Free The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies by Aeschylus

diabolic Fury. In style and theme the play represents a static, claustrophobic world, ‘a huddling together of fierce extremes’, in Hazlitt’s description of Macbeth. Still, the ferocity of action may seem obscured. Memory takes its place and renders action inescapable but frozen. Aeschylus may evoke a lost, primordial ritual, the sacramental killing of the king, but here the king has small potential to release, and his death may generate a deadlock in the future. Yet there is a movement, too, a choking coil of image and event. It is the poetic justice of the play that every good must seek its opposite and be destroyed, the health that turns to sickness, the beauty that blinds, the theodicy that is a ministry of fear. And things more often go from bad to worse, the wound that breeds more wounds, the hunter who is hunted down and killed. There is a lex talionis, a law of retaliation working in the style as in the action - in the bond between Agamemnon’s cruelty and his fate, in the double blow they deal to Troy and Greece, and all to strike against the double-bladed law that the killer must be killed, the law of Zeus that incriminates himself, binding him over to the Furies as they weld the race to ruin. In fact there is a momentum in the Furies, ‘the terror raging back and back in the future/the stealth, the law of the hearth, the mother’. These menacing phrases, like monolithic, unmovable building-blocks, are actually set in motion by the Fury who will construct her edifice, the house of Atreus or all our houses, where the elements of Aeschylus are clashing for control. There is an auditory struggle that intensifies the prophecies of Calchas with his cries. A stylistic struggle in which images of oozing and dyeing yield to Agamemnon’s blood, spurting out to stain the ground and shower Clytaemnestra like the rain. And a dramatic struggle that, from the storm at Aulis lyrically remembered, releases the storm that sweeps the ships at Troy, breaking out of heroic narrative to overpower Argos in the person of the queen. As Agamemnon says, ‘The storms of ruin live!’
    These are the dynamics of destruction. Nowhere do they work with greater force than in the symbol of the net and its companion, the symbol of the robes. Together they exemplify all the binding, recoiling, retaliating, revenging in the play, though they enter pianissimo. In the opening chorus Agamemnon is associated both with the hunt that captures Troy and with its first extension, the bridal robes his attendants wind around his daughter as he kills her. The robes of ceremony and the nets of capture: the chorus stresses the second in its hymn of triumph; the nets of the Night have trapped the prize of Troy. But soon the nets of Clytaemnestra trap the king - ‘if he took one wound for each report/to penetrate these walls, he’s gashed like a dragnet.’ And, as ‘she winds about him coil after coil of her glittering rhetoric’ (Herbert Weir Smyth’s description), her words materialize in the gorgeous tapestries that lure him to his death.
    Cassandra sees this clearly. She is caught in the nets of doom while she perceives the nets that trap the king. They are things of nightmare that, like objects in surreal pictures, are themselves and inextricably something else. First she sees unattached hands reaching out, ‘hand over hand’, to haul in things unseen, like nets perhaps, and so they are, she can see them clearly now, hellish nets - and no, not simply nets but a part of the one who casts them, a woman, in fact the woman is the net, ‘the snare, /the bedmate, deathmate, murder’s strong right arm!’ the queen who invests the king in robes, entangling him before she takes his life. But these are only flashes as Apollo sends them through his seer. Cassandra cannot see their pattern until she has trampled the vestments of the god and taken on, if only symbolically, the mantle of the Furies. Then she sees the tie between the violent nets of capture