The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies Read Online Free PDF Page A

the ‘dawn of the darkness’, the warlord in eclipse. The very stones of the house would cry it out, but terror chokes the watchman into silence. His closing words - ‘I speak to those who know; to those who don’t/my mind’s a blank’ - are the watchword for the play. Agamemnon speaks to those who sense the secrets of the house. That façade with its history of cannibalism, adultery and murder soon will rise and tell its story.
    A chorus of elders enters as the watchman leaves. They have not heard of the victory, they are still the voice of the home front anguished by the war, and the war itself appears a dubious battle. It is a mission of Zeus, but its leaders resemble vultures whose stolen offspring, Helen, may not be worth recovering. ‘Many-manned’, she has brought the Greeks and Trojans to a costly stalemate. The old men are helpless as children to resist their fears or the conspiracy that surrounds them. Ironically they turn for reassurance to Clytaemnestra - who has entered silently, ominously to burn her grateful sacrifices; but while they told of the Fury sent to punish Troy, they seem to have summoned the queen whose sacrificial fires spread through Argos now. Dubious as the war itself, she kindles hope on one hand, terror on the other. The old men beg to know what her fires mean. She ignores them. So they turn to the security of a sacrifice conducted in the past.
    They break into a rolling epic song - they are charged with the fighting strength of song, Peitho or Persuasion - and the Iliad begins again, in effect, with the omen sent to Aulis. When the Argives marshalled under Agamemnon and Menelaus, two eagles swooped down on a pregnant hare and devoured it with its unborn young. Calchas, the prophet of Apollo, gave the omen an Olympian interpretation : the Atreidae are avenging eagle-kings of Zeus who will triumph over Troy. But they are child-murderers too, and Artemis the goddess of childbirth, outraged at the sacrifice of innocents at Troy, may demand an innocent of Argos in advance. That is the double force of Calchas’ reading of the sign: the kings must ‘slaughter a suffering, trembling female creature together with its young before coming to the birth’ and ‘sacrifice a suffering, trembling female creature, their own offspring, in front of [or on behalf of] the armies’. The sacrifice of Troy and Iphigeneia, the justice of Zeus and the appeasement of Artemis clash. And Agamemnon is pinned between them, the man whose justice leads to further crime. Calchas prays that Artemis may work with Zeus, but she will fulfil the Father’s murderous will by making Agamemnon fulfil his murderous nature. The curse is where the war begins and ends, overshadowed by the internecine warfare that surrounds it. The precondition of victory, Iphigeneia, ‘another victim’ like the children of Thyestes, is the pretext for her mother’s vengeance ten years later - ‘Memory womb of Fury child-avenging Fury.’ Clytaemnestra will kill Agamemnon to avenge their daughter, then avenge herself upon her son. Calchas’ vision is the mainspring of the Oresteia. He not only sets the Aeschylean forces against each other, male against female, gods of the Sky against the powers of the Earth; here at the outset he consigns his people to the Furies.
    ‘Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end.’ The ominous refrain beats drum-like through the opening stanzas. What glory can be wrung from so much grief? Nothing less than a cosmic union, a new and better world. But the old men strain to praise it here and now, celebrating the only god who can create it - Zeus. They appeal to his vast, incomprehensible power, and they are uplifted by recalling his victory in the Theogony which, through savage strife and atrocities like those at Troy and Argos, brought glory out of grief. Yet it also brought the iron age of man, and the old men’s hope is undermined by what they offer as its basis: Zeus’s law’ that we must