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

abroad, however, it predicts her own approaching victory at home. As her beacons leave behind the mountains ruled by the gods, they kindle up a symbolic geography of peril to Agamemnon, building a conflagration of his guilt and Clytaemnestra’s superhuman power to avenge it. She is binding him, as Knox suggests, with the burning chains of crime and punishment that bound his fathers. And as she seizes command from the warlord, she is seizing fire from heaven - not only do her beacons rival the relay race of torches run for Hephaistos and Athena; they mark the end of a heroic, Olympian age and the dawn of an age primordial, matriarchal, ever-present.
    Zeus’s eagles began the war; Clytaemnestra’s flaming omen ends it and begins its repercussions, since she is a prophet too. She reads her sign with such immediacy that Troy and Argos seem to merge as cities struck by war. She is here and there, ranging through the streets like the winning general, but more sensitive than Agamemnon, she can see the victims are so pitiful, the victors so pitiless that their victory may recoil,
    If only they are revering the city’s gods,
the shrines of the gods who love the conquered land,
no plunderer will be plundered in return . . .
And even if the men come back with no offence
to the gods, the avenging dead may never rest -
Oh let no new disaster strike!
    Prophetic warnings that incriminate the king. He will desecrate the Trojan shrines and commandeer a priestess, adding the gods to Clytaemnestra’s stronger motive, ‘the avenging dead’ themselves. But now, conscious that she may have started suspicions, she breaks off with some conventional womanly phrases (not without their muffled warnings) and goes inside to prepare for Agamemnon.
    And so the trap begins to close at the first approach of Agamemnon in his triumph. The old men begin a hymn of thanks for the victory and its lesson: the Trojans repeat their fathers’ crimes and so are cursed with Peitho in its compulsive aspect, the beautiful, blinding lightning of Helen. She is the bride whose dowry is death for Troy, and death for Greece as well. She plunges both sides into grief, a demon of retaliation who, with Ares the ‘gold-broker of corpses’, leads the people of Argos against the ‘defenders’ who led them into war. Now those who died in victory demand vengeance as surely as those who died in defeat. ‘Poor exchange, poor return’ pervades this chorus; its six stanzas form six turns in a vicious circle of revenge, until the guilt that incriminated Paris also incriminates Agamemnon - Zeus and the Furies await the murderer of Greece. And the victory hymn becomes a moan of fear, as the old men fall back on a muted prayer for peace; they try to reject Clytaemnestra’s message (women are gullible, they murmur, over-sanguine) but it is too late. The leader sees a herald fresh from Troy. A victorious spray of olive ‘shades’ his face, and he tells a double story: though the Greeks have won the day, the king has desecrated Troy. There is little reason to rejoice. Argos and the armies longed for each other, but as the leader hints, the citizens needed the men to save them from repression. In his joy the herald fails to understand, yet as he recollects the miseries that the army has escaped abroad, he contributes them, like echoes from another country under siege, to the growing miseries of Argos. The more he revels in the spoils of Troy, the more he provokes the envy of the queen, absent but listening, or so her triumphant entrance would suggest.
    She taunts the old men with their doubts. She meant what she said, and she gives the herald a message for the king that means the opposite of all it seems to say. She rushes to welcome him in ‘the best possible way’, to ‘open wide the gates’ - her husband has been saved by the Saving God, whom she will identify with Death. She has heard ‘no joy or blame from another man’ as surely as ‘dye will not stain bronze’ - a