This is a play by Aeschylus. It is in GB Volume 5 - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes.
Characters
- Agamemnon, King of Argos
- Clytaemnestra, wife of Agamemnon
- Cassandra, daughter of Priam and slave of Agamemnon
- Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, cousin of Agamemnon
- Watchman
- Chorus of Argive Elders
- A Herald
- Attendants
Summary
Agamemnon is the first play of the Oresteia trilogy, depicting the homecoming of the Argive King after the ten-year Trojan War. The play begins with a watchman on the palace roof at Argos, waiting for a beacon fire that will signal the fall of Troy. When the fire appears, he rejoices, but his joy is tempered by a sense of “dim disquietude” regarding the internal affairs of the house. The Chorus of Elders enters, reflecting on the heavy cost of the war—both the lives lost at Troy and the “sacrifice unburnt” of Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia, whom he killed to appease Artemis and launch the Greek fleet.
Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, appears and announces the victory. While she prepares a grand welcome, she is secretly driven by a decade-long resentment over the murder of her daughter and her husband’s displacement of her authority. She has taken Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin, as her lover and co-conspirator. The tension builds as Agamemnon arrives in a chariot, accompanied by his war-prize, the Trojan prophetess Cassandra. In a display of calculated manipulation, Clytemnestra goads Agamemnon into walking on sacred purple tapestries, an act of “sacramental splendor” that marks his hubris and signals his impending doom.
While Agamemnon enters the palace, Cassandra remains outside with the Chorus. In a series of terrifying, ecstatic visions, she prophesies the murder of the King and her own imminent death. She sees the “House of Hate” and the ancestral ghosts of the children of Thyestes, whose deaths initiated the family curse. The Chorus, though sympathetic, is unable to comprehend her warnings until she explicitly describes the murder. Cassandra eventually accepts her fate and enters the palace, a willing victim of the cycle of violence.
The climax occurs when the cries of Agamemnon are heard from within the house. Clytemnestra appears at the palace doors, standing over the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. She is blood-stained and triumphant, claiming that the murder was a “just reward” for Iphigenia’s death and a necessary execution of the ancestral curse. She dismisses the Chorus’s outrage, asserting that she has brought peace to the house.
The play ends with the arrival of Aegisthus, who boasts of his part in the revenge for his own father’s suffering. The Chorus warns him that Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, will one day return to avenge his father. Clytemnestra, however, seeks to halt the “debauch of blood,” telling Aegisthus that they must now “rule and wrought with excellence” to establish their new order.