41 pages • 1 hour read
AeschylusAgamemnon
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 458A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Lines 782-1371Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Lines 782-1034 Summary: Third Episode and Third Stasimon
Agamemnon enters on a chariot. At his side is Cassandra, a princess of Troy and a seeress, whom he took captive after the sack of Troy. Taking care not to transgress justice and human limits by being excessive in its praise, the chorus sings a brief ode hailing Agamemnon’s victory over Troy. Agamemnon delivers a speech in which he greets Argos and the gods, giving thanks for his victory and his safe homecoming. He boasts that Troy was justly punished, but he cuts himself off, lest he incur the evil eye or the anger of the gods. Agamemnon concludes by declaring that the city must be put in order.
Clytemnestra responds to Agamemnon’s speech with a speech of her own. Apologizing for foregoing feminine modesty by speaking publicly, she expresses joy at being reunited with her husband after many years of living in a “house forlorn with no man by” (862). She describes in detail the fear and longing she suffered as she waited 10 years for Agamemnon’s return. Next, she praises Agamemnon extravagantly as she welcomes him home, urging him to enter the palace by walking on luxurious crimson tapestries she spread on the ground before him. Agamemnon rebukes Clytemnestra for her excess, saying that as a mere mortal he dares not accept such a welcome by stepping on the tapestries. Clytemnestra, however, argues that Agamemnon deserves to take pride in his achievements; as a king, he should not fear the “criticism of men” (937). Agamemnon at last yields to her. Asking the gods not to view his actions as hubris, Agamemnon steps onto the tapestries and enters the palace. As he does so, he asks that Cassandra be brought into the palace and that she be treated well. With a prayer to Zeus, Clytemnestra follows Agamemnon into the palace.
The chorus sings the third stasimon, brooding the sense of fearful foreboding that continues to plague it. Despite Agamemnon’s return, the chorus remains troubled and cannot shake the feeling that disaster is imminent.
Lines 1035-1371 Summary (Fourth Episode and Choral Interlude)
Clytemnestra reenters and asks Cassandra to enter the palace, promising that she will be treated kindly. The chorus urges her to obey, but Cassandra does not respond and stands unmoving; Clytemnestra, refusing to waste her time on the silent Cassandra, exits into the palace. As the chorus continues coaxing her, Cassandra leaps down from the chariot and addresses the god Apollo. In an interchange with the chorus, Cassandra alludes cryptically to the atrocities of Agamemnon and his house, the house of Atreus, and hints at the fate that awaits Agamemnon at Clytemnestra’s hands. She realizes that she is about to die, along with Agamemnon. To the horrified and confused chorus, Clytemnestra explains that Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but he cursed her so that nobody would ever believe her predictions because she refused to sleep with him. The chorus responds sympathetically, even claiming to believe her—a claim filled with tragic irony. But while the chorus recognizes the truth in Clytemnestra’s allusions to the curse of Agamemnon’s family—a curse with its origins in the sins of his father, Atreus—it cannot grasp the full significance of Cassandra’s prophecies. Even when Cassandra announces bluntly that they “shall look on Agamemnon dead” (1246), the chorus is unable to believe her and prays that her predictions fail to come about, observing—misguidedly—that oracles tend to be notoriously “hard to read” (1255). At last, Cassandra recognizes that there is no escaping her fate and that she and Agamemnon must die. She predicts, however, that Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, will someday avenge his father’s death—and, thus, hers as well. The chorus expresses concern and pity for Cassandra as she enters the palace, resigning herself to her fate and commending herself to the gods’ vengeance.
In a choral interlude—not a true stasimon, or choral ode—the chorus begins to sing of the vicissitudes of fortune, dreading what is to happen to King Agamemnon. As it sings, Agamemnon’s cries can be heard from inside the palace, off stage: He is being violently killed. The chorus breaks up into paired trimeters, with each member suggesting how to respond to the situation. The chorus debates whether to act or wait and see what is happening.
Lines 782-1371 Analysis
The events of the third and fourth episodes continue to develop the central theme of justice, increasingly shifting focus to the punishment that awaits those who are guilty of what the ancient Greeks called hubris, or excessive pride. When Agamemnon enters, for instance, the chorus is careful not to incur the evil eye or the anger of the gods by praising his achievements excessively:
How give honor
Not shooting too high nor yet bending short
Of this moment’s fitness?
For many among men are they who set high
The show of honor, yet violate justice (785-89).
Agamemnon, similarly, is careful to thank the gods first and above all for his success, and he is reluctant to accept too much praise and honor for his conquest of Troy. When Clytemnestra urges him to enter the palace on crimson tapestries, his initial reaction is to abstain piously. But Clytemnestra’s arguments eventually persuade him, and he is enticed to do as she asks and walk upon the tapestries—a symbolic act of hubris. As a result, the fate he subsequently suffers at her hands can be construed as a just punishment from the gods.
As this happens, the play’s tone of impending doom continues to intensify. In the third stasimon, after Agamemnon steps upon the tapestries and enters the palace, the chorus repeats its concerns and again hopes for the best: “Still I pray; may all this / Expectation fade as vanity / Into unfulfillment, and not be” (998-1000).
When Cassandra speaks in the fourth episode, the chorus’s fears are finally confirmed. She reveals exactly what is going to happen next: Agamemnon—with Cassandra—will be murdered by Clytemnestra inside the palace. Clytemnestra is repeatedly represented and spoken of as masculine and bold prior to this point in the work and seems to be capable of fulfilling Cassandra’s predictions. However, the chorus cannot understand her warnings. In part, this arises from the symbolic language in which she couches her predictions: She likens Agamemnon to a “bull” about to be slaughtered (1125), hints at Aegisthus’s role in the conspiracy by referring to him as a “strengthless lion” (1123), and speaks of Clytemnestra as an “accursed bitch” (1228), a viper, and a Scylla—a dangerous sea monster (1233). Even when Cassandra speaks plainly, the chorus cannot understand her because of the curse Apollo placed on her: No one will ever believe her prophecies. Cassandra’s realization that she can do nothing to save herself or Agamemnon highlights The Inescapability of Fate.
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By Aeschylus
