Agamemnon · The Oresteia

On the roof of the palace of the Atreidae at Argos, a Watchman lay at night, as he had lain for a whole year, like a dog, watching for a signal: a chain of beacon fires, set from mountain to mountain all the way from Troy, which would announce that the city had fallen. "I ask the gods for release from these toils . . . I know the assembly of the stars at night by heart." He was ordered there by the Queen — "a woman's heart that plans like a man's." He could not sleep; he tried to sing, to keep himself awake, and wept instead, for the misfortunes of this house, which was no longer ruled as well as it used to be.

And then the fire blazed out in the dark. "Hail, torch of night, showing a light like day!" He would dance for joy; he would wake the Queen. And then, as he went: "For the rest, I am silent; a great ox stands on my tongue. The house itself, if it had a voice, could tell it most clearly. I speak to those who understand; for those who do not, I forget."

The Chorus of old men of Argos, too old to have gone to the war ten years before, came into the square before the palace. They remembered how the two sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, had sailed with a thousand ships to avenge the theft of Helen, like eagles screaming over their robbed nest. And they remembered the omen at the start: two eagles, one black and one white-tailed, had torn apart a pregnant hare with her unborn young; and the prophet Calchas had read it — the sons of Atreus would take Troy, but Artemis was angry at the eagles' feast, and would demand another sacrifice, "a sacrifice without law, without feast."

And they sang a hymn to Zeus: "Zeus, whoever he may be — if it pleases him to be called by this name, by this I address him . . . Zeus, who has set mortals on the road to understanding, who has made it a fixed law: by suffering, learning. In sleep there drips before the heart the pain of remembered wrong; and even to the unwilling, wisdom comes. A grace that comes by violence, from the gods who sit on their awesome thrones."

And then they told of Aulis. The winds from the Strymon held the fleet in harbour, and the men wasted away, and the ships rotted; and the prophet cried out that only one remedy could calm the storm, heavier than the storm itself: the King must sacrifice his daughter. Agamemnon wept: "Heavy is my fate if I disobey; heavy if I must kill my child, the delight of my house, and stain a father's hands with streams of a virgin's blood beside the altar. Which of these is without evil?" And then he put on the yoke of necessity. Her prayers, her cries of "Father!", her young life, the warlike captains counted as nothing. Her father ordered the attendants to lift her over the altar like a kid, and to gag her lovely mouth, so that she could not utter a curse on the house. And as her saffron robe streamed to the ground, she struck each of her sacrificers with a glance of pity, standing out as in a painting, wanting to speak — she who had often sung in her father's hall at the feasts. "What followed, I did not see, and I do not tell."

The sacrifice of Iphigenia is told in the play in one of its greatest choral songs; it is given here without its final detail.

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, who had ruled Argos in his absence, came out to make sacrifices of thanksgiving. Troy had fallen, she told the Chorus, that very night. How could she know? She described the chain of beacons, fire handing on fire across the sea and the mountains: from Ida to Lemnos, to Mount Athos, across the sea to Makistos, to Messapion, over the Asopus plain to Kithairon, across the Gorgopis lake to Aigiplanktos, to the Arachnaean peak, and so to the roof of this house. And she imagined Troy at that moment: the conquerors drunk with victory, the conquered weeping over their dead; and she hoped the Greeks would not sin against the gods of Troy, in their greed, or plunder their temples, for they still had to come home.

A Herald arrived, sent ahead by the King, overjoyed to be home after ten years, and told of the hardships of the war — the cramped bunks on the ships, the dews of the Trojan meadows rotting their clothes, the bitter winter cold — and of the victory; and then, reluctantly, of the storm that had scattered the fleet on its way home: Menelaus was lost, no one knew where.

The Chorus sang of Helen, whose name means destruction — Helen, "hell to ships, hell to men, hell to cities" — and of a lion cub reared in a house as a pet, gentle with the children, which grew up and showed the nature of its parents, and filled the house with blood.

Agamemnon arrived in his chariot, in triumph, and beside him, in the chariot, a captive woman: Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, a prophetess, given to him as his prize. He thanked the gods for his victory. Clytemnestra came out to greet him, with a long speech of welcome — of how she had suffered in his absence, waiting, hearing rumours of his wounds and death, so that she had tried more than once to hang herself; of how she had sent their son Orestes away to a friend in Phocis for safety; of how she had wept until her tears were dry. And she had her servants spread before him, from the chariot to the door of the palace, a path of crimson tapestries, rich purple cloths of the household, for him to walk on.

Agamemnon refused: "Do not honour me like a god, spreading cloths beneath my feet; to walk on these embroidered things is for the gods . . . I tell you to honour me as a man, not as a god." She argued with him, gently, cleverly, until he gave way: "If you must have it so, let someone loosen my sandals." He walked barefoot on the crimson cloths into the house, ashamed to trample the wealth of his house. And Clytemnestra cried out after him: "There is the sea — and who shall drain it dry? — the sea that breeds the gush of purple, precious as silver, ever-renewed, the dye of garments . . . Zeus, Zeus who fulfils, fulfil my prayers; and let your care be for what you mean to fulfil."

The "carpet scene" — Agamemnon walking into his house on a river of blood-red cloth — is one of the most famous images in Greek drama.

Cassandra had stayed in the chariot, silent. Clytemnestra told her to come in; she did not move, and the Queen went in, angry. Then, suddenly, Cassandra cried out — wordless cries of terror — and called on Apollo: "Apollo, Apollo! God of the road, my destroyer!" Apollo had loved her, and given her the gift of prophecy; she had promised herself to him, and broken her promise; and in revenge he had made it her fate that no one would ever believe her prophecies.

She saw the house as it was: "a house that hates the gods, that knows many crimes, the killing of kin, a slaughterhouse of men, a floor sprinkled with blood." She saw the ghosts of children holding their own flesh in their hands — the children of Thyestes, served to their father. She saw, in a vision, what was about to happen inside the house: the bath, the net, the axe. The Chorus did not understand her; they were afraid. Then she spoke plainly: "I tell you, you will see Agamemnon dead." And she knew that she would die with him.

She tore off the garlands and the prophet's staff that marked her as Apollo's: "Go to destruction! . . . Make some other woman rich in ruin instead of me." And she went in to her death, knowing it, with dignity: "Alas for the life of men! When they are fortunate, a shadow can overturn it; and when they are unfortunate, a wet sponge wipes the picture out. And this I pity far more than that."

From inside the palace came a cry. "Ah, I am struck a deadly blow, deep within!" And again: "Ah, again, a second blow!" The old men of the Chorus did not know what to do; they talked, each one in turn, of rushing in, of calling the citizens, of waiting to know more.

The doors opened. Clytemnestra stood over the bodies of Agamemnon, in his bath, tangled in a robe like a fishing net, and of Cassandra beside him. She had lied, she said, for as long as she needed to; now she would speak the truth.

"I spread around him a net without escape, like one for fish, an evil wealth of robe; and I strike him twice; and with two cries his limbs went slack; and when he had fallen, I gave him a third blow, a thanks-offering to Zeus below the earth, the saviour of the dead. So he fell, and gasped out his life; and he spattered me with a dark shower of bloody dew; and I rejoiced in it no less than the sown field rejoices in the rain that Zeus gives, when the buds are born."

Clytemnestra's description of the murder is given here as she speaks it; the killing itself takes place offstage.

The Chorus were horrified, and threatened her with exile. She answered them with scorn: where were they when he killed her daughter, "as if it were the death of a beast," the child she had borne in pain, to charm the winds of Thrace? She swore by Justice, accomplished for her child, and by the Fury, to whom she had sacrificed this man, that she did not fear; and she named her protector: Aegisthus, her lover, who had ruled with her in the King's absence. The Chorus lamented the King, and blamed Helen, and the curse, the demon of the house; and Clytemnestra agreed: it was not she, Agamemnon's wife, who had done it, but the ancient avenging spirit of Atreus, who had taken her shape. "I want to make a pact with the spirit of the Pleisthenids, to bear what is done, hard though it is, and let him go to some other family."

Then Aegisthus came out, exulting: the son of Thyestes, avenging his father and his butchered brothers. He told the story of the hideous feast. The old men insulted him: a coward, who had planned the murder but let a woman do it. They nearly fought; Clytemnestra stopped them: "Let us not stain ourselves with more blood . . . We have reaped enough harvest of sorrow." The old men went away, muttering that Orestes might yet come home. "Pay no heed to their barking," said Clytemnestra to Aegisthus; "you and I will rule this house, and set all things well."