Intrusion, the second main type of interaction, has comparatively few distinct varieties. The chief reason for this would seem to be that for once considerations of word order or structuring hardly arise. Another contributory factor is that in general the distinctions between the different forms of imagery have little practical relevance here. In particular, the distinction between implicit imagery (i.e. metaphor) and explicit (e.g. simile) is not of much consequence in most cases – with one exception. The exceptional case has already been treated, albeit briefly. In its most rudimentary form, intrusion is confined to comparison and short simile, where a predictable ’N as V’ (or ’more N than V’) is replaced by ’T as V’ (’more T than V’).

Although kings are often central to the extant literary (and other textual) evidence from Mesopotamia, the wider Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, the texts themselves were usually authored by others, such as poets, priests, prophets or scholars. If mortal kings typically claimed to rule thanks to divine support, these latter characters similarly tended to base their authority on their ability to articulate and enact the divine will. Inevitably perhaps, the stage was set for narratives of conflict between kings and other intermediaries of the divine. This chapter shows that the ancient sources again exhibit a consistent pattern: it is always the king who initiates the conflict, often in a military context. The king is not necessarily impious, but shows casual disregard for the divine will, despite the information offered by a reliable intermediary. This is invariably depicted as an act of folly. The negative consequences soon become apparent, but they are usually borne primarily by the people whom the king was supposed to lead. The first attestations are found in Sumerian sources from early Mesopotamia. The other main bodies of evidence are the Hebrew Bible and the early Greek epics of Homer and Hesiod.

This chapter presents the first detailed study of afterlife heroic power in the Oresteia. Aeschylus only uses the word “hero” (hērōs) once in his plays, for the anonymous powerful ancestors who send and receive the expedition to Troy in the Agamemnon. But in the Choephoroi, Agamemnon is prayed to as powerful at his tomb, and in the Eumenides, Orestes predicts his own heroic power from beyond the grave. The Oresteia famously relocates these two mythical heroes to Argos to associate them with that city’s treaty with Athens. This chapter demonstrates that the representation of father and son after death reverses expectations not only from the world external to the play, but also from their living actions within the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes an ethically whitewashed ancestor figure; conversely, Orestes, who killed his mother, becomes a political hero. These radical afterlife transformations are a major part of the Oresteia’s “poetics of the beyond.”

Announcing victory in the Trojan War, the Herald has been seen as a cheerful character, thoroughly enjoying life. Why, then, does he dwell on his own grave from the moment of his arrival? Why does he attempt to silence lament and, unsuccessfully, any speech about his fallen companions? The Herald never directly mentions the afterlife and insists on treating death as the end of all ties to life. Nevertheless, his approach to his own death and to the war dead serves as indispensable background for the rest of the trilogy. The Herald’s traumatized approach to warfare and death contrasts with his official function. His attempt at guiding social memory excludes the dead as impinging on society’s profit (kerdos) or glory from war. He reckons them out of the account with the language of calculation and voting. We thus see individual and societal values being formed in response to death as closure, in ways the Oresteia will later overturn and complicate. Moreover, the Herald provides the first mention of heroes as worshipped beings, of Hades, and of the “unseen” forces that affect human fate.

The extended mourning for Agamemnon in the kommos scene of the Choephoroi dramatizes relationships to the dead not found previously in the trilogy. Unlike in the Agamemnon, in the kommos, death is neither an end point nor a peaceful rest. Instead, the mourners repeatedly alternate contradictory conceptualizations of Agamemnon’s existence and power in the beyond: They insist on his outraged, avenging spirit; paradoxically, they also refer to his honored place among kings in the underworld. At some points, they call on him to send his power from below; at others, they beg him to rise from the dead. None of the characters seems to know which of these possible afterlives, if any, are true. The “poetics of multiplicity” evident in the kommos affects the emotional, epistemic, and ethical aspects of the scene. The Chorus’s contrafactual image of Agamemnon as glorious king in the afterlife, jammed against their insistence on his dishonored death and burial, compels Orestes to begin the second coup d’état. It is potentially the first instance in extant Greek literature in which a fictional depiction of the afterlife motivates extreme political action.

The Chorus of the Agamemnon depict death and the afterlife in diverse ways, both in their dramatic role as the Elders of Argos and in their more universal choral songs. This chapter examines the ethical and political values their contradictory references imply, whether any affect their actions as characters, and how each links to other themes in the trilogy. The Elders go further than the Herald by not only treating death as oblivion at some points but even actively wishing death at others. In what way does this seeming escapism, contrasted with their emphasis on a good death as glorious, affect their resistance to the coup d’état? How does their story of returning casualties color the Argive critique of the Trojan War? The choral songs introduce different types of afterlives into the trilogy: in the memory of the living, at the grave, through the psyche that survives after death, in the possibility of resurrection, and even as a realm of punishment for ethical wrongs. The rest of the Oresteia significantly develops many of the Elders’ wide-ranging speculations.