Looking at Agamemnon

David Stuttard, David Stuttard

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350149557
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literatura
• Thema: Arte dramático antiguo y clásico

Agamemnon is the first of the three plays within the Oresteia trilogy and is considered to be one of Aeschylus' greatest works. This collection of 12 essays, written by prominent international academics, brings together a wide range of topics surrounding Agamemnon from its relationship with ancient myth and ritual to its modern reception. There is a diverse array of discussion on the salient themes of murder, choice and divine agency. Other essays also offer new approaches to understanding the notions of wealth and the natural world which imbue the play, as well as a study of the philosophical and moral questions of choice and revenge. Arguments are contextualized in terms of performance, history and society, discussing what the play meant to ancient audiences and how it is now received in the modern theatre. Intended for readers ranging from school students and undergraduates to teachers and those interested in drama (including practitioners), this volume includes a performer-friendly and accessible English translation by David Stuttard.

1

Eating Children Is Bad for You: The Offspring of the Past in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

Edith Hall

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our will; nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life, both in and out of our consciousness.

George Eliot

The infancy of humankind

In one of the most extraordinary ghost scenes in world literature, the clairvoyant Cassandra of Agamemnon sees the spectres of the little children served up at the Thyestean feast, diminutive ghosts who died in and haunt the house forming the scenic background to the tragedy. ‘Do you see those young creatures’, she demands of the Chorus, ‘beside the house, like figures in dreams? They are the children, slaughtered by their own kindred; their hands are full of the meat of their own flesh; they are clear to me, holding their vitals and entrails, which their father tasted’ (1217–22). As if to emphasize her isolation, Aeschylus has designed the scene so that only Cassandra can see these very special spirits of the untimely dead – pitiful, butchered, roasted and disembowelled.¹ In Cassandra’s vision, the themes of kin-murder, flesh-eating and cannibalism, which are recurrent throughout the entirety of Agamemnon, are realized visually, albeit only in the audience’s imagination, to shocking effect. This chapter aims to illuminate these themes by exploring (1) their relationship to the idea of the family curse afflicting the Argive royal family and the parallel curse afflicting the original divine family in Hesiod’s Theogony, at the precise moment when the Erinyes were born, and (2) their interactions with images drawn from the animal world and human as well as other mammalian reproduction.

Intermingling with Cassandra’s vision of the ghostly, cannibalized sons of Thyestes, numerous metaphorical and symbolic children haunt the imagery and figures of speech characterizing the tragedy as a whole.² The Chorus complain about growing old; they are as weak and ineffectual as children (75; 81). At Troy, says Clytemnestra, children are being thrown onto the corpses of the very men who begot them (327–28). Temptation, state the Chorus, is a domineering child who incites a man to arrogant behaviour (385–86); such an arrogant man is, in his delusion, like a child who chases a bird (394).³ Clytemnestra complains about being addressed as if she were a child of no understanding (277); childishness is equated with a lack of sense of comprehension (479). When the Chorus can finally understand unambiguously something that Cassandra says (i.e. that she is about to die), they reply that ‘even a newborn infant’ could understand her words (1163). Aegisthus also contributes to the repertoire of infancy images: he describes how he was sent into exile by Atreus when he was still only in swaddling-bands (1606).

It is not easy to understand the pervasive equation of imperfect powers of comprehension with those of children in isolation from the other plays in the Oresteia. In the course of the tragedies, Aeschylus uses the analogy of the life of a human being to symbolize the progress of humankind from barbarism to civilization. In terms of the advance of civilization, the people in Agamemnon remain in their infancy. In Libation Bearers Orestes is at the point of leaving adolescence; by the stage of human development portrayed in Eumenides the Argive prince, who now represents a new level of social evolution, has himself become an adult and can be tried as a morally competent and autonomous agent in a civic criminal court. The court is of course in Athens, which in Aeschylus’ vision has no king, and is beginning to construct the community institutions that would eventually coalesce, when Aeschylus was a teenager, and take the form of the state apparatus of the Cleisthenic democracy. The course of a human life – from birth through babyhood, infancy, childhood and adolescence to adulthood – is thus used as a paradigm of the progress of Greek society from the moral toy box of simple, reciprocal blood-feuds under monarchy and tyranny to the complexities of ‘grown-up’, publicly administered justice in democratic, fifth-century Athens. But it also interacts in several ways with the ancient Greeks’ account of the origins of conflict amongst the earliest gods, their violent, vindictive family, and their struggle for control of the cosmic political order as played out in Hesiod’s Theogony.⁴

The Erinyes and the family curse

For the ancient Greeks of Aeschylus’ time, the legacy of past deeds was conceptualized more concretely, more extremely and more physically than it is in our modern notions of internal guilt which torments the malefactor. Murderers (and there was no crime more serious than murder within the family, outlawed by an ancient and grave taboo) were tormented not so much by their own consciences as by the Erinyes, or vengeance-spirits, of the murdered victim. The Erinyes could only be appeased by the blood of the murderer, or vicariously by the blood of his or her children. When this blood was spilt on the ground, they drank it voraciously from their subterranean home beneath it.⁵ In drinking human blood, and their association with hunting, blood-hounds and tearing flesh, which will receive such an emphasis when they physically appear in Eumenides, they have their own cannibalistic qualities.

The centrality of the Erinyes to the entire Oresteia is, however, set up by several important passages in Agamemnon. In a vivid passage, the Chorus imagine eagles wheeling, mourning and seeking vengeance for the loss of their young, as an Erinys that brings punishment (55–59); although the context implies a comparison with the vengeful Atridae, the simile also reminds the audience of Clytemnestra, awaiting revenge for the loss of her daughter Iphigenia.⁶ Later, they reflect that ‘the gods are not unaware of murderers. Eventually, the black Erinyes bring to oblivion the man who has succeeded by unjust means, and reverse his fortunes by wearing him down’ (461–66). Helen herself is seen as a bride whose effect on Troy (and consequently on the Argives) was that of an Erinys who brings tears (748–49). And Cassandra describes another group of terrifying spirits haunting the palace, reminiscent of the cannibalized children, but associated rather with the crime of adultery which had resulted in the Thyestean feast, because Thyestes seduced his brother’s wife, Aerope (1186–93): ‘For a cacophonous chorus, singing in unison, never leaves this roof, for it speaks only of ill. And so, glutted with human blood, and thus emboldened, a revel-procession of kindred Erinyes haunts the house, and can’t be driven away.’

The Erinyes bring with them the story of their own strange genesis, as members of the primordial family in Greek myth, as disseminated in Hesiod’s Theogony, one of the Greeks’ oldest narratives and part of their core identity and cultural curriculum. The Erinyes are some of the youngest in the long line of siblings produced in the first sexual mating, between Gaia and the son she has produced alone, Ouranos. They are thus primeval, but also low-status among this primordial generation; they are framed, forever, as the junior, little sisters of mighty beings. But several of the core themes and images in Hesiod’s account of the original, conflicted, family in the universe reverberate within Aeschylus’ account of the later, conflicted royal family at Argos in the Peloponnese.

In the Theogony, the Erinyes are said to have originated materially in the blood falling on Gaia, and socially within a phenomenally dysfunctional family already encompassing patriarchal privilege, incest, inter-generational violence, conflict between sexual partners and co-parents, mother-child collusion, castration and child abuse. Its complexity in terms of both ethics and gender ideology – a complexity that helps us understand why it was the Greeks who invented their household-focused genre of tragedy – can be seen from a brief comparison with its Hittite/Hurrian precursor. Kumarbi did bite off and swallow his father Anu’s genitals, before spitting out the blood. Earth was inseminated. She gave birth to male god Tasmisu (connected with the important male Weather-God) and a female, a rather straightforward personification of the river Tigris. There is no sense of a conflicted nuclear family and the engendering of the cosmic principle of retribution for kinship-group crimes.⁷ Similarly, when Enkidu returns from below after his katabasis in the Sumerian text Bilgames and the Netherworld, he reports the eternal punishment of groups whom the Greeks certainly saw later as the responsibility of the Erinyes – those who disrespected or were cursed by a parent, and oath-breakers.⁸ But there is no sense that the punishment in the Mesopotamian underworld was carried on by any supernatural females born into a fundamentally dysfunctional divine family.

To summarize Hesiod’s account of the background to the arrival of retributive justice – the fundamental theme of Agamemnon – in the universe (132–92): Gaia lay with Ouranos and gave birth to several children, including ‘Cronos of the crook...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Agamemnon in Context David Stuttard
• 1 Eating Children Is Bad for You: The Offspring of the Past in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Edith Hall
• 2 Agamemnon at Aulis: Hard Choice or No Choice? Alan H. Sommerstein
• 3 The Homecoming of Agamemnon Alex F. Garvie
• 4 Clytemnestra and Cassandra Hanna M. Roisman
• 5 Ritual in Agamemnon Richard Seaford
• 6 Let the Good Prevail Sophie Mills
• 7 Agency in Agamemnon Robert Garland
• 8 Wealth and Injustice in Agamemnon Michael Carroll
• 9 ‘There is the sea – who can drain it dry?’ Natural and Unnatural Cycles in Agamemnon Rush Rehm
• 10 Similes and Other Likenesses in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Anna Uhlig
• 11 Agamemnon, Warfare and Its Aftermath Isabelle Torrance
• 12 Revenge for Murder Seen through Modern Eyes: Recent Reception of Aeschylus’ Oresteia Betine van Zyl Smit
• Aeschylus’ Agamemnon translated by David Stuttard
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright