passage, with his direct invocation of Robert Graves’s combat memoir, which I doubt is in the original Greek.

Hughes is good, too.  The Chorus of old men on how the war looked to them:

The men came back

As little clay jars

Full of sharp cinders.  (26)

But the big part is Clytemnestra’s, magnificent all the way through.  She is like Prometheus or Ajax, a rebel against the gods.  Much of this blood is supposedly demanded for unknown reasons by the cruel, perhaps insane gods.  Her own grievances irrevocably revenged, she addresses “You Powers, whoever you are”:

Find some other blood-glutted

Family tree of murder –

Go and perform your strange dance

Of justice in their branches.

Leave us.

I ask for nothing,

Now the killing is over –

Only to be left in peace.  (79-80)

Imagine if Agamemnon were the only play of the trilogy that had survived.  But no, so next week we’ll see if the next generation can lift the curse in The Libation Bearers.  Good luck, kids!

I’ve illustrated this post with a 1906 “galvanoplastic” reproduction of the famous, so-called Mask of Agamemnon, owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.