I am grateful to Professor H. Lloyd-Jones, Professor D. E. Eichholz, Mr A. R. Thornhill and Mr D. O'Brien for reading and commenting on this article; their comments have been very helpful. All references to Aeschylus are to the Oxford Text.

¹ In CQ xii (1962) 187 f., which should be read together with his important article ‘Zeus in Aeschylus’ in JHS lxxvi (1956).

² P. 192.

³ P. 197.

⁴ See the excellent note by Fraenkel, E., Aeschylus, Agamemnon, iii 546 and 740.Google Scholar The explanation of the name Pleisthenid is lost to us, but the meaning is clear at 1569, where Clytemnestra tries to appease the daemon of Agamemnon's own line (as opposed to that of her lover Aegisthus).

⁵ The picture of the powers behind men's actions is more complex than this in Homer, where Agamemnon, for instance, ascribes his impulse in taking Briseis to three agencies ‘Zeus and Moira and the Erinys who walks in darkness’. As Dodds, E. R. remarks (The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley 1951, 6 and 49)Google Scholar ‘we must resist the temptation to simplify what is not simple’. It is only when we turn to Euripides' polemical plays that we find the simplification of the issues in such statements as the one in his Electra that Zeus sent a wraith of Helen to Troy

⁶ This is the moral of Euripides, , Electra 1245 and 1266Google Scholar But Aeschylus is as different from Euripides as chalk from cheese.

⁷ The gospels are often closer to the ideas of the classical Greek period than to those of modern times.

^7a See for instance Solmsen, F., Hesiod and Aeschylus 196 f.Google Scholar

⁸ It is these beliefs which form the main theme of the trilogy; see Fraenkel, E., Aeschylus, Agamemnon iii 147 Google Scholar (referred to hereafter as Fraenkel).

⁹ In this passage ‘the burden of anguish’ is the apprehension which the Chorus feels on hearing the prophecy of Calchas. This anguish is not eased until the end of the Oresteia. Fraenkel, ii 102, Denniston-Page, , Agam. 84 Google Scholar (referred to hereafter as Denniston-Page) and Lloyd-Jones, in JHS lxxvi (1956) 62 Google Scholar seem to take the passage out of its context. When the play is produced, the context has the immediate and important impact, and the anguish of the Chorus is conveyed not only by the sung refrain but also by its acting.

¹⁰ The translations in verse are from G. Thomson's translation of the Oresteia.

¹¹ This manner of speaking expresses the way in which Zeus and the Erinyes act through human agents, so that they bring punitive disasters upon one another. Despite the doubts which are voiced in Denniston-Page, 135, the story of the lion-cub and the effect of Helen on Troy are analogous; for Helen came as a darling of love and became the embodi ment of the Fury—in a metaphorical, not a literal sense—and brought disaster on the family of Priam and on the city of Troy.

¹² When Lloyd-Jones says that Zeus ordered the expedition (so too Denniston-Page, xxvi, and Jones, J., On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, 75 and 78Google Scholar), he puts the initiative on Zeus in a way in which the Chorus does not; for the Chorus sees an analogy between the Erinys sent by a god to punish the robbers of the vultures' nest and the Atreidae sent by Zeus to avenge the rape of Helen. It does not follow that the god or Erinys appeared to those who punished the robbers or that Zeus appeared to the Atreidae. We are not even told that Apollo urged the Atreidae to go by uttering an oracle, as he did later to Orestes (Ch. 269 f.).

¹³ So Fraenkel, ii 122 ‘it is decisive that the answer implied in this “rhetorical” question can only be impossible’.

¹⁴ Thomson's translation ‘desert my comrades’ for ξνμμαχίας ἁμαρτών has a modern ring. In 458 B.c. the immediate connotation of ξνμμαχίας was the Athenian Alliance, of which Thucydides saw a forerunner in the coalition led by Agamemnon. J. Jones, op. cit., 76, translates correctly ‘our alliance’.

¹⁵ As Fraenkel remarks (ii 126) ‘he knows that the task he has in hand may be necessary, but it cannot possibly be θέμις’. Lloyd-Jones, in CQ xii 191 Google Scholar seems to infer from Agamemnon's words here that Aeschylus regarded Agamemnon's decision as justified. The opposite is rather the case. Agamemnon's words are a shallow excuse, in which the subject of ἐπιθυμεῑν is left deliberately vague.

¹⁶ The metaphor of the changing wind and the changing course is graphic to anyone trained in sailing; it is particularly apposite here because the wind at Aulis is about to veer likewise.

¹⁷ The word παρακοπά is a variant here for ἄτη as Fraenkel, ii 545, remarks, just as the epithet πρωτοπήμων is a variant for πρώταρχος at 1192.

¹⁸ The literal meaning of the words ἀνάγκας ἔδυ λέπαδνον is disputed. A similar phrase occurs in Persae 191, where Zerxes puts the yoke on the necks of the two women λέηαδν' ἐπ' αὐχένων τίθηαι. In our passage Agamemnon passes under the yoke, like a horse passing under the yoke, and his course from then on will be a necessary one. The action comes first; the consequences follow. The exact moment at which Agamemnon passes under the yoke—‘the starting-point of the fateful change of mind’, as Fraenkel calls it—is emphasised by τάθεν resuming ἐπεί and by the present participle πνέων. The moment came in the soliloquy; then his spirit veered and thereupon he put on the yoke of necessity. We use a similar metaphor when we say that Agamemnon became the slave of his decision. He was now committed to necessary consequences of the kind which Aeschylus illustrates in the trilogy. Fraenkel, ii 127 gives parallels for the metaphor, and he discusses its meaning at iii 487 and 729; in the last passage he favours an interpretation similar to mine. On the other hand Denniston-Page, 88, find such an interpretation untenable and take the meaning to be that ‘Agamemnon acts under Necessity…. Artemis compelled Agamemnon to commit the crime’ (see also p. xxvi). But when we recall the metaphor, the point is not that the horse is compelled to put on the yoke but that the horse once yoked is compelled to follow a restricted course. The metaphor is commonly used by Aeschylus, with ζύγον or ζεύγνυμι, At PV 107 Prometheus gave fire to man and yoked himself to necessary consequences; it is not the act but its consequences which were compulsory.

¹⁹ I prefer Denniston-Page, 103, who join πλούτου with ἔπαλξις, to Fraenkel, ii 199.

²⁰ Fraenkel, ii 201, compares the phraseology of 206 f. with this passage.

²¹ It is important to keep to the dramatic sequence, because the play was written for performance.

²² Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational, 39 Google Scholar, draws a distinction between the views of ‘the poet, speaking through the Chorus’ and ‘the characters’. Writing of the passage which I have just quoted he says ‘where the poet, speaking through his Chorus, is able to detect the overmastering will of Zeus (παναιτίου, πανεργέτα) working itself out through an inexorable moral law, his characters see only a daemonic world haunted by malignant forces’. This view is not compatible with the fact that it is the Chorus which introduces the daemon at line 1468; indeed it names the daemon and Zeus as active in the very same stanza, which we have quoted in the text.

²³ Some are usually outside the control of any god. This is the point of the protest which the Furies make to Apollo in E. 172.

²⁴ Fraenkel, iii 728 f., has a good note on Moira.

²⁵ Events which lie in the future but on one day will have happened can be viewed in the same way as due to or in accordance with Moira, but not for that reason as preordained and as overriding the power of choice in men. Calchas, for instance, has a glimpse into the future and tells of what will happen—τοιάδε … μόρσιμα (A. 156)—and the Chorus looks forward to the appointed day of the future (Ch. 464–5; cf. A. 68 and 766 with a more general context).

²⁶ Adkins, A. W. H., Merit and Responsibility, 130 Google Scholar, emphasises the freedom of Orestes' will. ‘But in the Eumenides Orestes makes no attempt to defend himself in these terms, and Apollo does not advance the plea on his behalf (sc. that Moira urged Orestes on): Orestes' will was not forced.’ I think that this may be correct; but the issue in the Eumenides is rather whether the pollution of Orestes is indelible (E. 652 f.) or can be purified.

²⁷ See Fraenkel, ii 114, ‘the hymn is a corner-stone not only of this play but of the whole trilogy’.

²⁸ See Fraenkel, ii 105. The lesson is for men and women in general. The theory is more acceptable at a time when the group is judged to be more important than the individual. The individual bearer of a tragic action may or may not survive to learn the lesson; Oedipus does survive and stresses the lesson (OC 7–8). Denniston-Page, 85 f., discuss the case of Agamemnon as an individual.

²⁹ It is so translated, for instance, in A. W. H. Adkins, op. cit., 17 f.; Italie, Index Aeschyleus s.v.; and Fraenkel, ii 463.

³⁰ The trouble caused by translating εἱμαρμένα as ‘fate’ in A. 913 is shown in Fraenkel's note in ii 413, which begins by quoting Karsten and Meineke ‘quae fato constituta sunt non pendent a mortalium arbitrio’. When Clytemnestra says

she means that her thoughtful vigilance will with the gods' help deal justly with all else which has been apportioned to her and Agamemnon, that is to say with the situation in which they are now placed. Commentators find similar difficulties at A. 1025 f., when μοῑρα μοῑραν is taken by Paley and others as ‘the appointed law of fate (did not hinder) fate’.

³¹ This is of course different from being responsible for all things: ‘the cause of all’ or ‘who causeth all’, as Lloyd-Jones and Thomson translate it.

³² Orestes does not just shelter behind the oracles of Apollo, powerful though they are (Ch. 297 and E. 594). He faces the fact that he would have to act, even if he disbelieved the oracles (Ch. 298 f.). He accepts responsibility for the killing of Clytemnestra (E. 463 f.). In the same way Orestes and Electra take the initiative in calling upon the spirit of Agamemnon; and the ghost of Clytemnestra appears not to urge on men (as the ghost of the king does in Hamlet) but to urge on the Erinyes.

³³ For the phrase see also A. 1545 and Ch. 42.

³⁴ Twentieth Century Approaches to Plato 27 (Semple Lectures, Cincinnati, 1963).