Aeschylus AGAMEMNON
D. B. Levine Notes April 14, 2021
The Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Furies) is all about crime, justice, and punishment.
Each crime demands justice, and the punishment of the guilty. [And there are a lot of guilty people.]
Here are the six main crimes, in mythological chronological order, and how each is punished (or isn’t).
- FAMILY MURDER #1: ATREUS KILLS HIS BROTHER’S CHILDREN.
Atreus’ crime of killing the children of his brother Thyestes, in a struggle for power at Mycenae. Thyestes then cursed Atreus and his descendants. [Aegisthus was the baby brother of the murdered children.] This awoke the spirit called ALASTOR, the bloodthirsty “ancestral spirit of vengeance” (Ag. 1508), which would haunt the house until the acquittal of Orestes in the last play of the trilogy: The Furies. (Since this original crime was kin-killing, the Furies are involved.
- A.
EARLIER FAMILY CRIMES… If we want, we can trace this back to Atreus’ grandfather Tantalus, who sinned against the gods and found punishment in Tartaros as a result. His son Pelops, Atreus and Thyestes’ father, killed his own father-in-law, and cheated in a chariot race.
- PARIS’ VIOLATION OF XENIA.
Paris’ crime of violating Zeus’ rules of hospitality by stealing Helen, the wife of his host at Sparta, Menelaus. This is against the law of Zeus xenios (of hospitality). The Trojan War and the brutal sack of Troy bring about punishment for this crime.
- FAMILY MURDER #2: AGAMEMNON SACRIFICES DAUGHTER IPHIGENEIA.
Agamemnon’s crime of killing his daughter Iphigeneia, supposedly to appease the wrath of Artemis, and thus allow the Greek ships to sail against Troy to punish Paris and his people. This was kin-killing, and so the Furies are involved. Clytemnestra claims that her murder of Agamemnon is a just punishment for his crime.
- GREEK SACRILEGE WHILE SACKING TROY.
The Greeks under Agamemnon’s command at Troy violated the laws of the gods by destroying the sacred altars and sanctuaries of the gods. Divine punishment must follow against the perpetrators of this impiety. And it happened under Agamemnon’s command. The play Agamemnon implies that the terrible storm that separated the victorious fleet was a consequence of this blasphemy. And perhaps Agamemnon’s death could be seen as a result of this crime, too.
- CLYTEMNESTRA’S ADULTERY, HUSBAND-MURDER AND SLAVE-MURDER.
Clytemnestra’s crimes: 1) She took Aegisthus as a lover into the palace while her husband was at war, and plotted against her husband; 2) She deceived and killed her husband Agamemnon upon his return from Troy; 3) She killed the Trojan princess and prophetess Cassandra for being Agamemnon’s spear-won slave girl. Clytemnestra claims that her actions are proper punishment and that she has acted with justice. She vainly hopes that her actions will bring an end to the curse on the House of Atreus (1567 ff.):
And now finally you can see that the prophecy was true. I am willing to make a pact with the spirit of the Pleisthenids. I shall accept that what’s done is done, even though it is hard to bear, and in return it must leave our House, to take its evil to some other family and destroy them with kin-killing misery. I will live modestly and be content, if I can rid these halls of this frenzy of death.
[Levine’s comment: Sorry, Clytemnestra, it doesn’t work that way…]
- ORESTES’ MATRICIDE.
The curse of the House continues in the play Libation Bearers, in which Orestes returns to Argos, and avenges his father’s murder by killing the killers Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. As a consequence, The Furies pursue Orestes because he had shed kindred blood. Although Apollo at Delphi subsequently purifies him of the murder, he must be put on trial in Athens, where Athena votes to acquit him, and persuades the Furies to stop their hounding and to accept a respected position as guardian deities at Athens, beside the Areopagus hill, where subsequent trials for murder will take place.
*** THIS IS ALL WELL AND GOOD, BUT WHAT ABOUT H E L E N? ***
The play treats Helen as a criminal, too… but what is her crime?
CAUSE OF THE TROJAN WAR. In the Chorus’ entry song (Parodos), when the Chorus speaks about the origin of the Trojan War, they slut-shame Helen when they say that the war was “all for a woman bedded by many, a generation brought to their knees, wrestled down, ground into dust, Greek and Trojan spears shatter in the marriage rites of blood.” (Ag. 62-66 Meineck).
CAUSE OF DESTRUCTION AND DEPRESSION. In the Chorus’ first Stasimon (385ff), they mention that Paris stole “another man’s wife,” without mentioning Helen by name, and goes on to sing, “For us, her people, she left behind the din of clashing shields and spears, as the war fleet armed. Taking with her a dowry of destruction, she strode swiftly through that city’s gates, daring what must not be dared…” (403ff Meineck). They go on to speak about how depressed Menelaus is without her in the house, and how sad he is when he sees statues of her in his house, and how he has “grief-stricken dreams,” in which he reaches out for her, but her image cannot be touched (414-435).
“HELLL TO MEN, HELL TO THE CITY.” The Chorus’ song after the Messenger episode (Ag. 681 ff.)is a full-scale excoriation of Helen, with word play on her name (“Hell to men, Hell to the city”). They say she is like a lion cub who is tame to its human owners when young, but which then turns on its people and causes bloodshed.
DEMENTED WASTER OF LIVES. In mourning the death of Agamemnon, and in a fit of misogyny, the Chorus again accuses Helen of being a destructive force, on par with Clytemnestra (Ag. 1453-1461), after which Clytemnestra defends Helen against the charge that she alone caused the whole war and the many deaths that resulted (Ag. 1464-67).
Chorus: Oh demented Helen, you wasted all those lives, under the walls of Troy (Ag. 1455-57)
Clytemnestra: And don’t turn your anger on Helen, as the destroyer of men, she was just one woman, as if she alone killed so many Greek men! She did not cause these incurable wounds (Ag. 1464-67).
In Odyssey 4, Helen is Menelaus’ respectable queen. Why is she the object of such scorn in the play Agamemnon?
I think that Aeschylus vilifies Helen so much in the Oresteia because part of its theme is the evil work of the woman, Clytemnestra, who causes the death of her Trojan War hero husband, So the playwright makes Clytemnestra’s sister Helen a criminal too, deserving of contempt, in order to stress the evil of another woman who causes men’s destruction in the war. These words of the Chorus seem to support this idea: “He endured so much for the sake of a woman, now a woman’s hand has struck him dead” (Ag. 1453-55).
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