The Agamemnon of Aeschylus | Page 2

(pp. 7 f.)
At the opening of the _Agamemnon_ we find Clytemnestra alienated from her husband
and secretly befriended with his ancestral enemy, Aigisthos. The air is heavy and
throbbing with hate; hate which is evil but has its due cause. Agamemnon, obeying the
prophet Calchas, when the fleet lay storm-bound at Aulis, had given his own daughter,
Iphigenîa, as a human sacrifice. And if we ask how a sane man had consented to such an
act, we are told of his gradual temptation; the deadly excuse offered by ancient
superstition; and above all, the fact that he had already inwardly accepted the great whole
of which this horror was a part. At the first outset of his expedition against Troy there had
appeared an omen, the bloody sign of two eagles devouring a mother-hare with her
unborn young.... The question was thus put to the Kings and their prophet: Did they or
did they not accept the sign, and wish to be those Eagles? And they had answered Yes.
They would have their vengeance, their full and extreme victory, and were ready to pay
the price. The sign once accepted, the prophet recoils from the consequences which, in
prophetic vision, he sees following therefrom: but the decision has been taken, and the
long tale of cruelty rolls on, culminating in the triumphant sack of Troy, which itself
becomes not an assertion of Justice but a whirlwind of godless destruction. And through
all these doings of fierce beasts and angry men the unseen Pity has been alive and
watching, the Artemis who "abhors the Eagles' feast," the "Apollo or Pan or Zeus" who
hears the crying of the robbed vulture; nay, if even the Gods were deaf, the mere "wrong
of the dead" at Troy might waken, groping for some retribution upon the "Slayer of Many
Men" (pp. 15, 20).
If we ask why men are so blind, seeking their welfare thus through incessant evil,
Aeschylus will tell us that the cause lies in the infection of old sin, old cruelty. There is
no doubt somewhere a _[Greek: prôtarchos hAtê ]_, a "first blind deed of wrong," but in
practice every wrong is the result of another. And the Children of Atreus are steeped to
the lips in them. When the prophetess Cassandra, out of her first vague horror at the evil
House, begins to grope towards some definite image, first and most haunting comes the
sound of the weeping of two little children, murdered long ago, in a feud that was not
theirs. From that point, more than any other, the Daemon or Genius of the House--more
than its "Luck," a little less than its Guardian Angel--becomes an Alastor or embodied
Curse, a "Red Slayer" which cries ever for peace and cleansing, but can seek them only in
the same blind way, through vengeance, and, when that fails, then through more
vengeance (p. 69).
This awful conception of a race intent upon its own wrongs, and blindly groping towards
the very terror it is trying to avoid, is typified, as it were, in the Cassandra story. That
daughter of Priam was beloved by Apollo, who gave her the power of true prophecy. In
some way that we know not, she broke her promise to the God; and, since his gift could
not be recalled, he added to it the curse that, while she should always foresee and foretell
the truth, none should believe her. The Cassandra scene is a creation beyond praise or
criticism. The old scholiast speaks of the "pity and amazement" which it causes. The
Elders who talk with her wish to believe, they try to understand, they are really convinced
of Cassandra's powers. But the curse is too strong. The special thing which Cassandra

tries again and again to say always eludes them, and they can raise no finger to prevent
the disaster happening. And when it does happen they are, as they have described
themselves, weak and very old, "dreams wandering in the daylight."
The characters of this play seem, in a sense, to arise out of the theme and consequently to
have, amid all their dramatic solidity, a further significance which is almost symbolic.
Cassandra is, as it were, the incarnation of that knowledge which Herodotus describes as
the crown of sorrow, the knowledge which sees and warns and cannot help (Hdt. ix. 16).
Agamemnon himself, the King of Kings, triumphant and doomed, is a symbol of pride
and the fall of pride. We must not think of him as bad or specially cruel. The watchman
loved him (ll. 34 f.), and the lamentations of the Elders over his death have a note of
personal affection (pp. 66 ff.). But I suspect that Aeschylus, a believer in the mystic
meaning of names, took the name