‘Agamemnon’: Fate, Justice, Revenge
A review of ‘Agamemnon’, by Aeschylus; circa 458 BC.
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 a tricky thing to pin down). The first of these is Agamemnon, named for the Achaean leader in the Trojan War. As you will recall, that 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 the deities play in mortal events. 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 plain to see. But this is not your common ice queen. Aeschylus casts Clytemnestra as complex. She is vengeful, regal, maternal, determined. She is neither passive, not resentful. Rather she is calculating and committed. The standing of her husband, at its peak after triumph at Troy, means nought to her. She 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 divine will. We are invited to ask if she is murderer or avenger. And what is the difference?
The men dismiss her as a woman; but she outwits them.
The Chorus, made up of Argive elders, bridge past and present in the play, interpreting events through the lens of myth and prophecy. They struggle to grasp Clytemnestra’s motives and the will of the gods, and thus stand for human confusion in a contingent world. Their words are charged at every turn with dread and resignation: ‘Zeus has led us on to know,’ one member says, ‘that the future comes through suffering.’
It is a resonant line. And not the only one. Indeed, 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. She forewarns of Clytemnestra’s lust for vengeance, but of course, no one listens. For she is cursed to know the future yet never be believed. Having foreseen her own murder and that of Agamemnon, she speaks with a simplicity and intensity that is haunting: ‘The house breathes with murder.’
Before you start fretting, these are not spoilers. In Greek tragedy, key events like the killing of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra are known: they come from familiar myths. The beauty of Greek drama is in the telling, the how. And Agamemnon unfolds quickly but not hastily: the tension builds, and anticipation mutates into inevitability. Each line drives us forward towards bloody calamity. There is an undercurrent of dread. Clytemnestra shows the calculated, sinister hospitality of Lady Macbeth to King Duncan, while Agamemnon — complacent, drunk on his own achievements—shows the hubris of Milton’s Satan, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Captain Ahab, Gatsby. He will walk on a crimson path that to any ordinary man should herald death. Fate looms over Agamemnon like a storm cloud so vast that none can escape its violent rain.
The beauty of Greek drama is in the telling, the how.
Does Agamemnon deserve his fate …? After all, he sacrificed his daughter to pursue that most male past-time: war — war, that is, and the standing, the honour it might bring. But does he dishonour himself by killing Iphigenia? And does Clytemnestra’s revenge then restore balance—or does it only worsen the family’s curse? The gods in Agamemnon are at once distant and all-controlling, leaving mortals to suffer the fruits of actions they can justify but barely understand. Justice in Aeschlyus’s world is brutal, recurring; yet also ambiguous.
Such a play, seeming on its face to be so deeply rooted in the peculiar beliefs of a people at one time and in one place, lasts because those beliefs sprang from existential human needs. It is in our nature to ask ourselves to what degree we are free 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 response to questions like, Why are we here? Am I free? Why be just? We may, in the modern age, think we have moved past such concerns; but it may just as well be said that we have never been further away from addressing them. Justifiably it might even be claimed that we have just become better at distracting ourselves from those great existential questions. And in those moments, fleeting as they are, between those lovely distractions, we are faced with the awesome contingency of our being, and, lacking any kind of robust shared framework of belief, see how very unhappy we are.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. What we can say of Agamenon is that it is not a mere story of revenge. It deals with lasting, perhaps unsolvable existential questions about fate and freedom, right and wrong, fairness and unfairness, authority and liberty. It marries very human concerns about pride and shame with bigger, grander questions about our ultimate place in the world. It is this profound and simultaneous psychological and philosophical depth that have ensured the relevance of Agamemnon for over 2,000 years. It echoes in Shakespeare and Eliot and Sartre. Such a story draws on myth, but it also rises to the level of myth in its own right. And dealing as it does with what is veridical archetypally and symbolically, we can perhaps say, in a manner of speaking that would not have troubled the Greeks, it is true.
