Aeschylus: ‘Agamemnon’

 In thinking about Aeschylus’s brand of tragedy, Professor H.D.F. Kitto says it’s useful to think about the Instrument of Doom.

Aeschylus’s play was based on a story that everyone knew. King Agamemnon of Argos, bent on destroying Troy, sacrificed his and Queen Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigeneia to advance his plans. He didn’t consult his wife. He just did it.

Ten years later, when he finally returned home victorious from the war, there was the Instrument, waiting for him.

In Sophocles’ tragedies, characters collide. Their motives conflict, and the drama is between the characters.

In Aeschylus, the tragedy is in how one person fails. There’s no revelation about motives, no anguished monolog from Agamemnon about what he was thinking. Kitto says:

 

The theme is not the tragic workings of a mind; it is that men of violence do things that outrage Justice, bring retribution, and provoke further deeds of violence.

 

Kitto says Aeschylus limited his characterization to the traits that were essential to that view of the story. Agamemnon had to be the kind of man who was capable of giving moral offense, and Clytemnestra was the kind of woman who was capable of taking it.

 

They collide, and her strength matches his, as does her moral build.

 

The story is not a battle of wills. It’s the dropping of fate’s hammer.

 

Kitto, who strikes the reader as a person who counts lines, says that lyrical passages account for exactly half the play. The chorus of Argive elders sings not to give us a narrative but to amplify the points where we ought to feel the story, rather than think about it. I like these lines: 

 

Cry aloud without fear the victory of Zeus,

You will not have failed the truth:

Zeus, who guided men to think,

who has laid it down that wisdom

comes alone through suffering

Still there drips in sleep against the heart

grief of memory; against

our pleasure we are temperate

From the gods who sit in grandeur

Grace comes somehow violent.

 

Agamemnon is the first of a trilogy, The Oresteia. Aeschylus decides what to do about the killing of the king in The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Agamemnon is on pages 68-81. The quotations are on pp. 75 and 70.

Agamemnon, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Aeschylus I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 33-90.