beccaelizabeth | Agamemnon, by Aeschylus (Reply)

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...