Aeschylus' 'Agamemnon': Creation, Context, Context

Transcript: 

Summer 2026 has been the summer of Homer, the summer of Odysseus, but he wasn't the  only Greek hero who had a shock coming when he got back home.  So we're bucking the trend on Ancient History 101, we're not going to talk about him.  Plenty of people talking about him already. Instead, we're going to be talking about a different Greek hero who is just as morally ambiguous. And we're not going to be talking about a poem either. We're talking about a play today, one that suggests that for the Greeks who were at  Troy, there is no such thing as home sweet home. So without further ado, let's get going.    

Hi everyone, I'm Dr Shelby Judge.  I'm a lecturer at the University of Derby and my areas of expertise in classics  are sort of in reception and sort of contemporary feminist retellings of Greek  myth and I spend a lot of time looking at the women of Greek myth.   

 I'm guessing that this play has got quite an interesting woman in it.    What play are we going to talk about today, Shelby?    

Today, we're going to be talking about Aeschylus' Agamemnon.   

 OK, so Aeschylus, I know the name, he's a famous playwright, one of the big three,  right, of the tragedians of ancient Athens. What do we know about this specific play?  Do we know a date for this play to start off with?   

Yes, so the play is from 458 BCE.   

As far as the career of Aeschylus goes, is this early on in his career? Is this one of his, you know, after he's famous and everyone knows who he is?   

Yeah, this is one of his later plays. So this is when his celebrity is in full swing.    

When we talk about ancient Greek plays, I always think it's really important to  remember the context of their performance. So can you just explain why this is being written and where it's being performed?    

Yeah, absolutely. So ancient Greek tragedies in ancient Athens, tragedy was kind of like  the Olympics. So the way that they came out is not like how we imagine going to a play today.  You know, you go in, you've bought a ticket, you watch the play, you get a glass of wine in the intermission and then you go home. Actually, it was part of a big festival called the Dionysia,  and it was actually a competition. So playwrights would submit three plays that tended to be connected by story, and they were all tragedies. And then they would submit a fourth play, which was called a satyr play, which was a sort of comic and vulgar piece that commented on the themes in the preceding tragedies, sort of to lift the mood at the end. If you've ever watched a horror film and then a cartoon afterwards, you understand the impetus there. Going to the theatre was really a marathon experience. So you were there all day and it was also like a marathon, a competition.   

So Aeschylus is competing against other playwrights. He's got this trilogy of plays.  Where is Agamemnon in the trilogy?   

So Agamemnon is first in the trilogy. It's followed by The Libation Bearers and the Eumenides, or the 'kindly ones.'   

So the trilogy is called the Oresteia. Why is it called that?   

Because it's about the rise of Orestes. So you do get this a fair bit in Greek literature,  where it's named after the sort of epic overarching story is named after the hero of the piece.  So think about the Odyssey, it's named after Odysseus and the Achilleid named after Achilles. So this is the Oresteia because despite the first play being called Agamemnon, it really is about the rise of Orestes.   

So I'm assuming that people in Athens, they're going to see this play. They may have heard what the title is going to be. Is this a story that they would have been able to, you know,  like see the title Agamemnon and say 'Yes, I know what's going to happen in this'?   

Yeah, absolutely. So this is very much not Aeschylus' story in terms of an original creation.  This is a story that the people would go very familiar with the characters and what's going to happen. It's more like a retelling or an adaptation of the stories that they already know.  So that's not to say that they could predict exactly how Aeschylus would present it.  And playwrights often changed how the plays would go or change the endings  or changed how the characters thought and functioned and felt about the events going on.  But the actual basic story would be something that everyone was very familiar with.  For the ancient Greeks, myths were sort of part religion, but part history as well, as well as entertainment and culture. So they absolutely would know the story going in.    

OK, so it's a bit like, I mean, this is the worst example that I can think of,  but it's the only one that's coming to my brain, like Disney films. Everyone knows Cinderella before they see the Disney Cinderella. Might have slightly different versions like the original fairy tale, but they know the basic plot points.    

That's one example. Another example you could use is kind of like all the novels  that we're getting right now that are retellings of Greek myth. We might already know the story, but we find them really entertaining anyway. In fact, one of the things that we tend to find the most entertaining about them is the fact that we already know the story, and then we're seeing it told in a different way. And Aeschylus was just doing the exact same thing in the fifth century BCE that authors today are doing.   

OK, so that makes sense. I mean, I can get the impression then that people in the audience  might have had expectations about where the play was going, and maybe Aeschylus is going to throw them a curveball or maybe look at something in a completely different way so that they start thinking, OK, new perspectives. That's interesting. So when we talk about plays being presented as a trilogy, is that something that was always an aspect of Greek tragedy,  or is this kind of a new development when Aeschylus is writing?   

 Well, you mentioned the big three. So when we say that, we tend to be referring to Aeschylus,  Sophocles, and Euripides. And Aeschylus is kind of the first of the big three,  or some might say the biggest of the three, but that's entirely down to your own preferences.  But he's kind of considered the first of the three. So when we think about this structure of the three plays, the trilogy, he's kind of the first to do it in that sense. So when we say trilogy, it can mean a slightly different thing when we talk about ancient Greek tragedy. In Aeschylus, in the Oresteia, it might be more of a familiar trilogy to what we think of as trilogy in the sense of three interconnecting stories, one following on from the other in a sort of sequential way.  But that doesn't mean that other trilogies within this festival were the same.  Sophocles, in particular, does a lot of different stories in his trilogies. But the exciting thing about this trilogy is that it's the only one that we have surviving as a full trilogy.    

Okay, that's good, right, because this is rare. When we're talking about the ancient playwrights,  they wrote a lot more than what we have surviving…   

My gosh, the dreams I have about finding these other plays is shocking. So Aeschylus is estimated to have written between 70 and 90 plays.  

 How many do we have?  

 We have seven. Sophocles wrote about 130 plays, and we have seven of his left as well.  Euripides wrote 92 plays, and we have 18 or 19 of his plays remaining. So yeah, it's big losses with all of the big three.   

Of course, of course it is. That's one thing that I very quickly learned as an ancient historian is we don't have much left.  

 I always say that's the biggest tragedy of Greek tragedy is that we don't have them all.  

 Yeah, I would agree. This is the trilogy that we have a full set of. That's, as you say, pretty spectacular. Let's talk about Agamemnon. Who are the main characters in Agamemnon?   Well, it's funny because you said that the Orestia is a slightly deceiving  name for the trilogy. I would say that Agamemnon is a slightly deceptive name for the play  because Agamemnon is in no way the main character. The main character is his wife, the queen, Clytemnestra.   

Okay. Why isn't the play called Clytemnestra? Do we know?

I'm going to go ahead and guess patriarchy a little bit.   

Right, okay. That would make sense.  

 I also think taking it into account with the wider trilogy, it's really about the end of one king and the rise of another. Taking that into account when we know that it's the story of Oresteia,  it's the first thing that has to happen for him to be king is for the previous king to die, right?  So that's part of the reason.   

So we've got Agamemnon, we've got Clytemnestra, and we've got any other characters that we might recognize the names of?    

Oh yes, we've got Cassandra, a doomed seer from Troy.    

Troy, okay. You're mentioning Troy, which I think is a great place to mention,  that these are all characters that anyone who's read the Iliad will know. I'm assuming a lot of the people in the audience would have listened to the Iliad being recited. So is Homer the only place that Aeschylus is taking the story from, or is this a common myth that everyone knows, not just from the Iliad? How familiar are the audience with these characters?    

So this is absolutely a story that basically everyone would know. And yes, you're right that they would be absolutely familiar with it from the Iliad. People would perform books of the Iliad as entertainment from memory, which is so shocking to think of now, when I can't even remember my own phone number half the time. So that's one way that they would be familiar.  But we have to remember that Homer is adapting from an oral tradition,  and that oral tradition doesn't go away when words start being committed to the page.  So this is like any other story that gets told and retold via word of mouth,  where you've probably heard a bunch of different versions of it,  and the story that you were told by your mother when you were a child  is going to be quite different to the version you hear in the bar when you're an adult.  But they're stories that they're most basic you would be familiar with. He's using characters that everyone knows.   

This part of the story though, it's not whilst Agamemnon is at war at Troy, is it? Is it like a sequel to the Iliad then, this play?   

That's absolutely a good way of thinking about it, because it's about what happens after the fall of Troy. It's about what happens when Agamemnon, King of Kings, gets home after Troy.  

  Okay, and there's a posh word for that, right? Nostos.  

  Yes.  

Nostos just means homecoming, return. And all of the Greek heroes are desperate for a return back home after they've won the war. How does Agamemnon's Nostos go?  I'm guessing that's the main point of this play, is talking about his homecoming, right?

   Yeah, I mean, that's another reason why you could say it's called Agamemnon,  is because it's about him coming home. In the same way that we say that sitcom characters, you can tell the main character, because it's the one who arrives at the beginning.  Arguably he's the main character, because it's about him coming back.  You know, I often don't have nice things to say about the heroes of the Trojan War,  but what I will say is that you can understand their desire for a Nostos.  You can understand why they're all desperate to get home after what was supposed to be a very swift victory turns into a dire 10-year war, where things only really start to kick off in  the last year of it. So, you know, in that sense, you can have some empathy for it.  The play opens with a watchman, basically, who's been tasked with the job of looking  out for lights. And this idea is that presumably Clytemnestra has set it up so that there's a series of lamps to be lit all the way from Troy to Mycenae. When she describes it, some of them are like maybe 15 miles apart, but some of them are like 100 miles apart.  He sees this light and it's the sign that Agamemnon is coming back. It's the sign of his Nostos.    

Okay, so if anyone's watched Lord of the Rings with the beacons, is that kind of thing?   

Absolutely. That's exactly how I imagine it.  

 Yeah, with the music and everything going. I've got it in my head right now, the music and that scene. Okay, Agamemnon is coming home. What does his wife think about this?

   Well, it depends if you listen to what she says or dig into what she says.  

 Ah ha.   

Because for all intents and purposes, she's like, oh, finally, my husband is coming home.  But we, as an audience who know the events preceding the play, know that that may not be entirely true.  

 Does she have a reason why she doesn't want her husband to come home? Did she replace him with a boyfriend?  

 Yeah, she replaced him with a boyfriend. That boyfriend is Agistus, who in the interest of keeping it in the family, which is not as much of a hang-up in Greek myth as it is to us, he is her husband's cousin.   

Okay, right. So she's replacing him with a boyfriend. I mean, he's been away for 10 years.  A woman has needs. Fine. Is there any other reason why she's not happy to have him home? 

  Yes. The boyfriend thing is kind of surplus to requirement,  despite the fact that Agistus also has his own beef with Agamemnon.  He's got his own reasons for revenge, but they frankly pale in comparison to Clytemnestra's.  Clytemnestra has spent 10 years waiting for her husband to come home,  not because she missed him, but because she's waiting for revenge.  And the reason why she wants revenge is because just before the start of the war,  he sacrificed their daughter to get fair winds to sail to Troy.   

The Iliad itself covers, what, like two weeks, a couple of months of a 10-year war.  We're talking about a sacrifice that happened just before the war started.  Where is this story coming from? What source is Aeschylus using? Is it just, again, an oral story that everyone knew, or is there another poem or play that already deals with the sacrifice of his daughter?  

 The answer to that question is yes. All of the above. All of the above.  We get all of the above. We get flashbacks to it in the Iliad.  I mean, yes, it only covers a couple of months of the war, but it's long.  I don't know if you know that. It's quite a long beast.   

 It's a hefty book.  

 Yeah. Not for the faint of heart. Yeah, so we get it in there. We get it in lots of other ancient texts like Apollodorus, and we get it in the Homeric texts and things like that. So yeah, we get it everywhere. He also likely would have seen it in his other plays, for example,  and in the plays of his contemporaries.   

So in other words then, when Aeschylus is writing this play, he doesn't have to worry about spending 10 minutes having his characters set up the backstory. The audience knows the backstory.  

 Yeah, as soon as Clytemnestra says, I am Clytemnestra, everyone in the audience is going to go, I know exactly what that means.  

 Okay, so if the audience knows what's going to happen, what's the point of writing the play?  Is he doing something different with this story?  

 Well, I mean, to answer a question in two parts, partly to go to what is the point of watching the play. Can I ask you, have you ever rewatched something? Do you have a comfort show?   

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely love comfort shows. 

  Have you ever read a book again? Have you ever read books that cover the same period of history, but from different perspectives?   

Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely.   

That's why people like it. They like to see a familiar story told in a new way.  And then in terms of differences, the way that the tragedians worked was they could play with the events as much as they liked and there was nothing sacred about the events of the story.  So yeah, he could get in there and mess with it as much as he likes. And there are some things with this version, with this myth, that change depending on who is telling it.  And he makes some interesting choices, especially with regards to the ending.   

 Right. Okay. Agamemnon is coming home. Clytemnestra has seen the lights. She knows he's coming home. It sounds like she's getting excited because she's finally going to get revenge after 10 years. What happens when Agamemnon gets home? Does she just stab him as soon as he crosses the threshold? 

  I would love if that was what happened. No, she first goes into a battle of wills with him  and wins this very small battle before the greater one to come. So just for context again,  remember that Agamemnon is coming home victorious, right? He's coming back.  He's cracked the golden egg of Troy. He's got innumerable wealth with him  and he's got the most desired concubine which we will use as a euphemism here to mean sex slave of the army, which is Cassandra. So he's come back on a wave of victory,  especially considering a lot of his peers haven't made it home either yet or ever.  So this victory is so important. And when the chorus sees him for the first time,  they say, how do we like revere you? They say, to quote from it,  tell me my king, Sacher of Troy, Atreus' offspring, how shall I speak to you?  How shall I revere you? And they go on to try and compare him to gods.  And he, in a very transparent play at avoiding Hubris, says, oh no, worship me as a man, not as a god. But this is the excitement and fervour that they have for him. And then Clytemnestra sees him. She sort of comes and sees him as he's coming in and she gives this very long speech  referencing Hercules and heroes and all of this stuff. And she says, come now, darling,  step from your vehicle. And this is where it gets interesting because she says, come now, darling, step from your vehicle, but keep your feet from the ground, great ravager of Ilium.  Now Ilium is another name for Troy, which is why the Iliad means Troy story.  

  Yeah, I love that.  

 You do not have a friend in horse. But yeah, so she says, don't step on the ground.  You are too good to step on the ground. And what she does is she has these tapestries  from their walls laid out on the ground for him to walk on. She says, you're too great to walk on this ground. And then Agamemnon, this is one of the only things that I love that he says  when in response to this very long speech that she gives, he says, offspring of leader left to guard my house. The speech you've given suits my absence well  since both were quite extended. He's like, you're yapping and I just want to come in.  And then he says, I can't walk on this tapestry because that's the kind of thing  that we would only do for gods, right? You're treating me like a god.  And I'm too humble for such a thing. I'm just a man. And understand here that when we say this, it's not just she's pulled down the curtains and he's walking on them.  Tapestries are a massive sign of wealth. This tapestry is worth its weight in silver or gold  because it was incredibly hard to dye them. She specifies that it's a purple cloth in other versions, other translations they say like a red and purple tapestry. But yeah, she lays this down and to get those dyes, people had to by hand dive and get these like sea snails and then mash them up and turn them into a dye. Like it was a very long process. And so this is a massive sign of wealth. This is like walking in, just stepping over gold cups and plates and things like that or just solid diamonds.  

 So she's not acting like a woman who's really hating having a husband home. She's lulling him into a false sense of security, right?   

Yeah, it's said that anytime we see someone walk on a red carpet,  this is a tradition that we get from this one scene of this one play.  So next time you're watching the BAFTAs, keep that in mind.  Hopefully those people aren't as doomed as Agamemnon is because think about these colors, this purple cloth. It's like a massive sign of wealth and purple is a symbol of like regality and kingliness, but it's also red. He's going in stepping on blood and it's such a powerful image.  A woman who's lost her daughter.  

 Yeah, that is, it sounds like she's giving him a bit of a clue amongst the false sense of security with the redness.   

Oh my gosh. Everything she says is giving them so many clues, right?   

But the boys aren't getting the hint, right?  

 Every single thing she says before doing what she does can be read in two ways.  It's a master of language in a way, because she's saying like, I've spent 10 years waiting for him to come home. And that's absolutely true. She's spent 10 years scheming for him to come home. And then she says like in this scene, she's like to be unenviable is unenviable.  And she talks about how the right people like lose and things like that in this exchange.  And she's really challenging him. She's like, she basically sets this up as a fight between them  and he loses. And she's saying like, this is how things are going to be now that you're home.   

Asserting dominance. I like it. Don't tell my husband I said that. So he's home.  She is not stating explicitly how angry she is, but there are certain hints that he's clearly not picking up. He's clearly not noticing what's going on. Is this because the return at this point is very public and she's waiting until they're inside like the domestic space where things are a bit more private? What happens when they all go inside and they're alone?   Y

eah. So obviously here he's followed by a big procession, but let's not let that imply that she's waiting to a moment where she has strength because she's really manipulating the fact  that they're in public right now to be like, you have to concede to me here otherwise.  Otherwise you're going to look so petty upon your return. So she plays with that.  Then she says, you know, come in, come in. But there's another matter to deal with  before they're allowed to go inside the house. And that's the problem of Cassandra. 

  So for those of us who kind of know the name but don't remember who Cassandra is,  she's a princess of Troy, but she's got very special skill, right?  

 Yes. She was a priestess of Apollo and as a god of prophecy, he gives her the gift of prophecy.  But he does so with some strings attached, I think it's fair to say. He gives her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sleeping with him. And she accepts, but you know, she's a young virgin. And when it comes to the moment at which she has to hold up her end of the deal,  she changes her mind, which, you know, you should always be able to withdraw consent.  But they didn't quite have that perspective in ancient Greece, especially with regards to a god.  So the problem is that he can't take away a gift that he's given. So he adds a caveat to it, a little codicil, if you will, and says that you can completely tell the future, but no one's ever going to believe you. So this is the curse that she has. She sees the future where her nation will fall  and her family will die and her city will burn and she will die and no one will believe her.  She sees Helen in Paris come to Troy and she says like, throw her in the sea,  but no one listens. And that was the great tragedy of Cassandra. A greater tragedy, perhaps,  is the fact that she is claimed by the brute Agamemnon when Troy falls.  And so she knows what fate awaits her when she does come to Mycenae  and when she does walk through the gates.   

So was this normal for Homeric Greek warriors that after the war was won,  they each just took a princess and used them as a slave for sexual purposes?  

 Yep, very much so. I mean, it's a very common thing in war to claim the women of the land  as part of claiming the land. Because if you think about claiming them as a sort of possession  in the same way that you claim, you know, people's stools or plates or tables.  But you also think of it as a way of sort of dominating the land because the thing is that, say,  those Trojan women then give birth to Greek children. So it's a sort of act of dominance and colonization. One of the more famous ones is Achilles and Neoptolemus. He takes Hector's widow Andromache as his war bride and he loves her better than he loves his wife.   

Okay, but is this when we're talking about Agamemnon and Cassandra  or any of the Greek warriors who took these sex slaves, should we be using the word love  or is this just them taking something that they believe is a right?  

 It's not a romantic situation. I mean, yes, from the perspective of the women, it's very much not a romantic situation. The women are absolutely victims, sexual and physical violence,  and they've been beaten down and the kind of psychological and physical trauma  that they've experienced is unimaginable. But for a lot of these men, they either see it as something that they're, well, they'd absolutely see it as something they're entitled to.  But some of them do believe that they have genuine connections with these women.  Achilles stops fighting in the Trojan War because he loves his sex slave Briseus so much.  Agamemnon says that he gets the greatest envy of Troy and he gets the greatest sort of possession, which is Cassandra.   So I'm assuming that Clytemnestra, she knows that this is the kind of thing that conquering heroes do. So when she sees Cassandra turn up on her doorstep, is she angry at Cassandra or is she angry at Agamemnon?   

It's interesting because I think that a lot of people say that she's angry at Cassandra as well.  She's not, you know, the kindest to her, but I don't think that she's unaware of where the blame truly lies. I think, again, she does this thing with her language where you can read it both ways.  So there's a bit where she says that Agamemnon had all the Cryseis' of Troy.  Now, Cryseis was his concubine, which again, sex slave, that he had to give up.  So she's clearly referring to the fact that she knows how he's been behaving. So she knows that she was going to expect this. So it hasn't taken her by surprise in the same way  that I think maybe he was expecting it to.  

 Right. In other words, he's been acting all boys on tour and she's saying to him very clearly,  I know what you were doing. You weren't being subtle. You know, just because I'm stuck at home doesn't mean that I don't know what's going on.  

 Yeah. I think that this is one of those moments where he begins to realise that actually  she hasn't been at home with her head in the sand the entire time because she's referring to the fact that she knows what he was up to. So that should, again, that should be a moment  where he goes, actually, maybe I should stand up for my intention. But once again, he's just like, oh, my dumb wife.  

 He doesn't sound like the smartest person in this play. Is that an accurate representation  of Agamemnon from the Homeric stories or is Aeschylus, you know, saying this guy sucks?   

A bit of both really. So maybe it's my bias, but when I read the Iliad, I absolutely see him being an idiot. You know, Achilles calls him like dog faced and a coward. And you can see him like his pride almost risking the entire war and his lust and his greed. So yes, but from a Homeric standpoint, he is very much still held up as the king of kings and chosen by the gods  and bearing the scepter of Zeus. But once we get to the tragedies in the fifth century BCE,  we start to get more critiques of the heroes and we start to see that perhaps they're not so heroic after all. And this is one of the excellent examples of that where we see Agamemnon  really torn down for the things that he does that are morally wrong.   

You mentioned the Cassandra problem. What is Clytemnestra's solution to the Cassandra problem?   

Well, at first, she, you know, welcomes her in. Actually, what I want to say here is that her solution to the Cassandra problem is the same solution as the one that she has  for the Agamemnon problem, which is to kindly welcome them in on the promise of a feast,  offer them a lovely, lovely bath, and then stab them to death.  

 Stab them to death in a bath?  

 Yep.  

 Okay. Cassandra can see the future. Does she at any point say we're going in, we're not coming out?  

 Yeah, she tells the chorus because Clytemnestra goes in and then the chorus and Cassandra  have this whole conversation and she's like wailing and saying that Apollo has left her  in her time of need and she knows what's going to happen when she goes in there.  

 Did she try telling Agamemnon?   

Why would you? Why would you tell Agamemnon? 

  I'm starting to think, yeah, why try and warn him? He's not going to believe you anyway,  but also you kind of want to see this guy stabbed. I want to see this guy stabbed already. 

  You know, I want to see this guy stabbed, but unfortunately we don't get to see it because of how Greek plays work.  

 Yes, it's worth mentioning, isn't it? All violence, all murders, all battles happen off stage  and then we hear someone reporting events to us afterwards, which is less fun, I think.  

 In a way it's less fun, but then you also get to play it out in your head as violently as you like.  So, you know. That's also true. But yes, so Cassandra talks to the chorus. She tells them her story of how she got her skills, I suppose, is a way that you would put it. It's kind of tough because she says that she like feels shame in telling them that she led him on  and then rescinded her consent, which, you know, we kind of have to take  as a product of the time. But it's interesting because the chorus mostly believe her  in spite of the fact that her curse is not to be believed. Up until that point,  up until the point where she's talking about the future that they currently are going to have,  they go along with it and they're like, oh, wow. But then at the point where she says,  I tell you, you'll see Agamemnon's death. The chorus says, poor thing. And then they also fall under this curse from Apollo to not believe her. So it kind of doesn't matter if she tells Agamemnon, if she tells the chorus. She tells all of us that they're not listening.

   Okay, so we're listening. 

  It's interesting because the reason why she doesn't want to go into the castle  isn't because death awaits her. This is something that I find so interesting.  She's happy to, you know, skip into her death in a way. She knows it's come in.  She's been prepared for it. She knows that the man responsible for the death of her entire family is going to die along with her. It's not too much of a curse in that way. And we see her in other plays by other tragedians saying, I can't wait, dance for me because I'm so excited  for this future that I see now. But the reason why she doesn't want to go into the palace  is a bit where she's like, right, I'm going to go in. And then she turns around in terror  and she's repulsed. The chorus think that it's because she doesn't want to go into  her fate in the house, but it's because the place reeks of dripping blood and murder.  That's what she says. She can smell, she can sense the long history of murder in this family  that's happened in this house. And she knows that the Furies are there waiting to claim the family. 

  The Furies, who are they?  

 The Furies are ancient deities that are in charge of justice. And the Olympians are terrified of them.  

 So justice, it sounds like justice is quite a big theme in the play then.  

 Oh yeah, it's a big theme across the entire trilogy. In fact, the third play is the world's first murder trial. We've got a jury and everything.   

When we're talking about Agamemnon's death, it happens in a bathtub offstage. So do we ever get a chance to hear Clytemnestra say to him, this is what I'm about to do to you and why?  Does she tell him you're going to die and it's because you killed our daughter?   

She doesn't get to tell him that, but she does get to tell us. She comes out and tells the audience, she tells the chorus. I would just like to say though that we know that Agamemnon dies because from offstage we hear him say, no, I've been hit. The wound is deep and deadly  and no stop again. A second blow has landed. So we can hear him being killed offstage,  which is both satisfying and kind of hilarious.  

 I've got images of some Greek with a bucket of water and a sponge making splashing noises,  you know, sound effects.   

Yeah, and then just someone really going like, ah, you have got me.   

Yeah, which I'm guessing,  you know, without all the CGI and stuff, fifth century BC, this was cutting edge theatre effects.   

Well, Sophocles is actually  accredited with the first  sort of set design.  

Oh, okay.  So we should assume  that there was no set for this then?  

Well, this is one of  Aeschylus' later plays  and he was a contemporary of Sophocles.  So maybe by this point  he had also adopted,  maybe there was some painting  to just show that they were  just outside the walls.  It's likely that there probably  would have been an image of a lion  because we really associate  that with mycenae.  So yeah, there could have been  some visual elements.  

That makes sense.  He arrives home.  They have a big argument  outside of the palace.  They go inside the palace.  We don't see the murder.  This play takes place in  what seems like one afternoon.  Is that quite normal  for a tragedy plot?  

Yeah, absolutely.  A lot of them tend to cover  kind of real time.  So you see things that could  almost feasibly happen  in the amount of time  that you're watching it  with a bit of a stretch.  But yeah, they don't  tend to span decades  like what we get in later plays.  

So Agamemnon's dead.  Was Cassandra in the same bath  as Agamemnon?  

Maybe. I don't know.  I wasn't there.  They don't specify.  No.  

Because I'm thinking, you know,  coming home to your wife  and then taking your sex slave  to the bath with you straight away  would, I mean, that alone  would be enough to get you stabbed.  

Alexandra, I can't express  this to you enough.  Agamemnon is so dumb.  Right, okay.  He's so full of his own hubris,  which is why it's so funny  when he comes back  and he's saying,  oh no, don't revere me as a god.  No, I couldn't walk on the tapestries  because that would make me like a god.  But he does see himself  as like a god.  He's got the scepter of Zeus.  He's the king of kings.  He comes in with like the booty of Troy  and, you know, I don't want to say  the booty of Troy about Cassandra  because that feels harsh  given that she's a terrible victim.  But, you know, he is really feeling himself.  He is the big man on campus  to his own mind.  So of course he can come in with his,  be like, welcome, wife.  You've got to welcome in my sex slave  and now we're all going to go  have a threesome in the bath  or you're going to attend to me  while I'm having sex with her in the bath  because A, he's been out of  what the Greeks would pass  as polite society for quite a long time  and B, he's coming back feeling immortal.  He feels unchallengeable.  He's taken down Priam.  He's taken down Troy.  What could happen to him now?  

I mean, I'm thinking of the vast,  infinite even entitlement  of certain modern royals  who are abusive to other people  and can't seem to realize  that this is stupid behavior.  And those royals,  the one I'm thinking of,  didn't even win a war.  I digress.  

It's almost like ultimate power  and wealth corrupts.  But it's the same message.  

Okay.  So Agamemnon is dead.  He's the title character of the play.  Does the play end as soon as he dies?  

Absolutely not.  That's when it gets good.  

Okay.  So what happens next?  Oh my God.  

So Clytemnestra comes out.  She's revealed, standing over two bloody corpses.  

Dramatic.  

I'm just going to say it.  It's sexy. 

 I mean, I like the woman.  I have to say.  

This is my image of it.  She's in a saffron dress.  Now in my heart,  the reason why she's in a saffron dress  is because that was very, very expensive.  And that is what they specify  that they dressed Iphigenia in  before what was supposed to be her wedding to Achilles,  but was actually her sacrifice.  So I imagine that she's like,  I've worn a saffron dress  for the occasion of my husband coming home.  This is entirely conjecture in my own head.  Blood spattered,  knife in hand,  two corpses on the floor.  

That's, you know, that is impact.  

I would like to specify  that these corpses are covered  with what looks like a big piece of material.  And the reason why is because  before she stabs him in the back,  Clytemnestra presents Agamemnon with a handmade gift,  which is very nice of her.  And the way I understand it,  it's sort of like a dressing gown.  So she's like, oh, you know,  put on this gown, get in the bath.  But the dressing gown sort of works  like a straight jacket  and imprisons him so that she can stab him.  And then the two corpses are sort of covered over  with the dressing gown slash straight jacket.  

Yeah, I mean, that's,  that's one hell of an image.  All of us who have known a little bit of,  you know, feminine rage once in a while,  I can imagine any woman watching this is thinking,  yeah, this is, this is quite good.  

I will defend Cassandra until my final breath,  because, and this is my favourite thing  to say about the story,  Agamemnon ran his bath and now he's got to lie in it.  

Yes. 

Yeah, I mean,  you can absolutely say with this  that he orchestrated his own demise.  Yeah, he gets everything that's come into him  and everything that he is killed for,  he is absolutely guilty of,  which I think is a very important thing to specify.  She doesn't make up charges against him.  

Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's important  because especially I'm thinking again,  you know, modern culture,  women are not exactly believed  when we're testifying to what we've been through.  But on this occasion, yes,  we can absolutely say we believe her  because we know that he definitely did do all of these things.  We've seen it in other plays,  we've seen it in the poems.  He has done this.  

But that's not to say that the chorus feel bad for her.  So the chorus is made up of old, archive men.  So men from the area who were too old to go to war  and they were the council who were supposed to think,  keep things taking over,  although obviously Clytemnestra has taken over that role  and has been ruling with an iron fist,  which again, sexy.  So she comes out, she's blood spattered  and she says, no.  Yeah, I did it. I killed him.  And they say, we're stunned at this defiance in your mouth,  this bragging speech above your husband's body.  And I'm quoting here from my favorite translation  of the Oresteia, which is Sarah Rudin's translation.  I think it's the best one.  And I wonder if you'll just give me patience to read out  just a few things that Clytemnestra says in response to this,  because everything she says is perfection.  She says to this chorus when they're like,  oh, you're a terrible woman bragging over your husband's body.  You should be ashamed.  And she says, you think you're prodding at a female moron,  but I don't shake inside addressing those who understand.  And you can praise or blame me.  It doesn't matter.  This is Agamemnon, my husband.  He's a corpse now.  My right hand, an honest builder, made this.  Here we are.  So at this point, she's saying like, yeah, and?  But then she goes on to say, so now you sentence me  to banishment, allot me hatred, rumbling civic curses.  Back then, you offered him no opposition  when he, as casual at one death amongst the crowding  and luxuriant flocks, sacrificed his own child,  my dearest birth pangs,  to conjure up some blasts of air from Thrace.  Wasn't it that polluted criminal you should have driven out?  

That's really powerful.  What I'm wondering is, do we think that Aeschylus  is making the chorus of these old men really unsympathetic  because that's Aeschylus' opinion of what's happening.  He is unsympathetic.  Or is he making the chorus deliberately unsympathetic  so that the audience then and the audience now think,  well, actually, they're not thinking this through.  When we look at it, how we're looking at it,  yes, we can understand it, our being intransigent.  

Yeah, so the chorus in this play, as in many tragedies,  represent the status quo.  They represent what the normal state of things are.  And they tend to be the sort of conservative voice  and they tend to challenge the protagonists  who are agents of change.  So in this one, it's very much the case that the chorus  are these presented as these fuddy duddy old men  who are dusty and gray and can't keep up with the times.  And they're clinging to this perceived power that they have  as the old men, as the men who were left in charge.  But Clytemnestra, with one fell swoop,  takes away any power that they have.  And we see them trying to tell her that she can't do this  and her saying, well, I already have.  

If we're talking about the themes again,  we're talking about justice and it sounds like  she's taking justice into her own hands.  What happens to her at the end of the play?  Is she executed?  Is she banished?  Is she punished in any way?  

Not at the end of this play.  So after Agamemnon has died, she comes out  and she's arguing with the chorus  and having this big back and forth.  And it's basically her opportunity to defend herself.  She gets this opportunity here to stand there  and give her reasons for why she did what she did.  She gets to say, look, this is what he did to me  and this is the only choice I had.  This is the thing, Clytemnestra has no legal recourse  to get justice for her daughter and for herself.  So of course she's saying to them,  this is the only choice I had.  And in some ways it's your fault  because you didn't condemn him.  And then there's all this interesting stuff about power.  She's got the power now.  She's claimed it from him  and there's nothing the chorus can do to stop her.  And then just at this point where it's sort of the epoch  of female power in the city,  which would be very threatening to an audience,  out comes a man.  Out comes Agistus, who is Clytemnestra's lover  slash Agamemnon's cousin.  And then he gives this very pointless monologue  about how he was also mad at Agamemnon  and the House of Atreus.  This is his revenge too.  But it's always come off slightly impotent to me  because he just comes on right at the end  and says, yeah, and I'm here too.  

Himbo boyfriend coming in at the end.  

I was there too.  And then it sort of ends  with Clytemnestra rejecting the chorus.  She says to Agistus, ignore that empty barking.  I will rule over this house with you and set it right.  So Agistus comes on and says,  well, don't worry, I'll be the ruler.  And she says, no, no, I'll be the one ruling.  Ignore all these old men.  So it very much ends with her seizing the power for herself  and making it quite clear that Agistus is just her arm candy.  

So it's the first part of a trilogy.  Do we see her popping up in parts two and three then?  

Well, we certainly see a pop up in part two.  In the Libation Bearers, we see Orestes return.  So he finally turns up in his trilogy.  

Okay, interesting.  It's a trilogy about him.  He doesn't pop up until episode two, as it were.  

Yeah, you know, it keeps the suspense alive.  And remember that people will be watching these all in one go.  It's kind of like a Netflix show dropping a whole season.  So they're not having to wait till next week to see the next episode.  So it's okay to wait for Orestes for the second one.  She is his mother.  So Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have,  depending on the version, three or four children.  They have Iphigenia, Orestes, Electra, and Chrysothemis, who isn't ever relevant.  So sometimes there's a Chrysothemis and sometimes there isn't.  So yeah, so they have these three children and each of them play a very important role.  Obviously, Iphigenia is killed before all of these events.  So she's kind of the impetus behind them.  Electra's job is very much to love her father and hate her mother.  There is a reason why Freud called the female version of the Oedipus complex,  the Electra complex.  She loves her father to the point of strangeness.  But she's also a traumatized child who was very much neglected by her mother  as her mother dealt with the grief of losing her eldest daughter.  And then we get to Orestes, and he's the prodigal son.  He's been sent away for fear of his safety because Agithsos might kill him.  It's a very uncertain time.  So he was sent away where he finds his  cousin, best friend, love of his life, Pylades, and they come back together.  So he's sort of grown up away from home, become a great warrior or whatever,  trained.  And then he's come back many years after the murder of Agamemnon.  And he has come to do his duty in the eyes of the gods and the laws of the land,  which is to avenge the death of his father.  That's literally his duty as a son is to avenge the death of his father.  

So in other words, between parts one and two, there's a bit of a time jump then?  

Yeah.  The problem with avenging the death of his father is of course the fact that  that will make him kill his mother, which is not allowed in the eyes of the gods.  

Right.  Okay.  Catch 22.  Okay.  So in other words, when we're talking about these plays,  so it really only makes sense if you're watching the trilogy  rather than watching Agamemnon on its own.  

Well, it works as a self-involved story, you know, man comes home, gets killed by wife,  wife claims throne.  That works as its own story.  And similarly, like the Libation Bearers and Eumenides work as their own stories,  but they do work one after the other.  I mean, we mentioned Lord of the Rings earlier.  It's like watching the Fellowship of the Rings.  It's great by itself, but it's also great if you watch all three  in one day while eating snacks.  So in Agamemnon, Clytemnestra kills her husband.  In the next section, Orestes kills his mother.  

We've got two extrajudicial murders that happened.  Does this lead us into the theme of part three, the idea of extrajudicial murder?  

Yes.  Part three is literally a murder trial.  It's literally like a true crime trial.  It's incredible.  It's so different to what anyone might expect the play to be without having read or seen it.  It's just not what's expected at all.  So having killed his mother, the furies drive Orestes mad,  because that's the punishment for killing your mother, right?  So he flees to Athens, which is, you know, this place of great democracy  and fairness and culture and kindness.  Again, remember that Aeschylus is Athenian and everyone watching it is Athenian,  so he's doing something there.  And so he goes to this greatest place in the world, Athens,  and I imagine that the crowd is sort of cheering at this point.  He beseeches the gods for help.  He says that he was just doing what Apollo told him to do.  Apollo said, you know, you have to avenge the death of your father.  And so down comes Athena, you know, patron goddess of Athens,  and she says, look, I've got to protect my city.  She's sort of like, NIMBY, not in my backyard, we'll sort this now.  So she presides over it like a judge and she gathers 11 men of Athens to act as a jury,  and she listens to both sides.  And the furies say, you know, this is the law as it was laid down before you were even born  and you're trying to come for our job.  And Apollo comes forward and says, look, I told him he had to do it.  And this is where it gets really interesting.  Apollo claims that the reason why it's okay to kill his mother  is because mothers aren't true parents.  So children are born from the seed of the man and women just function as incubators.  So they're not a true parent.  It gets worse because Athena agrees with him.  

Oh, God.  

She says, I don't see the point in women.  I don't have a mother, which she does, but that's a whole other thing.  She's like, I just love my dad, Zeus.  And I love all things male, except marriage.  So I don't value the life of a woman over that of a man.  And says, okay, yeah, killing a man is worse than killing a woman.  So you're free to go.  And the furies aren't keen on that until Athena in her infinite wisdom says,  okay, well, instead of being furies, you can become the kindly ones  and be protectors of Athens.  And so they become the kindly ones, which is what the name of the play means.  

I mean, we've mentioned that the final play takes place in Athens.  We've mentioned that this is an Athenian drama competition for Athenians by Athenians.  Athens is really important in both the narrative and the context of this play.  When we're talking about drama, we're talking about primarily 5th century,  when Athens is a radical democracy, quite unusual for the ancient Greek world.  Can we see a kind of correlation between the way that Aeschylus is writing this play  and the fact that he is delivering it to a democratic audience?  Is he trying to tell them something, advise them of something?  What's he trying to do?  

It's a celebration of new ways of conducting the law in a way,  because we see Agamemnon and Orestes as part of this very bloody ancient historical  form of justice. Orestes has to kill his mother because his mother kills his father.  His father killed his nephews and served them to his brother.  It's a very bloody, cursed line.  His great grandfather is Tantalus, who also serves human meat.  It's a very bloody line.  But we see that long, cursed history come to an end with justice and with democracy.  In the third play, we see that this massive conflict that spans generations  can be resolved using democracy and using processes of justice.  It's absolutely a celebration of that.  Essentially, Aeschylus is saying the old ways are flawed.  With this newfangled democracy and all of the processes that we've built into it,  we can improve.  Yeah, absolutely. There's also an element of desperate patriotism to that.  Ending the trilogy with a big celebration of Athenian culture and the new things  they're bringing to the world as a way of patting themselves on the back and  reminding them that their culture is something absolutely worth fighting for  and that the alternative is a long, bloody, brutal, bestial culture.  

We've got this trilogy. It's been performed at the Dionysia Festival.  Do we know if it won the prize?  

Oh, he almost always won the prize.   What you've got to know about Aeschylus is that he is a winner, right?  He likely came first almost every time that he competed.  He won as many as 13 times.  Sophocles pips him to the post. He won 30 times.  He actually is noted as beating Aeschylus once, but that's so noteworthy that we  have that piece of history passed down all the way to now.  Euripides only won four times, which is a shame because he's my favorite,  but we do have the most surviving plays from Euripides.  He won in the 3,000-year competition, but in the actual Dionysia, he wasn't as popular. 

 I know that Athenians were keen to write everything that they could down,  so do we know who the other playwrights competing that year were,  what the titles of their plays were, or is that something that we just will never know?  

It's tough because a lot of stuff is lost in history.  Like I said, we lost so many of their plays,  but one of the things that we do have, and this is in some ways why it's so frustrating,  is because we have so many titles of their plays, so this is one of the things that's so  difficult is that we have lists of titles of plays that were performed at Dionysias,  and so we can see the things that we're missing. 

 Yeah, it's tough, but yeah, so that's something that we often have,  but it doesn't mean that we know what things went up against  or we don't have the things that they went up against.  The Trilogy of Plays won the first prize because, well, the prize, there is no second prize,  there's no silver or bronze medals for Greeks, so it won the prize.  Clearly it resonated with whoever was judging it.  Did the play remain popular for a long time after Aeschylus wrote it?  Can we see further generations engaging with the play?  

Oh my god, absolutely. Aeschylus dies in Sicily in 456, I want to say. 

 So not long after he's written it then?  

No, no, I think this is his last one, it's certainly one of his last ones.  It's funny really because even Aristophanes, who spends a lot of time taking the mickey out of  Aeschylus and everyone else because he's a comedian of this period, he's maybe the  Greg Davis of the time, but he couldn't help but endorse his work as well for, like he said,  it was ethical and patriotic, and he says that he wishes that he could be brought back  to life, and then it's interesting because after this we see it forever. We see it being  reproduced still in Athens after he dies as part of the Dionysia, kind of like playing reruns or  just another run of it at the theatre, and then the Romans loved it so much that they  put it on all the time, they put on versions where they changed it slightly so that the  patriotism was shifted towards Rome because there's one thing we know about ancient Roman  literature, it's that it has to be super patriotic, and then yeah, so we see it getting  adapted and retold and just reproduced time and again throughout ancient history before we get to  more modern history from the early modern period onwards when people just became  really re-obsessed with the classics as they rediscovered them, and yeah,  Aeschylus was one of the most popular ones largely because we do have this surviving  trilogy and one of the things I just wish is that we had the satyr play that went with it  because if we had that then we'd have a complete one and we only have one full satyr play  surviving and its origins are disputed, although we tend to say it's a Euripides play.  If we had that then it would be a full, complete one. Having this complete trilogy is  a gift in its own way. 

So what about modern scholarship? What scholars had to say about it?  

I mean, it's a play that is used as an archetype. It's an archetype of these plays. People use it  to explain what these plays look like and how they are structured because it is considered  so typical or so like a perfect form of the kind of plays that were being put on at the  time. So in terms of educators, I would say that people use it a lot to be like, this is  what it worked like, especially when it's so easy to show that it's a complete trilogy.  A lot of people like to comment on the fact that this is a trilogy that works in a way  like the trilogies that we currently have where the stories lead on from one another  rather than vaguely connected or unconnected stories put together as a trilogy, which is  more what Sophocles did. 

Awesome. I would love to see the play. I don't speak Greek.  You've mentioned a translation that you like and we're going to put a link to that in  the episode description. If I wanted to watch it, is there a movie adaptation or a recording  of a play performance that you would recommend?

 Yeah, so there's a really famous one that  is often played and it's from 1981 and the complete thing is on YouTube. I think  it's in three parts, but it's from 1981. It's Sir Peter Hall and he directed Tony  Harrison's adaptation for the Royal National Theatre in London and the whole thing is  recorded on YouTube. It's a mixed bag for me, that version, because you do get to see a lot  of very traditional things in a way. They're all wearing masks, which was typical of Greek  theatre. I don't know why, it's just got a very big sort of horror theme to it. It's quite  sort of uncanny in a way. That's the main one that you can find online, but it's kind  of spooky. What I will say is that the BBC Radio did an absolutely excellent audio translation, BBC  Radio 3, that's incredible and it's got some really good actors in. It's got Leslie Sharp  playing Clytemnestra and Hugo Spears as Agamemnon. It's really, really good. It's  not really a watching it, but it's a great audio and you can listen to it like a podcast.  I wouldn't be me if I didn't also suggest some novelistic retellings from  the 21st century. I think this is a great way to appreciate the story without being worried  about reading a play in translation or watching it when it's a very spooky adaptation. I think  that Costanza Cassati's Clytemnestra is really excellent and I think that the story as it's  told in Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships is just perfect. There are some recommendations as  well if you want the story without the fear of reading a play, because a lot of people  don't like to read plays because you're not really supposed to read them, right? You're  supposed to watch them or listen to them. I do understand that a lot. People don't like  reading them, so read a novel inspired by it. 

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Okay. Final question.  What do you think the big impact of the play Agamemnon is and why is it still worth  reading or watching or listening to today? 

Because it deals with all of the same things  that we are worried about today. That's the thing. This is why we still love all of  these tragedies is because they are using Greek myth and well they are like Greek myth stories,  but the way that they're told is so human and they are problems that we still deal with today.  Obviously earlier we made a joke about powerful kings abusing their power, which is absolutely  a thing in the play. It's so much a battle of the sexes. This is why I wanted to talk  about this play with you because it is about man versus woman and it's about who has the  doesn't and how to reclaim that power or how to carve out a space for what you need to happen  in a world that doesn't make that space for you. This is a story that a lot of women  in the 21st century will absolutely understand. Even if they're not stabbing their husbands in  the bath, they might understand the desire to do so or they might understand the feeling that  the law isn't there to protect them when we live in a time where rape has effectively been  decriminalized and we see people who are vulnerable not protected by the law day in day  out. This is something we can absolutely relate to. When young people are fighting against the  people who say, well this is the way that things have always been done. That's Clytemnestra  arguing with the chorus. When Agistus pops up at the end and he's like, oh actually it's  about me. I think that we've all been in a meeting with that guy. It's about mothers and  whether your connection to, this is one of the really big things, is whether your connection to  your child or your connection to your husband is a deeper one and what happens when those two  things are at odds. Any mother whose child has even argued with their husband will know  the complexity of trying to navigate that. It's a story about what we owe to each other and  trying to navigate what we can live with or how we can change the things we can't live  with. I think that they're absolutely things that we still fight with today and that's why  it's still so popular. 

It really does sound evergreen.  

Yeah, absolutely. This is what I say about the tragedies anyway. They just deal with  eternal things. They deal with questions of mothers and fathers and nationality and war and  trauma and grief. It's all the things that we deal with today. In ancient Athens they  would have been watching this and they would have been using the familiar framework of the myth  to navigate these emotions that they were all dealing with at the time. Then again today  we're using the familiar story of myth to navigate the complex emotions and goings on of  the time. We're in some senses doing the exact same thing except we as girls are allowed to  go see them now. Yes and thank God because it sounds like this play is definitely worth  seeking out. So thank you Shelby for coming on to Ancient History 101 to talk about this play  and helping us to understand some of its complexities.