The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, the Eumenides

  I’d watch till late at night, my eyes still burn,

  I sobbed by the torch I lit for you alone.

  I never let it die . . . but in my dreams

  the high thin wail of a gnat would rouse me,

  piercing like a trumpet - I could see you

  suffer more than all

  the hours that slept with me could ever bear.

  The torch goes to the heart of Clytaemnestra’s darkness, flickering like her feeling for her husband - now the lamp beside their bed, now the light for her paramour, now the beacon burning for revenge.

  In dreams begin the queen’s responsibilities and a vision of their price. Again she means what she says, but now her meanings multiply and blend. ‘If he took one wound for each report/to penetrate these walls, he’s gashed like a dragnet, /more, if he had only died . . .’ Her extravagant pity becomes a death threat and, as if just breathed in a half-line, the wish that he had died at Troy and she were spared the dreadful work at home. Through her war she gains what he has lost through his: sympathy for the victim and something even deeper. Empowered by a love that makes her hatred stronger - by an admiration for his prowess that makes her prove ‘that heaven had made her such a man’ - she manipulates her husband, the elders and ourselves: And so

  our child is gone, not standing by our side,

  the bond of our dearest pledges, mine and yours;

  by all rights our child should be here . . .

  Orestes.

  In defending herself for the absence of their son, she suspends his name until we recall their daughter Iphigeneia too, and so she indicts the king for murder. He is the victim of irony, she is the master. She ‘would salute’ him as a public defender, but he is indefensible, and he is standing trial in her court.

  Clytaemnestra’s welcome, the tapestries she spreads before him are the grounds for his incrimination. These were fabrics sacred to the gods; to walk on them would be an Oriental excess and, to a man like Agamemnon, a strong temptation. They glitter with silver embroidery ; they are also dyed with the red dye from the Murex snail, ‘sea-purple’ dark as blood - a visual paradox of deadliness and richness. At first Agamemnon rejects the queen’s temptation. He knows hubris when he sees it, he reveres the gods. He protests too much. Clytaemnestra knows hypocrisy when she sees it. Turn that piety inwards, you have self-destructive pride. She overpowers him in a tense, brusque dialogue - less than a minute in performance - that seals Agamemnon’s doom.

  She begins by challenging him as the man who knows his limits. She asks him if he will speak his mind frankly. ‘You may be sure,’ he replies indignantly, ‘I shall not destroy [or “violate” : the Greek could carry a military or a sexual metaphor) the principles I have just expressed.’ By gaining this promise - Agamemnon is too vain to refuse it - Clytaemnestra makes his mind as vulnerable to her verbal thrusts as his body soon will be to her weapon. ‘Suppose you had been afraid of some disaster,’ she continues, ‘would you have sworn to the gods to do the kind of thing that I am asking?’ Agamemnon admits he would, if a person skilled in such matters prescribed such a ritual - as Calchas had, we remember, to appease Artemis at Aulis. Clytaemnestra then attacks on another front, turning adroitly to the war itself, and asks, ‘What would Priam have done if he had had your success?’ Certainly, Agamemnon thinks, almost with a trace of envy, he would have walked on the tapestries. Clytaemnestra is too skilful to draw the obvious conclusion - ‘Why not you, then?’ She draws things out, eager for him to excel his enemy in hypocrisy as well. He seems to fear popular condemnation, she insinuates, but would Priam? Agamemnon is superior to Priam, isn’t he? Indeed he is, as he replies. He is morally superior, and he stands his ground in good democratic style. He respects the vox populi. ‘Well, the man who won’t risk envy will never be enviable.’ Here she strikes a nerve: Agamemnon did risk public criticism for glory in the past; argue the point, and the pose of the democrat may collapse, so he resorts to other platitudes. ‘A woman shouldn’t want to fight this way.’ He is losing his grip on the first issue and playing into Clytaemnestra’s ‘man-designing’ hands.

  Now she takes the offensive, as only a woman can. A victorious soldier can quite properly yield to a woman, she insists, and her appeal from apparent weakness to apparent strength makes him waver: ‘Do you really value victory in this contest of ours?’ ‘Do be persuaded,’ she replies, and then with brilliant insight - since Agamemnon was always the man to have it both ways - she adds, ‘because if you willingly yield you are really the victor.’ How irresistible for him to satisfy her whims and at the same time, by her own admission, to be the true superior! The shifts of the queen’s attack have outwitted him. The victor of the ten-year siege of Troy is defeated in a moment of psychological warfare with his wife.

  It is all so swift, so simple. Yet behind the king’s clichés we hear his sacrifice of Iphigeneia and his own imminent death, more terrible than Priam’s. Behind the queen’s cajolery we hear the great impersonator play the prophet Calchas, while dominating this struggle between male and female, justice and the Furies. As her final imperative suggests (pithou - ‘be persuaded!’), she personifies Peitho, but not in the manner of her sister Helen; she is not compulsion but temptation, deft, insinuating, luring Agamemnon to expose himself in all his guilt. As he consents, idly hoping to appease the gods by taking off his boots before he treads their vestments, he demonstrates his moral blindness once again. Yet at Aulis he had to choose between two acts of outrage, both fatal to himself, as well he knew, and so the choice was torment. At Argos, ten years later, he may choose an act of abstinence. It will not save him, but it will not incriminate him either. Instead he chooses outrage because it seems so innocent - a scrap of ceremony, not the flash and stab of a knife. This outrage, thanks to the insight of the queen, can appear as superficial as the conscience of the king has actually become. The war has deified the man. His potential as a tragic hero is defeated. With his first step on the fabrics he displays Cassandra as the model of his piety, unaware that her abduction is a sacrilege and her presence is an insult to the queen. The ‘flower and pride of all the wealth [he] won’, Cassandra epitomizes what he always does with wealth. He triumphs over it, lending it fatal power over himself, and he does so of his own free will.

  Only after he consents does Clytaemnestra rise, in a wild, whirling speech, and speed him to the last:

  There is the sea

  and who will drain it dry? Precious as silver,

  inexhaustible, ever-new, it breeds the more we reap it - tides on tides of crimson dye our robes blood-red.

  The sea is both the reservoir of their riches and the incarnation of their never-ending strife, a harvest and a grisly reaping both. Thus the sea reflects the tapestries and Clytaemnestra’s victim, the deadliness beneath the surface grandeur of the fabrics and the man. The sinuous red line they form is in the vein of Agamemnon - they fuse his slaughters and his bloodline, his will and his hereditary guilt. And at every step he takes upon them he exceeds his limits and retraces his descent; he commits an Olympian outrage that will be punished by the forces of the Earth. For as he tramples on the gods he re-enacts his trampling on the innocents of Troy and on his daughter - just as his forebear trampled on the banquet of his children - and so the king reactivates the curse. As if caught in a slow-motion camera, all his murderous acts dissolve into a single act, deliberate and majestic and profane, that accelerates towards the murder that awaits him.

  An entire history of violence marches towards its violent but valid retribution. Clytaemnestra has created a theatrical triumph that is also a solemn moral judgement. Through her words and tapestries the assassination of her husband becomes an execution, a sacrifice. She is the great artist of ritual. And this ritual not only incriminates her victim ; it exhilarates herself with sacramental power - whipping the priestess into fury, even yoking the gods beneath her fury as she drives her husband towards his destination. ‘Arrival’ is her theme. She hails him as a sun-king whose arrival
ushers in a greater darkness. He is a prodigy like Zeus, when Zeus

  tramples the bitter virgin grape for new wine

  and the welcome chill steals through the halls, at last

  the master moves among the shadows of his house, fulfilled.

  Zeus-Agamemnon has arrived to trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. Agamemnon is teleios or fulfilled, ‘arrived at perfection’ and also ‘ripe for sacrifice’. Zeus is Teleios too, as we hear in the queen’s closing prayer, the lord of fulfilment who will consummate her rites.

  Now for the agony of that event. The king and queen go in, the doors close - the sense of disaster is electric, and the old men cry out as never before. They had made deeper and deeper sweeps into the past; now there is no escaping from the present. Their hopes for justice have collided with the Fury that is ‘real, true, no fantasy’, and their song is torn in half. First an explosive dirge the Furies thrust upon them, then a manual of Olympian platitudes. They cling to their old safeguards, the virtue of moderation, the doctrine of the Mean - if only it were asserted now, Agamemnon might be saved. But he has trampled on the Mean, he must pay the price, and so must they. The more they try to exceed their limits, to pour out words that match their feelings, the more they choke and mutter through the nights, while the ‘burning’ in their hearts goes unexpressed. Struck dumb by the gods on one hand, powerless to sing without the Furies on the other, they are at the threshold of a new awareness.

  At this point in a Greek tragedy the audience would expect to hear the death-cry ringing out, but Aeschylus will delay it for more than three hundred lines, building its suspense and its significance through Cassandra. Clytaemnestra enters, unctuously invites her to share the sacrifices of thanksgiving for a husband’s safe return - offered to Zeus Ktêsios who guards the possessions of the house - though of course she means the murder of Agamemnon and his mistress. Cassandra remains impassive, and Clytaemnestra goes inside, exasperated. In this brief clash of wills the silence of Cassandra seems to defeat her argumentative opponent. But she is impervious to outside events, in the grip of a higher power and entranced, like a medium on the verge of vision.

  Cassandra breaks her silence with a scream that turns the house of Atreus into an echoing torture-chamber - a scream for Apollo, the god of enlightenment and prophecy, that makes his very name Destruction. And through his seer there flows - in language that could be clear only to ‘those who know’ - a pageant of disaster. The collective, curse-ridden past of the house is streaming into Thyestes’ murdered children, streaming into the murder of Agamemnon, streaming into the murder of Cassandra, into Argos are streaming all the murders done at Troy. At the core of her vision stands the king’s death, and each event that rushes towards it rises in stylistic violence, from the floating wreckage of the house, ‘kinsmen/torturing kinsmen, severed heads’, to a tableau vivant surfacing into the light like ghosts from a cavern half seen, half moving, ‘babies/wailing ... their flesh charred, the father gorging on their parts’, then to the murder of Agamemnon breaking out of the swirling mists of prophecy, breaking off in horror - Cassandra’s outcries stabbing into the darkness like the wounds that pierce the king. Apollo’s vision is a crescendo of shattering impressions. For all its seeming order of events, each stands out in isolation, unrelated in human terms, unmotivated, unbearable. Through the eyes of Apollo, history is a chronic nightmare, and Cassandra is at the mercy of the god, forced to endure his piling impositions. Her vision breaks apart. She is wrenched from Agamemnon’s death to prophesy her own. And although she subsides into an elegy, her suffering only grows. First Apollo exploits her as his medium, then he destroys her, ‘treads [her] down’ - his service is a rape.

  But there is a counterforce at work. At first the chorus is confused, as Aeschylus increases the pathos of Cassandra: Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy but added, ‘No one will believe you.’ The old men begin to, however, as the violence of her language forces them to live out the horror she foresees in broken flashes. They turn from terse disclaimers to a more coherent, lyric form of protest, and they do so when Apollo’s seer invokes another power. ‘Let the insatiate discord in the race/rear up and shriek “Avenge the victim - stone them dead!’” It is her first self-motivated utterance; it forces the old men to identify the Furies, the Furies shock them into song and new awareness, and Cassandra answers with a sudden, lucid pause: ‘There’s stealth and murder in that cauldron, do you hear?’ One mention of the Furies brings unusual clarity and more, Cassandra’s vision of the murder of the king. ‘Drag the great bull from the mate!/ . . . black horn glints, twists - she gores him through!’ Man is brutalized into beast, and the beast’s sex is perverted. A phrase from the Odyssey, Agamemnon ‘cut down like an ox at the trough’, erupts into a kind of religious, mythological upheaval. At the core of Apollo’s vision may stand the shattering of the god himself and his original triumph over Mother Earth; she rises up again, in effect, to claim her sacramental bull. And Apollo’s perspective shatters into tragedy and deeper human feeling. The old men reach towards Cassandra, they cry out to her, silent and about to die, to live and sing a more prophetic song.

  Now she repeats her declarations, with a difference. The old men ask for clarity, so she engages them in discourse, iambics and normal syntax, much as at Delphi the interpreters turned the outcries of the Pythia into conventional language. But Cassandra does not lose intensity; she gains. She has been like a bride who hides behind a veil, a song of innocence. Now she calls for a song of experience and the only force that can inspire it:These roofs - look up - there is a dancing troupe

  that never leaves. And they have their harmony

  but it is harsh, their words are harsh, they drink

  beyond the limit. Flushed on the blood of men

  their spirit grows and none can turn away

  their revel breeding in the veins - the Furies!

  They cling to the house for life. They sing,

  sing of the frenzy that began it all,

  strain rising on strain, showering curses

  on the man who tramples on his brother’s bed.

  A brutal irony and a brutal truth. The Furies’ revel, passing through the house, becomes as permanent as the roaring in the blood. They offer a form of recreation, which re-creates our pain and makes it inescapable. ‘Evil is unspectacular and always human,’ they might say with Auden, and they reveal what lies behind the traditional, sensational version of Thyestes’ banquet and the curse - a simple breach of faith. That is the curse, so human it is a perennial menace and, as we shall see, a well-spring of compassion. It is mortality itself that can, at any time, consume one’s offspring and one’s future, but it may provide a kind of sustenance as well. Live with the curse and with the Furies, and we may live intensely, even perhaps invigorated by their force. Apollo is oblivious to our origins; the Furies are our origins. Through them we may articulate ourselves, if we can bear to sing their song and take Cassandra’s lead.

  The old men are struck by her knowledge. She has passed the customary test of seers; she can report events she never witnessed. And she owes her vision to Apollo, but not its credibility. She committed a breach of faith herself, she explains; she deceived the god, and that is why he aborted his gift of prophecy. What added pathos to her lyrics, in other words, now gives her kinship with the story of fallibility she is telling, and increases her effect. Again she approaches Agamemnon’s murder, but now she begins at its source, Thyestes’ children,holding out their entrails . . . now it’s clear,

  I can see the armfuls of compassion, see the father

  reach to taste and -

  For so much suffering,

  I tell you, someone plots revenge.

  Here she assembles her own vision, basing it on insight, not the lightning of the god. In her eyes history becomes a living force, a continuum of movement and motivation. The suffering children, more than victims, have a new potential; it is less the macabre crime of Atreus than their grie
f and the grief of Thyestes, even of his insensitive son, that breeds the murder of Agamemnon. And Cassandra sees other human factors, too. There is the blindness of the king who, by obliterating Troy, destroys his own perception. Above all, there is the queen’s manipulation of appearances. Detest her as she may, Cassandra sees as Clytaemnestra sees, and brings to light her terrifying powers. There is a relationship between the murderess and the victim, as if Cassandra’s vision might inspire the queen’s revenge, the queen’s revenge fulfil Cassandra’s vision.

  The old men cannot accept the murder of the king. Hoping against hope, they look for a man to do the work and cannot see the woman, but this is a matter for the matriarchal hearth, as Cassandra’s third, climactic speech implies. Indignant at Apollo’s cruel indifference, she revolts against the god. She rips off his regalia, stamps it into the ground - an act of trampling that is the opposite of Agamemnon’s. She is not surrendering to her destiny, she is struggling to create it; not committing an outrage but decrying the abuses of the god. As she tramples on his robes she re-enacts his trampling out her credibility at Troy and now her life in Argos. And, by implicating Apollo so severely, she may strip him of his power in this play. Not until she has revolted against the Prophet can she prophesy what is to come. Not until she bares herself to the Furies can she foresee the coming of Orestes - the promise of the future rising from the torment of the present:We will die,