Aeschylus’s audience would have known the story well—as well as (or even better than) a modern audience would know a familiar story from the Bible. For them there would be no suspense, in the ordinary sense, as they would be aware in advance that Clytemnestra was going to kill her husband on his return from the conquest of Troy and that their son in turn would kill his mother and then seek justification and, ultimately, forgiveness before a court of gods and men. But there was suspense of a sort, as the audience would not know how Aeschylus was going to treat the familiar myth, how he would use it to comment both directly and indirectly on current events, and what conclusions he would draw from it about human life and the relation between humans and their gods.
Aeschylus’s conclusion—that a blood feud, particularly within a royal family, cannot be allowed to proceed indefinitely and that society, in order to sustain itself, must develop institutions that can control the anger and hatred of individuals—is of course important. If the Oresteia did no more than to present this crucial political idea at such an early date, it would deserve much of its fame. But it does a great deal more than that. It is not only a political treatise in dramatic form, but also a lyric tragedy. As such, in the grandeur of its conception, it is almost unique.
This is particularly true of Agamemnon, the first and by far the longest of the three parts of the trilogy. The play has three main char-acters: Agamemnon, the returning hero; Clytemnestra, who waits with implacable hatred in her heart to kill him when he reenters his home; and the girl Agamemnon brings back with him as a spoil of victory, the princess-prophetess Cassandra, who has given her name to the deepest kind of pessimism about the future in which she sees her own death with awful clarity. But despite the majesty of these masked figures, it is perhaps the Chorus of Old Men of Argos that will endure longest in the minds of readers.
The choral songs in Agamemnon are beautiful and moving poems. The Chorus in its odes obeys no common limitations of space or time. Seeming to wander from subject to subject but actually following trains of thought that are inevitable, the Chorus “remembers” the departure of the army under Agamemnon many years before, the brutal murder of Iphigenia in order to placate the impatient troops gathered at Aulis, the seduction of Helen by Paris and the devastation this brings down on Paris’s city, the conquest of Troy and the slaughter of its men and enslavement of its women and children, the overweening pride of the conquerors as they run riot through the burning city and their subsequent punishment by the deeply offended immortal gods, and the awful consequences, still to come, of all these events. The Chorus sings of the future and the past, of the distant and the near, and it says things about men and war, about justice and pride, about love and honor, about hatred and shame that for their profundity are hardly surpassed in all of literature.
The original Greek verse of the entire Oresteia is antique and difficult, and perhaps no translator is capable of perfectly understanding, to say nothing of conveying, every allusion and meaning. But the reader who will take the trouble to read slowly, carefully, and thoughtfully—and more than once, for this three-part play richly rewards multiple readings—will come to realize that Aeschylus, especially in Agamemnon, creates a tragic intensity that has been seldom achieved since.
SOPHOCLES
496?–406 BCE
Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Ajax
Philoctetes
The life of Sophocles epitomized perfection. He won every prize, gained every honor. As a youngster he was the favorite of his teachers because of his exceptional brilliance and personal beauty. He won first prize with the first set of plays he produced. He was president of the imperial treasury and was elected general to serve with Pericles in one of Athens’s wars. He was several times an ambassador and managed the city’s affairs after the defeat in Sicily, late in the Peloponnesian War. He was the friend and confidant of every Athenian leader from Pericles on. He was also the leader of the cultural life of his city. Best of all, he was born about 495 BCE, just as Athens was emerging from the relative darkness of the sixth century into its short-lived but immortal splendor. He died in 406, just before the final defeat by Sparta, which ended that great age. It can almost be said that Sophocles was fifth-century Athens: he was conterminous with it and created more of it than any other man.
In this unbroken string of successes were dramatic moments. A notable one occurred at the very end of his life. He was almost ninety years old when his son sued for control of his father’s financial affairs, on the grounds that the old man had become incompetent. Sophocles appeared before the judges with a manuscript in his hands. It was Oedipus at Colonus, his last play; he begged the court’s leave to read from it. His voice was weak but the words of the superb choral song were rich, strong, and beautiful. His competency was confirmed and the judges chastised his son.
Sophocles wrote a number of plays dealing with the myth of Oedipus, which must have retained a fascination for him throughout his life. Here is the basic story: Laius, King of Thebes and husband of Jocasta, is told by an oracle that their son, Oedipus, will grow up to kill him. In his superstitious fear he takes the boy from his mother and nurses and gives him to a faithful shepherd with instructions to expose him to the elements. The herdsman, his heart touched by the baby, cannot kill the child and gives him to a certain Corinthian, who rears him as his own son. However, during a drunken brawl, a man tells Oedipus he is not his (supposed) father’s son, and Oedipus sets out to search through the world for his real father. At “a place where three roads meet,” in the lonely mountains between Thebes and Delphi, he is ordered by a noble in a chariot to step aside at a narrow place in the road. Oedipus, in the impatient fury that often overtakes him and is so characteristic, kills the man in the chariot and soon goes on to Thebes. There he learns the king has recently been killed by robbers and that a new husband is being sought for the queen. The oracle has said she should marry a man who can solve the riddle of the Sphinx, which Oedipus has no trouble doing. He marries the queen and rules for many years over Thebes, bringing the city great prosperity. He and his wife have four children, two sons and two daughters, one of whom is Antigone.
Then, in the glory of his middle age when he has achieved all that a man can achieve and looks forward to an old age filled with peace and honors, a terrible plague descends on his city. Oedipus, concerned as always for his people, sends to Delphi for advice from the oracle. The message comes back: there is a frightful pollution within the city that must be removed. With his customary energy the king sets about to discover it. He questions, interviews, threatens those who won’t answer his questions. Slowly the truth emerges: he himself is the pollution. Fulfilling the old prophecy, he has slain his father at the place where three roads meet and married his own mother Jocasta who, learning the truth, hangs herself. Oedipus tears out his eyes so he can no longer see her body swinging from a beam.