Oresteia

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Agamemnon

The Libation Bearers

The Eumenides

Character Analysis

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AgamemnonChapter Summaries & Analyses

Agamemnon, Lines 1-492 Summary

In Argos, a watchman anxiously awaits the return of King Agamemnon and his army. Ten years to the day from when they set out to wage war on Troy for the kidnapping of Helen, the wife of Agamemnon’s brother, Menelaus, the Greek fleet appears. The watchman rushes off.

As Queen Clytaemnestra prepares ritual fires, the chorus of old Argive men, who have not yet heard about the Greek victory, reflect on the past decade. They are anxious because Clytaemnestra wants to avenge the death of her daughter, Iphigenia, who Agamemnon reluctantly sacrificed to the goddess Diana so his ships could sail to Troy. The chorus recalls the horrible scene of the sacrifice. They pray to Apollo and Zeus for the safety of their king.

The leader of the chorus questions Clytaemnestra, who explains that the relay of beacons across the mountaintops of Greece have conveyed the news of her husband’s triumph. The chorus praises Zeus for the news. They sing of the consequences of defying the gods and breaking the rules of hospitality, as Paris of Troy did when he ran away with Helen. At the same time, they lament the damage and sorrow that war, “the great broker of corpses,” has caused (435). They know the Greek populace resents the heavy casualties they suffered for one noblewoman.

Agamemnon, Lines 493-975 Summary

A herald arrives and announces Agamemnon’s arrival. Clytaemnestra wants to greet her husband. She boasts that she has been true to Agamemnon in his absence, declaring, “That is my boast, teeming with the truth. / I am proud, a woman of my nobility— / I’d hurl it from the roofs!” (609-611). After she leaves, the leader of the chorus muses, “She speaks well, but it takes no seer to know/ she only says what’s right.”

The leader asks the herald what became of King Menelaus. After leaving Troy’s shores, a sudden storm whipped the Aegean Sea into “into a great bloom / of corpses… Greeks, the pick of a generation / scattered through the wrecks and broken spars” (58-660). He does not know if Menelaus survived, but he is hopeful. In an ode, the chorus laments the events that precipitated the Trojan War.

Agamemnon enters with his war plunder, which includes Cassandra, the daughter of the Trojan King Priam and Queen Hecuba, who he took as a concubine. The king boasts of leaving Troy in ruins, and he promises a lavish sacrifice to the gods in thanks. Clytaemnestra enters, along with servants carrying dark red tapestries. Agamemnon praises the chorus for their loyalty, promising to fix what has gone wrong in Argos during his absence. Upon seeing Clytaemnestra , he prays, “Victory, you have sped my way before, / now speed me to the last” (840-841).

Clytaemnestra describes the pain she felt in her husband’s absence, both from missing him and from hearing the constant rumors of the Greeks’ fate. She informs him that she sent their son Orestes to live with Strophios in Phocis to keep him safe if the Argive citizens rebelled. She orders her attendants to lay the tapestries on the ground before Agamemnon steps off of his chariot so he will “never set the foot / that stamped out Troy on earth again” (898-899). Agamemnon recoils from the ostentatious display; such a welcome is not fit for mortals. However, by chiding him and appealing to his pride, Clytaemnestra convinces him. Agamemnon steps down, revealing Cassandra, dressed in the regalia of a priestess of Apollo. Clytaemnestra prays to Zeus to “speed our rites to their fulfilment once and for all” as Agamemnon enters the house (976). Clytaemnestra follows, leaving the chorus trembling in fear.

Agamemnon, Lines 976-1354 Summary

The members of the chorus cannot explain their fear. Clytaemnestra returns to confront Cassandra. She asks her to come inside to partake in the celebrations, but the girl is impassive. Angry, Clytaemnestra returns to the house.

Cassandra, who can see the future, falls into prophetic fit. She cries out at being taken to a “house that hates god / an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen torturing kinsmen, severed heads, / slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood” (1088-1091). Cassandra frantically predicts Agamemnon’s murder at Clytaemnestra’s hands; however, her words are veiled in metaphor, and the chorus does not understand. She explains that she once rejected Apollo’s sexual advance; the god then gave her the gift of prophesy—but cursed her with the caveat that nobody would ever believe her. She sees the Furies gathered on the palace’s roof. She warns the old men that they will see Agamemnon dead.

Cassandra sees that it is her fate to die with Agamemnon. She tears off her prophetess’s regalia and treads on it to spite Apollo. She reflects, “We will die, / but not without some honour from the gods. / There will come another to avenge us, / born to kill his mother, born / his father’s champion” (1300-1304).

The old men commend her on her bravery. She attempts to enter the palace, but recoils from the odor of blood. She cries out to the chorus to testify to how she dies. She hopes when Agamemnon’s death is revenged, they will avenge her too, even though she is just a slave. She enters the house.

Agamemnon, Lines 1355-1708 Summary

The chorus hears cries from within the palace. They hear Agamemnon scream as he is stabbed. The chorus scatters, not knowing what to do. One member of the chorus opens the palace doors, revealing Agamemnon and Cassandra’s corpses, and, standing over them, Clytaemnestra, brandishing a sword.

Clytaemnestra recounts the grisly scene of his murder and does not deny she killed him. The chorus decries her actions, but she believes justice is on her side. She killed Agamemnon to avenge their daughter, Iphigenia, who Agamemnon sacrificed before leaving Greece. Clytaemnestra was aided and abetted by Aegisthus. Clytaemnestra claims she is moved by the bloody spirit of the House of Atreus. The chorus falls into despair. They wonder who will conduct Agamemnon’s funeral rites and lament that Agamemnon’s “race is welded to its ruin” (1594).

Aegisthus emerges from the house and gloats over Agamemnon’s body. Aegisthus’s father, Thyestes, was tricked by Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, into eating his children’s flesh. Upon discovering what Atreus did, Thyestes cursed Atreus’s bloodline. Aegisthus believes he has carried out the revenge his father sought.

The men of the chorus deride Aegisthus’s cowardice. Aegisthus threatens to have them chained, tortured, and starved. The leader of the chorus calls him a coward for having a woman do his dirty work. He hopes Orestes returns to avenge his father.

Clytaemnestra breaks up the conflict between Aegisthus and the old men. Aegisthus threatens to subdue any dissenters. He and Clytaemnestra enter the palace, shutting the doors behind them. The chorus disbands, and the old Argives wandering off one by one.

Agamemnon Analysis

Greek tragedies were a genre of drama developed in Athens during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. Tragedies formed from a loose, celebratory, and religious function; Aeschylus helped codify and standardize the format. The chorus is a unique aspect of Greek tragedy. Though its function is often debated, many scholars argue that it served as an intermediary between the action of the play and the audience. The chorus of the old men of Argos in Agamemnon, for example, provide much of the exposition of the play—background events, such as the sacrifice of Iphigenia, that are important to the present action of the play. Choruses are thought to have danced and sung during long transitionary sections called choral odes.

Tragedies, according to Aristotle, depict the downfall of great men in order to produce an emotional release in the audience called catharsis. Agamemnon is not the main character of the play; he appears for only one scene before he is murdered. However, his piteous death is the focus of the action, making him the central figure and tragic hero. Tragic heroes are often marked with one or more fatal flaws called hamartia that lead to their downfall or demise. Agamemnon’s fatal flaws are putting his role as king over his role as a husband and father and his pride. Sacrificing his daughter, Iphigeneia, provokes Clytaemnestra to seek revenge, and she exploits his pride by having him tread on the royal tapestries, an affront to the gods. Such an act would likely have been viewed as a catalyst for his doom.

The crux of Agamemnon’s status as a tragic hero lies in the fact that he has been gone for a decade waging an unpopular, almost pointless war for the sake of his brother, Menelaus, who, as the herald reveals, has been lost at sea after a storm. Agamemnon is murdered upon his return, and he never truly sets foot on Greek soil again, thanks to walking on the tapestries. The mightiest king of the Greeks is killed in a net by a woman, a shameful way for a warrior to die. With Menelaus lost, Agamemnon dead, and Orestes in exile, the House of Atreus is in disarray, taken over by the usurper, Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin. The cycle of vengeance perpetuated by Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra is fueled by the bloodline’s violent history, and it will not be purged until Orestes avenges the death of his father in The Libation Bearers, exorcising the spirt of vengeance which Clytaemnestra claims has possessed her.

Clytaemnestra is the most active female character in The Oresteia (except, perhaps, for Athena in The Eumenides). The queen’s plotting emasculates Agamemnon, Aegisthus, and the chorus of Argive men, and it is her active role that spurs the action of The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. Aegisthus is Agamemnon’s foil to a degree: While the king went to war, Aegisthus stayed home and plotted with Clytaemnestra. This would have been seen as feminine and cowardly. While Clytaemnestra has the bravery to execute her revenge, Aegisthus merely claims credit for Agamemnon’s murder, causing the chorus to rebuke him, saying “You rule Argos? You who schemed his death / but cringed to cut him down with your own hand?” (1666-1667). Clytaemnestra takes the active, and therefore masculine role, leaving Aegisthus to quarrel with the old men, whose advanced age has essentially emasculated them as well; at the end of the play, they are impotent, unable to do anything but swear to resist Aegisthus and pray for Orestes to return to Argos.

Though they are not present within the action of the play, the Furies are first invoked in Agamemnon in the first choral ode and are linked to the Greek parents who lost their children in the Trojan War. Though the queen is off stage, her triumphant cry at the sight of the beacons that announce Agamemnon’s arrival interrupts the choral ode. Her shriek dramatizes the chorus’s hope that a god will hear “the piercing wail / these guests of heaven raise / … late / but true to revenge, a stabbing fury!” (61-65). The chorus invokes the Furies to right the wrongs in Argos that have arisen in Agamemnon’s absence. The prayer that is initially answered is Clytaemnestra’s own hope for vengeance against her husband for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia. After Clytaemnestra lures Agamemnon into the palace, Cassandra sees the furies gathering, indicating the danger Agamemnon is blind to.