The sense of difficulty, and indeed of awe, with which a scholar
approaches the task of translating the _Agamemnon_ depends directly on
its greatness as poetry. It is in part a matter of diction. The
language of Aeschylus is an extraordinary thing, the syntax stiff and
simple, the vocabulary obscure, unexpected, and steeped in splendour.
Its peculiarities cannot be disregarded, or the translation will be
false in character. Yet not Milton himself could produce in English the
same great music, and a translator who should strive ambitiously to
represent the complex effect of the original would clog his own powers
of expression and strain his instrument to breaking. But, apart from
the diction in this narrower sense, there is a quality of atmosphere
surrounding the _Agamemnon_ which seems almost to defy reproduction in
another setting, because it depends in large measure on the position of
the play in the historical development of Greek literature.
If we accept the view that all Art to some extent, and Greek tragedy in
a very special degree, moves in its course of development from Religion
to Entertainment, from a Service to a Performance, the _Agamemnon_
seems to stand at a critical point where the balance of the two
elements is near perfection. The drama has come fully to life, but the
religion has not yet faded to a formality. The _Agamemnon_ is not, like
Aeschylus’ _Suppliant Women_, a statue half-hewn out of the rock. It is
a real play, showing clash of character and situation, suspense and
movement, psychological depth and subtlety. Yet it still remains
something more than a play. Its atmosphere is not quite of this world.
In the long lyrics especially one feels that the guiding emotion is not
the entertainer’s wish to thrill an audience, not even perhaps the pure
artist’s wish to create beauty, but something deeper and more
prophetic, a passionate contemplation and expression of truth; though
of course the truth in question is something felt rather than stated,
something that pervades life, an eternal and majestic rhythm like the
movement of the stars.
Thus, if Longinus is right in defining Sublimity as “the ring, or
resonance, of greatness of soul,” one sees in part where the sublimity
of the _Agamemnon_ comes from. And it is worth noting that the faults
which some critics have found in the play are in harmony with this
conclusion. For the sublimity that is rooted in religion tolerates some
faults and utterly refuses to tolerate others. The _Agamemnon_ may be
slow in getting to work; it may be stiff with antique conventions. It
never approaches to being cheap or insincere or shallow or sentimental
or showy. It never ceases to be genuinely a “criticism of life.” The
theme which it treats, for instance, is a great theme in its own right;
it is not a made-up story ingeniously handled.
The trilogy of the _Oresteia_, of which this play is the first part,
centres on the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of
The ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong.
Every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every
punishment becomes a new wrong, calling for fresh vengeance. And more;
every wrong turns out to be itself rooted in some wrong of old. It is
never gratuitous, never untempted by the working of Peitho
(Persuasion), never merely wicked. The _Oresteia_ first shows the cycle
of crime punished by crime which must be repunished, and then seeks for
some gleam of escape, some breaking of the endless chain of “evil
duty.” In the old order of earth and heaven there was no such escape.
Each blow called for the return blow and must do so _ad infinitum_.
But, according to Aeschylus, there is a new Ruler now in heaven, one
who has both sinned and suffered and thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the
Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his gift to mankind is the ability
through suffering to Learn (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
πρώταρχος Ἄτη, 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 Agamemnon to be a warning that
Ἄγα μίμνει, “the unseen Wrath abides.” _Agâ_, of course, is not exactly
wrath; it is more like Nemesis, the feeling that something is ἄγαν,
“too much,” the condemnation of _Hubris_ (pride or overgrowth) and of
all things that are in excess. _Agâ_ is sometimes called “the jealousy
of God,” but such a translation is not happy. It is not the jealousy,
nor even the indignation, of a personal God, but the profound
repudiation and reversal of Hubris which is the very law of the Cosmos.
Through all the triumph of the conqueror, this _Agâ_ abides.
The greatest and most human character of the whole play is
Clytemnestra. She is conceived on the grand Aeschylean scale, a scale
which makes even Lady Macbeth and Beatrice Cenci seem small; she is
more the kinswoman of Brynhild. Yet she is full not only of character,
but of subtle psychology. She is the first and leading example of that
time-honoured ornament of the tragic stage, the sympathetic, or
semi-sympathetic, heroine-criminal. Aeschylus employs none of the
devices of later playwrights to make her interesting. He admits, of
course, no approach to a love-scene; he uses no sophisms; but he does
make us see through Clytemnestra’s eyes and feel through her passions.
The agony of silent prayer in which, if my conception is right, we
first see her, helps to interpret her speeches when they come; but
every speech needs close study. She dare not speak sincerely or show
her real feelings until Agamemnon is dead; and then she is practically
a mad woman.
For I think here that there is a point which has not been observed. It
is that Clytemnestra is conceived as being really “possessed” by the
Daemon of the House when she commits her crime. Her statements on p. 69
are not empty metaphor. A careful study of the scene after the murder
will show that she appears first “possessed” and almost insane with
triumph, utterly dominating the Elders and leaving them no power to
answer. Then gradually the unnatural force dies out from her. The deed
that was first an ecstasy of delight becomes an “affliction” (pp. 72,
76). The strength that defied the world flags and changes into a
longing for peace. She has done her work. She has purified the House of
its madness; now let her go away and live out her life in quiet. When
Aigisthos appears, and the scene suddenly becomes filled with the
wrangling of common men, Clytemnestra fades into a long silence, from
which she only emerges at the very end of the drama to pray again for
Peace, and, strangest of all, to utter the entreaty: “Let us not stain
ourselves with blood!” The splash of her husband’s blood was visible on
her face at the time. Had she in her trance-like state actually
forgotten, or did she, even then, not feel that particular blood to be
a stain?
To some readers it will seem a sort of irrelevance, or at least a
blurring of the dramatic edge of this tragedy, to observe that the
theme on which it is founded was itself the central theme both of Greek
Tragedy and of Greek Religion. The fall of Pride, the avenging of wrong
by wrong, is no new subject selected by Aeschylus. It forms both the
commonest burden of the moralising lyrics in Greek tragedy and even of
the tragic myths themselves; and recent writers have shown how the same
idea touches the very heart of the traditional Greek religion. “The
life of the Year-Daemon, who lies at the root of so many Greek gods and
heroes, is normally a story of Pride and Punishment. Each year arrives,
waxes great, commits the sin of Hubris and must therefore die. It is
the way of all Life. As an early philosopher expresses it, “All things
pay retribution for their injustice one to another according to the
ordinance of Time.”[1]
To me this consideration actually increases the interest and beauty of
the _Oresteia_, because it increases its greatness. The majestic art,
the creative genius, the instinctive eloquence of these plays—that
eloquence which is the mere despair of a translator—are all devoted to
the expression of something which Aeschylus felt to be of tremendous
import. It was not his discovery; but it was a truth of which he had an
intense realization. It had become something which he must with all his
strength bring to expression before he died, not in a spirit of
self-assertion or of argument, like a discoverer, but as one devoted to
something higher and greater than himself, in the spirit of an
interpreter or prophet.
[1] See my _Four Stages of Greek Religion_, p. 47. Cornford, _From
Religion to Philosophy_, Chapter I. See also the fine pages on the
Agamemnon in the same writer’s _Thucydides Mythistoricus_, pp. 144,
ff. (E. Arnold 1907). G. M.