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Agamemnon at Aulis: A Study in the Oresteia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Michael Ewans
Michael Ewans*
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle, New South Wales
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Extract

Aischylos wrote Agamemnon for exhibition in a theatre. A theatre whose conditions of production almost defy our imagining — how, in particular, were the chorus able to convey the verbal richness and complexity of their lyrics, while at the same time singing and dancing? To a music and choreography of which we know little and nothing respectively, but which yet, however stylized, however unobtrusive, added something to the complexity of the drama. We are left with a mere script. But a stage script, designed to be heard, performed with the phrases emerging in a prescribed order. The audience cannot refer back or leaf forward as in a book. They are — as the parodos is performed — witnesses of a lyric narrative. At any one point, they can only know what they remember of what has been heard already. About what is going to happen, immediately or later, they have only conjecture. We presume the majority to have been acquainted with some or many versions of the history of the house of Atreus; they are, then, aware of a range of possibilities. Aischylos can use any or none of the traditional versions, move from one aspect of the story as he imagines it to another as his purpose demands. And so, as the drama unfolds, the audience's range of expectations can be narrowed, or widened, at will by the emphases given to what they are hearing, the ways in which it adds to what they have heard already.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , 1975 , pp. 17 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1975

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References

This article presents a substantially developed version of pp. 13–25 of my unpublished Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation, Aischylean inevitability: a study of the Oresteia (1971Google Scholar). A draft of the article was read at AULLA XVI in August 1974, and I am grateful to several delegates, and in particular to Mr Kevin Lee, for helpful comments.

Aischylean scholars approach the playwright from such diverse points of view that a record of every point at which I disagree substantially with previous writers would overload the article intolerably. I have therefore confined the notes which follow almost exclusively to technical matters; the reader is invited to compare this exposition of the parodos as a whole with the standard accounts. Contrast especially the first chapter of HDF Kitto, , Form and meaning in drama (London 1956Google Scholar); Jones, John, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London 1962) 75f.Google Scholar; Vickers, Brian, Towards Greek Tragedy (London 1973), 348f.Google Scholar; and Dover’s, K. J. article, ‘Some neglected aspects of Agamemnon’s dilemma’, JHS xliii (1973) 58–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

1. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London 1962), 43–46Google Scholar; and see the index under masking.

2. Op. cit. 1.2, especially 24–25.

3. Aischylos und das Handeln in Drama (Philologus supplement 20.1, Leipzig 1928), 113Google Scholar.

4. Cf. Odyssey XVI.216f.

5. The increasing disregard for metron diaresis and proliferation of spondaic feet after line 75 make it probable that after this point the anapaestic introduction (already of a virtually unparalleled length) attained the higher emotional plane of melic anapaests. And this is the point at which Aischylos begins to draw out the tragic implications of the facts previously stated.

6. Cf. Fraenkel, E., Aeschylus Agamemnon (Oxford 1950), on 205fGoogle Scholar.

7. It was first openly propounded, as far as I am aware, by M. S. Dawson in a Classical Review note in 1927.

8. See Denniston, J. D. and Page, D., Aeschylus Agamemnon (Oxford 1957) on 127fGoogle Scholar. The most recent attempt known to me is that of Sommerstein, A. H., ‘Aeschylus, Agamemnon 126–30’, CR n.s. xxi (1971) 1–3Google Scholar. His discussion displays a clear grasp of the dramatic issues at stake here; whether his proposed emendation (kteinei for ktene) will gain widespread acceptance among Aischylean scholars remains to be seen.

9. See Fraenkel’s Agamemnon, vol. II 112f.

10. In their commentary on 184f.

11. This is the traditional interpretation; cf. Fraenkel on phronein in 176, citing Hermann, Headlam and Paley. It is also the preferred reading of Sidgwick in his edition (Oxford 1881) and Verrall (London 1889). Cf. also Murray, , Aeschylus (Oxford 1940) 210Google Scholar, Kitto, Form and meaning in drama (London 1960) 7f.Google Scholar, and the translations of Weir Smyth (London 1922), MacNeice (London 1936) and Lattimore (Chicago 1953).

12. See Denniston and Page on 184f., and Lloyd-Jones on 176f. in his translation of Agamemnon (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970Google ScholarPubMed).

13. So LSJ, citing this passage under pathos 2.

14. Wecklein, quoted by Fraenkel on 184.

15. The usage recurs at 581–582, where the periphrasis ‘and the charts of Zeus which accomplished this will be paid honour’ means ‘and Zeus will be paid honour for the charis of letting us take Troy’.

16. Or, at the very least, ‘with very passionate emotion’. But I doubt if it can be denied that orga carries its stronger meaning, ‘anger’, in this extremely intense passage.

17. Against Fraenkel cf. Denniston and Page ad loc.

18. Poetics 1453a 1–7.

19. Artemis is already in the context (last mentioned at 201). The suggestion that she is the implied subject of epithumein was first made in a gloss in the Triclinian text — which of course did not have the benefit of Bamberger’s emendation. Fraenkel dismisses it without argument; Denniston and Page do not even mention it.

20. So Lloyd-Jones, , ‘The guilt of Agamemnon’, CQ n.s. xii (1962) 190Google Scholar.

21. Cf. Jones op. cit., 78–79.

22. In my unpublished Cambridge dissertation, in my forthcoming book Janácek’s tragic operas, and in work in progress on Eumenides. I use the phrase ‘high tragedy’ in this article to refer to the manner of the agreed masterpieces of the genre — the Oresteia, Oidipous the king, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.