The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies by Aeschylus Read Free Book Online Page A

return - offered to Zeus Ktêsios who guards the possessions of the house - though of course she means the murder of Agamemnon and his mistress. Cassandra remains impassive, and Clytaemnestra goes inside, exasperated. In this brief clash of wills the silence of Cassandra seems to defeat her argumentative opponent. But she is impervious to outside events, in the grip of a higher power and entranced, like a medium on the verge of vision.
    Cassandra breaks her silence with a scream that turns the house of Atreus into an echoing torture-chamber - a scream for Apollo, the god of enlightenment and prophecy, that makes his very name Destruction. And through his seer there flows - in language that could be clear only to ‘those who know’ - a pageant of disaster. The collective, curse-ridden past of the house is streaming into Thyestes’ murdered children, streaming into the murder of Agamemnon, streaming into the murder of Cassandra, into Argos are streaming all the murders done at Troy. At the core of her vision stands the king’s death, and each event that rushes towards it rises in stylistic violence, from the floating wreckage of the house, ‘kinsmen/torturing kinsmen, severed heads’, to a tableau vivant surfacing into the light like ghosts from a cavern half seen, half moving, ‘babies/wailing ... their flesh charred, the father gorging on their parts’, then to the murder of Agamemnon breaking out of the swirling mists of prophecy, breaking off in horror - Cassandra’s outcries stabbing into the darkness like the wounds that pierce the king. Apollo’s vision is a crescendo of shattering impressions. For all its seeming order of events, each stands out in isolation, unrelated in human terms, unmotivated, unbearable. Through the eyes of Apollo, history is a chronic nightmare, and Cassandra is at the mercy of the god, forced to endure his piling impositions. Her vision breaks apart. She is wrenched from Agamemnon’s death to prophesy her own. And although she subsides into an elegy, her suffering only grows. First Apollo exploits her as his medium, then he destroys her, ‘treads [her] down’ - his service is a rape.
    But there is a counterforce at work. At first the chorus is confused, as Aeschylus increases the pathos of Cassandra: Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy but added, ‘No one will believe you.’ The old men begin to, however, as the violence of her language forces them to live out the horror she foresees in broken flashes. They turn from terse disclaimers to a more coherent, lyric form of protest, and they do so when Apollo’s seer invokes another power. ‘Let the insatiate discord in the race/rear up and shriek “Avenge the victim - stone them dead!’” It is her first self-motivated utterance; it forces the old men to identify the Furies, the Furies shock them into song and new awareness, and Cassandra answers with a sudden, lucid pause: ‘There’s stealth and murder in that cauldron, do you hear?’ One mention of the Furies brings unusual clarity and more, Cassandra’s vision of the murder of the king. ‘Drag the great bull from the mate!/ . . . black horn glints, twists - she gores him through !’ Man is brutalized into beast, and the beast’s sex is perverted. A phrase from the Odyssey, Agamemnon ‘cut down like an ox at the trough’, erupts into a kind of religious, mythological upheaval. At the core of Apollo’s vision may stand the shattering of the god himself and his original triumph over Mother Earth; she rises up again, in effect, to claim her sacramental bull. And Apollo’s perspective shatters into tragedy and deeper human feeling. The old men reach towards Cassandra, they cry out to her, silent and about to die, to live and sing a more prophetic song.
    Now she repeats her declarations, with a difference. The old men ask for clarity, so she engages them in discourse, iambics and normal syntax, much as at Delphi the interpreters turned the outcries of the Pythia into