‘Agamemnon’: Fate, Justice, Revenge
A review of ‘Agamemnon’, by Aeschylus; circa 458 BCE.
Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy deals with the way the Greek gods interact with human beings and shape their choice. The theme at the heart of the plays is the contrast between revenge and justice (which as we know from Plato, is tricky to pin down). The first of these is Agamemnon, named for the Achaean leader in the Trojan War. As you will recall, that sanguinary conflict kicked off when Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus, eloped with the handsome Trojan prince, Paris. (Or did she? Euripedes claims she was abducted, or that a phantom Helen went to Troy. At any rate, Dante puts Paris in the second circle with the lustful in Inferno.)
The story opens with a lone Watchman, weary but alert, scanning the horizon for the long-awaited sign that Troy has fallen. ‘I ask the gods for release from this long watch,’ he says, pointing to the role that deities play in the events of mortals. Soon the signal comes: Agamemnon is coming home to Argos. But his victory is tainted. To gain fair winds to Troy, he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. It is a crime his wife, Clytemnestra, has neither forgiven nor forgotten.
Clytemnestra is a commanding presence. Aeschylus depicts her as clever, manipulative and resolute. The men dismiss her as a woman; but she outwits them: her superiority, intellectual and (as she sees it) moral, is evident. Aeschylus casts her as many-layered. She is vengeful, regal, material, determined. Clytemnestra is no passive queen. The standing of her husband, at its peak after triumph at Troy, means nought to her. Cassandra forewarns of her lust for vengeance, but no one listens. Clytemnestra kills her husband without remorse: ‘I struck him twice,’ she says, ‘and with two cries of pain he buckled at the knees.’ She acts with the force of one moved by the will of the gods. We are invited to ask if she is murderer or avenger. What is the difference?
The men dismiss her as a woman; but she outwits them.
The Chorus, comprising Argive elders, bridge past and present, interpreting events through myth and prophecy. They struggle to grasp Clytemnestra’s cause and the will of the gods: they stand for human confusion in a contingent world. Their words are charged with dread and resignation: Zeus has led us on to know, the future comes through suffering.’
It is a resonant line. And not the only one. The language of Agamemnon is filled with blood and fire, fear, entrapment. Troy burns like a sacrificial offering; Agamemnon walks on a blood-red carpet like a doomed man crossing into death. Cassandra, the enslaved Trojan prophetess, burns with clarity. Cursed to know the future yet never be believed, she foresees her murder and that of Agamemnon with a simplicity and intensity that is haunting: ‘The house breathes with murder.’
These are not spoilers. In Greek tragedy, key events like the killing of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra are well-known: they come from familiar myths. The beauty of Greek drama is in the telling, the how. Agamemnon builds quickly but not hastily: the tension grows, and anticipation mutates into inevitability. Every line drives us forward towards bloody calamity. Clytemnestra shows the calculated hospitality of Lady Macbeth to King Duncan; Agamemnon — complacent, drunk on his own achievements—shows the hubris of Milton’s Satan, Shelley’s Frankstein, Captain Ahab, Gatsby—treading on a crimson path that to any ordinary man would herald death. Fate looms over Agamemnon like a storm cloud so vast that none can escape its rain.
The beauty of Greek drama is in the telling, the how.
Does Agamemnon deserve his fate? After all, he sacrificed his daughter for that very male past-time: war, and the standing it might bring. Does Clytemnestra’s revenge, then, restore balance—or does it only worsen the family’s curse? The gods in Agamemnon are at once remote and all-controlling, leaving mortals to suffer the consequences of actions they can barely understand. Justice in Aeschlyus’s world is brutal, cyclical; yet also ambiguous.
Such a play, seeming on its surface to be so deeply rooted in the peculiar beliefs of a people, lasts because those beliefs sprang from existential human needs. It is in our nature to ask ourselves to what degree we are free and to do what we wish and to what extent we must play out that which we are fated to do. Myth, as Kołakowski teaches us, is our reply to questions like, Why are we here? Am I free? Why be just? We may, in the modern age, think we have overcome such concerns; but it may well be argued that we have never been further away from resolving surmounting them. Justifiably it might be claimed that we have merely become better at distracting ourselves from them. And in those moments, fleeting as they are, between those distractions, we are confronted by the awesome contingency of our being, and see how very unhappy we are.
Agamenon is not a mere story of revenge. It deals with lasting, perhaps unsolvable existential questions about free will, right and wrong, fairness and unfairness, authority and liberty. It marries very human concerns with grand questions about our place in the world, and this simultaneously psychological and philosophical depth have ensured the relevance of the play for over 2,000 years. It echoes in Shakespeare and in Eliot and in Sartre because it resonates in our lives. It speaks to our experience. Because like all great myths, it is, in a manner of speaking that would not have troubled the Greeks, true.