¹ JHS lxxxvi (1966) 85.

² It is difficult to imagine, for instance, that the cry ‘We are all to blame!’ (sc. for everything), popularised by Ugo Betti, could have been echoed so widely and so often in any culture which had not inherited an oppressive sense of human worthlessness and guilt, even though many of those who have recourse to it most readily have no intention of contrasting man with a transcendent deity.

³ In tragedy generally, as in oratory throughout the fourth century, death is regarded as the end of suffering even (e.g. Lys. vi 20) for an impious man whose suffering is inflicted by angry gods. Perhaps Plato's Cephalus does not speak for everyone in saying (Rep. 330DE) that when a man is old and near to death he is tormented by the fear that the stories he laughed at when he was young may be true after all.

⁴ Soph. El. 400 (Chrysothemis) is unusual; contrast ibid. 355 f. (Electra).

⁵ Note especially Dem. xix 267, ‘Those responsible for this felt no shame where insanity (i.e. an abnormal shamelessness and recklessness) is treated as a consequence of wrongdoing.

⁶ No comprehensive affirmation or denial of its relevance is rational. It will be found on reflection that circumstances can arise in which the application of fourth-century evidence to a fifth-century problem is argument a fortiori.

⁷ In saying this I do not mean to deny that Aeschylus and his audience may well have had in mind a good reason why Artemis should have acted as an enemy to Agamemnon: Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, CQ N.S. xii (1962) 190Google Scholar, points out that in Homer Artemis, like Apollo and their mother Leto, is an ally of Troy (Il. xx 39 f., 67–72, xxi 470–513); cf. Daube, B., Zu dem Rechtsproblem in Aischylos' Agamemnon (Zürich and Leipzig, 1939), 149Google Scholar f.—who, however, will not accept partisan deities in Aeschylus. The objection of Dawe, R. D. (Eranos lxiv [1966] 14)Google Scholar, that this role of Artemis is insufficiently conspicuous in Homer, is far from cogent, since different people recall different details. One would not have thought, for example, that Menelaus, would have been remembered as μαλθακὸς αἰχμητής, a sncer rhetorically applied to him on one occasion (Il. xvii 588)Google Scholar by Apollo for the purpose of rousing Hector; but Pl. Smp. 174c—a passage criticised by Ath. 178A–E—indicates that he was so remembered, and that is a datum relevant to Ag. 122 f.

⁸ On the menacing character of seers' utterances and the predominantly pessimistic reactions to them cf. (with reference to Ag.) Klees, H., Die Eigenart des griechischen Glaubens an Orakel und Seher (Stuttgart, n.d.), 88 f.Google Scholar

⁹ These words have been called ‘cynical’, ‘sceptical’ and ‘despairing’; they are in fact a cliché (cf. Fraenkel ad loc.) naturally uttered by a Greek embarking on unwelcome means to a desired end.

¹⁰ Fraenkel (113) speaks of a ‘sharp break’ between 159 and 160, and in justifying this break (114) he treats the chorus as having reached ‘a point of utter ἀμηχανία’. Dawe (art. cit., 2 f.) is right to question the appropriateness of this hyperbole, but goes to the other extreme in saying, ‘There is nothing in the preceding verses which can be made to yield any point of attachment to the Hymn to Zeus’ (my italics). 159, prompted by the menacing obscurity of Calchas's concluding utterance, is a very good point of attachment to a pair of stanzas which say in effect, ‘Zeus will decide, anyway, and it is pointess to speculate in advance’.

¹¹ Rightly emphasised by Beattie, A. J., CQ N.S. v (1955) 15Google Scholar. In Eur. Phoen. 154 f. the Paidagogos says of Polyneikes' army

¹² Hammond, N. G. L. (JHS lxxxv [1965] 47)Google Scholar makes the important point that Agamemnon's dilemma ‘is very familiar to those who are engaged in a war and exercise command’, but whereas he formulates the crucial question as, ‘Is one to stop or is one to take an action which will involve the death of innocent persons?’, I would put more emphasis on (i) the relation between commander and seer, to which, perhaps, a partial modern parallel might be afforded by uncertainties over the interpretation of meteorological and intelligence reports, and (ii) the notorious fact that when we are responsible for the safety of others we commit cruelties which we would not commit purely in our own interests. Dawe's criticism (art. cit., 19) of Hammond seems, if I have understood it aright, to suggest that we should try to forget that fighting in battles was one of the experiences which formed the author of the Oresteia and that personal acquaintance with commanders who had taken difficult decisions is likely to have been another. Why we should even permit ourselves to forget such a thing, I am not clear.

¹³ Even if περιόργῳ <σφ'> is a mistaken emendation of περιόργως in 216, the connection of thought between 212 f. and 214 ff. and the order of phrases point to the army, not to Agamemnon, as the subject of ἐπιθυμεῑν; cf. the discussion by Dawe, art. cit., 16–18. I cannot agree with Lesky (82) that Agamemnon himself comes to feel a ‘passionate desire’ for the sacrifice; I dare say he passionately desires the end to which the sacrifice appears to be a means, but that is a very different matter. The analogies between Ag. 205–27 and ScT 653–719, to which Leskey (84) draws attention, are indeed interesting; but so are the great differences between the situation of Eteocles, who has good reasons for hating Polynices and a real need to kill him, and that of Agamemnon, who has had no occasion to feel anything but affection for his daughter.

¹⁴ I do not understand how Denniston and Page (xxiv n. 4) find it possible to say, ‘the word means “necessity”, “compulsion”, always’ (my italics) ‘with a connotation of inevitability’ (their italics). Apart from the instances quoted above, cf. Pers. 587, quoted below (p. 67).

¹⁵ Kitto, H. D. F., Form and Meaning in Drama (London, 1959), 5Google Scholar, calls the sacrifice ‘assuredly … a price which a man of courage and sense would refuse to pay’. It is perfectly possible to pass an adverse moral judgment on Agamemnon by some modern standard, but I feel pretty sure that many an Athenian in Agamemnon's place would have thought that courage and sense demanded the sacrifice; in Clytaemnestra's place, he would have thought the opposite; and in the chorus's, he would have felt as they do and would have changed his opinion frequently about the claims of courage and sense.

¹⁶ The phrasing of the sentence strongly suggests the former, and editors have normally taken it so.

¹⁷ Lesky (82) remarks, ‘I must object to the attempt to disparage these words of the chorus as a personal opinion or even a misunderstanding on its part’. For my part, I must object to the implications of the word ‘disparage’, to the suggestion that a valuejudgment is something other than a ‘personal opinion’ and to the treatment of ‘misunderstanding’ as a meaningful word in the discussion of this particular passage.

¹⁸ Cf. Alexis, fr. 15Google Scholar, where one character remarks successively οὐδὲν ἀσεβεῖς οὐδέπω and ἁγνεύεις ἔτι while another checks through the items of a shoppingaccount. The important boundary in the usage of words which carry, or can be made to carry, an emotive charge does not lie between the serious and the humorous but between the technical, informative or objective (philosophy, science, exegesis, jurisprudence) and the artistic, manipulative or subjective (poetry, drama, oratory, conversation).

¹⁹ Cf. Garvie, A. F., Aeschylus' Supplices: Play and Trilogy (Cambridge, 1969), 215Google Scholar ff.

²⁰ Cf. Schwenn, F., Die Menschenopfer bei den Griechen und Römern (Giessen, 1915), 121–40Google Scholar, on the part played in Attic and other Greek myths by human sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of a princess, on the command of an oracle. Kaufman-Bühler, D., Begriff und Funktion der Dike in den Tragödien des Aischylos (Bonn, 1955), 63, 72 f.Google Scholar, 78 f., maintains that the sacrifice of Iphigenia is an offence against divine Dike, and that Artemis cannot have required it; this amounts to saying that Calchas was wrong, but Kaufman-Bühler does not follow up the dramatic implications of that. The same criticism may be made of Wilamowitz, , Aischylos: Interpretationen (Berlin, 1914), 166Google Scholar, upon whose conviction that Aeschylus is rejecting legends about deities demanding human sacrifice Kaufman-Bühler's fuller exposition is based.

²¹ Fraenkel (248), criticising interpretations of 475–87 (see p. 68 below), will not allow a chorus to ‘function as an ordinary character’. Ctr. Winnington-Ingram, R. P., CQ N.S. iv (1954) 25 f.Google Scholar, on elements of consistency in the characterisation of the chorus of Ag.

²² The use of Ἀσία, Ἀσίς and cognate words in the Persae makes it very unlikely that 584 ff. refer to the Aegean coast of Asia Minor.

²³ Wilamowitz, , Griechische Verskunst (Berlin, 1921), 185Google Scholar f., reconstructs what could be called a rational process, in so far as it ostensibly leads to a conclusion that the gods cannot have allowed Agamemnon to capture Troy (‘iustitiam divinam eis ipsis, qui poenas demeruerunt, triumphum concessisse quis potest credere?’), but an infusion of irrationality is needed (cf. Fraenkel, , 247) to justify ‘qui poenas demeruerunt’Google Scholar.

²⁴ It may often be observed that when a participant in a discussion begins with ‘I say that, because …’, he proceeds sometimes to give the grounds on which his conclusion is based, but at other times to make a purely autobiographical statement. Denniston and Page describe 475 ff. as an ‘unmotived rejection of the theme on which the whole of [the chorus's] song was founded’. This is fair so long as ‘unmotived’ is taken in the limited sense ‘logically unfounded’, but the cause of the chorus's rejection of the news has in fact been fully presented to us in the course of the song.

²⁵ Hermann in his note on 454, of which Fraenkel quotes only the first half, suggested that the chorus's deep mistrust of Clytaemnestra conflicts with, and eventually prevails over, their joy in victory. Kranz, W., Stasimon (Berlin, 1923), 159Google Scholar f., offers an interpretation which has certain affinities with Hermann's, Wilamowitz's (see n. 23 above) and that which I have suggested, but also stresses the dramatic contrast with the arrival of the herald. Fraenkel eventually (248 f.) comes very near to admitting what he began by rejecting.

²⁶ Cf. (e.g.) George Eliot's letters to John Blackwood, February 29, 1860, and July 9, 1960.

²⁷ For example, the description of Agamemnon as μάντιν οὔτινα ψέγων (186) and his reply to Clytaemnestra in 934, εἴπερ τις εἰδώς γ'εὖ τόδ' ἐξεῑπεν τέλος, create a consistency in the character of Agamemnon. About the fact of consistency, there can be no argument; it is simply there, under our eyes; the argument can only be on whether the consistency is due to mere coincidence or to the poet's design. Of course, if Merkelbach, R. (in Studien zur Textgeschichte und Textkritik [Cologne, 1959], 168Google Scholar ff.) is right in his rearrangement of lines between 932 and 945, cadit quaestio.

²⁸ I find myself in essential agreement with the argument of Mrs P. E. Easterling (in a paper read to the Classical Association in April, 1972) that dramatic effect is diminished to the extent to which the characters whose interaction constitutes the effect are deficient in credibility and intelligibility.