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

suffer, suffer into truth’. His law may look ahead to the suffering that leads to wisdom, to the restorative power of staid, reasoned judgement; but suffering in Agamemnon leads to knowledge that is sorrow. ‘Pain comes from the darkness,’ in the words of Randall Jarrell, ‘and we call it wisdom. It is pain.’ Our only consolation is that we may suffer into sôphrosunê too, the knowledge of our mortal limits - readiness in the Shakespearean sense that ‘men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/Ripeness is all.’ In Aeschylus the truth is never neutral; it is a gift of the gods, and they have made it vivid. And for that kindness, certain thanks, the old men seem to say, as if they could foresee with Keats that ‘faint sketch of a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity’ because its basis is suffering itself.
    But at this point in the Oresteia such salvation is a dream. The elders’ hymn is a leap of faith; it heightens the pain of men because it yokes them to the harshness of their gods. Before the hymn Agamemnon’s murder of Iphigeneia seemed ordained, but the hymn implicitly evokes his power of choice. He is torn for a moment - how to choose between child-murder and dereliction of duty? ‘Pain both ways and what is worse?’ It is the tragic choice of evils. And it may be predetermined supernaturally by the gods and genetically by Agamemnon’s nature - being his father’s son, he is bound to choose the worst. But more than a victim of his fate, he is its agent with a vengeance. The more piously he reacts against this outrage, the more he can perform it with impunity, with his own outspoken sense of justice. As Aeschylus says in a famous fragment, ‘god plants an aitia [responsibility] in a man when he wants to destroy a house entirely; nevertheless a man must not be reckless with his words.’ Agamemnon and his gods are metaitioi, co-responsible, yet there is something in this man that may rival his gods for murderous self-righteousness. It is his Atê, his frenzy and his ruin, his crime and punishment in one - ‘the madness of doom’ in Werner Jaeger’s phrase, and Agamemnon’s ruling spirit. He not only conspires with the storm that strikes the fleets, he excels it with the violence of the curse.
    Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia, now described in superb, swift strokes, is a brutal parody of the Olympian ritual of marriage. According to legend Iphigeneia was brought to Aulis on the pretence of marriage, and here she appears the bride in saffron robes; but the robes become her winding-sheet - her slaughter becomes the proteleia, sacrifices preliminary to the bloody wedding of the armies, a symbol of all our fruitful unions torn by war. She actually consecrates the lethal brides to come, Helen and Clytaemnestra, for her sacrifice is a genuine chthonic rite. It seems to soothe the winds, the spirits of the dead, but it will only bring the dead to life. The chorus cannot bear to describe the deathstroke - ‘What comes next? I cannot see it, cannot say.’ Iphigeneia remains a still life, the knife still poised at her throat, the fountainhead of Agamemnon still about to burst. The old men try to drown her cries with Zeus’s law, a moot reassurance now. They had turned away from Clytaemnestra, but the past is worse and they return to her. She is their only hope, yet she is the very fear they have unleashed - Dikê with her sword.
    Clytaemnestra approaches. For a moment she seems lost in grateful prayer to the Night, the mother of this day and of the Furies, too. For when she reveals the Greeks have taken Troy, the old men challenge her for proof, and her passion overwhelms them. How could the news come overnight? By fire, she replies, and launches out with ‘tiger-leaps’ of imagination, her surging, fiery temper racing the fires like one tremendous torch relayed west along the peaks from Troy to Argos. As the torch announces her husband’s victory