Agamemnon, by Aeschylus

[beccaelizabeth]

Woah.
That's a lot of killing.
Powerful story there.

So, if I can get this straight... Helen buggered off to Troy so Agamemnon, among others, decided to go get her back. That was ten years before the play starts. This is Agamemnon's home town, on the night of the victory - signal torches tell them all that Troy has fallen. And then there is celebration, and people come home, and there's gold and slaves and all that rich stuff.

But celebration, in Greek terms, means sacrifices. And sacrifices means victims. So already there's a lot of dark mixed in there.

Agamemnon made a sacrifice to get a storm to stop, so they could set out to do war. He killed his daughter. And it turns out that for ten years his wife has figured that for murder, and has every intention of answering it in kind.

So there's a bit where Cassandra, the prophet nobody ever believes, tells everyone in earshot that the queen is going to kill the king, and they're all Oh Noes! What can this mean? And she's all... well, I would be *facepalm*, but she sees her own death and goes off towards it. And really, I'm never going to understand that. See own death = run away. Except, again, this is Greek, so they're big on the idea of Fate and Destiny and how running away isn't really going to work because you just find you've been running towards. So she tries and tries to tell them, but when they're still all puzzled about it, she goes off to get killed.

And then Agamemnon gets killed. His wife does it, with a sword, calling it Justice for his daughter's death. And then a bloke comes out and explains how it's also Justice for what Agamemnon's father did, which to my mind is a bit of a stretch, but it was a very bad thing. The bastard chopped up children and served them as a feast to the king he'd just deposed. That's messed up.

Have I mentioned recently that Greek myth is seriously messed up?

So there's killing for what happened ten years ago, and killing for what happened a generation ago, and some call it Justice and others murder, and there's prophecy that they've just got to wait for the next generation to turn up and it'll all happen again.

This stuff is *depressing*.

Really well written though. Sense of impending doom, blood soaked vengeance, and different sides presenting their case real well. Actually Agamemnon comes out of it looking worst, but that's partly because it's real difficult from here to *believe* that it was a case of kill daughter = win war. From here we get the feeling he could have waited for the winds to do their usual changey thing and not killed her. But if gods and sacrifice are real - and everyone invokes them, says they've got the same gods on their side, it's very messy - then it's a real dilemma. Still nasty though. I'm left thinking he needed killing. And she needed to do it quick and sneaky, because the usual avenues of justice weren't working - she tells the chorus when they try and exile her for murder that the same law applied when he did it but they didn't kick him out. I call that a winning argument.

There's bits and pieces, phrases, stuff that feels familiar. And there's bits of description from the war that are... really very much and weirdly familiar. I suppose dying in trenches while alternately getting frozen and heatstroked doesn't really change however many thousand years you put in between. Talk about depressing.



I'm going to read the other two plays in the book, but not today. I'll let this one digest.

... eew, wish I hadn't thought that, given the whole feast meat thing...

Comments

[louiex.livejournal.com]

Oooh!! Are you reading the Orestia? :D *loves that series*

Greek myth, especially when death is concerned, has a lot to do with the miasma of revenge. They believed it to be a tangible cloying thing that unless dealt with in a very 'eye-for-an-eye' fashion they would be cursed forever. Except to kill in revenge didn't exactly STOP the miasma from just getting transferred over anew :D Especially in the myths/plays~

Ah Cassandra! So misunderstood! She wouldn't offer herself up to Apollo to be one of his prophets he occasionally shags on the side so he made her always true predictions be incomprehensible to punish her (I love me some petty Gods! You can always count on the Greek gods acting like ridiculously spoiled children most of the time~). And the Agamemnon history has to deal with the myth of Tantalus (who's an interesting fellow on his own and worth looking up) who has a nice spot in tartarus carved out for him and is where the word 'tantalize' comes from :D

*loooooooooooooves Greek myths*

[beccaelizabeth]

yep, for Myth & Medievalism class.
I don't know if I love it, but I am liking it a lot more than many other units texts.

interesting, about the tangible miasma.

Also I looked up Tantalus a bit and that's interesting too.

[louiex.livejournal.com]

Everything intertwines but truly the family trees involved in Greek myths are really very interesting~ Tantalus is actually the one to thank for all of Agamemnon's woes in a way :D Had he not done that then his house wouldn't be cursed etc etc etc

Keep reading! I think you'll enjoy the next two plays~

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait until you get to The Eumenides. That part is gloriously fucked up, indeed: poor Orestes, being shoved in opposite directions by two sets of gods, and the rubber finally meets the road.

There is an utterly amazing filmed trilory of all three plays, starring Irene Pappas as Elektra, which I've watched several times over the years. Worth finding, if your prof isn't showing it. Reading plays is like reading sheet music: you don't get the intended effect unless you hear them spoken.

Julia, rarely speaks about my pash on Euripedes these days

[beccaelizabeth]

I shall have a look for the filmed version. Will try university library.

*nods* about reading plays

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

Technically, it's All Aphrodite' Fault, as she sets the Trojan war into motion. Though it's a bit like WWI, in where the assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand touched off the powder keg.

I think Agamemnon comes out looking the worst, too. The reason why the winds were bad was because Artemis was angry was because Agamemnon personally did something to upset her. And between the choice of "Go home and placate Artemis in a different way" or "Kill Iphigenia" I'm almost rooting for Clytemnestra here. The "almost" is the part where she kills Cassandra too.

Cassandra had a lose/lose situation too. If she ran away, she'd most likely to be captured and killed - and since she's on an island, there's not much to were she can go. I think she decided to just to walk into her death because at least this way she would have felt more dignity.

[beccaelizabeth]

*nods*

it's always deity's fault.
like people can't screw things up big enough on their own.

Yeah, killing Cassandra was a bit pointless, unjustifiable.

It's an island? I thought somebody ran there... oh, from the boat after the storm. *doh* Yes, I need to know more geography.
Dignity is all very well, but you know, *Death*, not cool.

:)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

You're talking about the Aeschylus version of the story? Aeschylus breaks my heart every time.

[beccaelizabeth]

yep.
and if I could spell it from memory I'd have put it in the title line... *edits*

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

The poor man couldn't help being hard to spell. He was Greek and they had the wrong alphabet. [g]