Greek Drama · Part 3 · Aeschylus · B2–C1
Aeschylus: Agamemnon
Part 3 of Greek Drama: the first play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the only complete trilogy that survives. After ten years, King Agamemnon returns from Troy. His wife Clytemnestra welcomes him with a purple carpet and a smile, and the prophetess Cassandra, whom no one ever believes, sees exactly what is going to happen. The future in the past and foreshadowing (was to, would, was about to, was going to), and the language of irony and fate, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria. The play includes a murder and the memory of a sacrifice, told briefly.
In the Odyssey you met Agamemnon’s ghost, warning Odysseus never to trust a woman. Tonight you see why. Aeschylus’ greatest work is a trilogy, three plays about one family, and tonight’s is the first: the night a king came home.
Exactly, Philo. Everyone on stage knows something is wrong, except the king. And the audience knows the whole story already. That is the great pleasure of Greek tragedy: watching people walk towards a fate they can’t see. Tonight’s grammar is the grammar of what was going to happen.
The Oresteia (458 BCE) is the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedy to survive: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. It won first prize, two years before Aeschylus died. It tells the story of the cursed house of Atreus, in which each generation’s crime causes the next.
Ten years earlier, when the Greek fleet could not sail to Troy, King Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis to change the winds. His wife Clytemnestra never forgave him. The play begins with a watchman on the palace roof, waiting for the chain of beacon fires that will signal the fall of Troy. When Agamemnon arrives with his captive, the Trojan princess Cassandra, Clytemnestra welcomes him with flattering words and persuades him to walk into the…
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