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

conventional language. But Cassandra does not lose intensity; she gains. She has been like a bride who hides behind a veil, a song of innocence. Now she calls for a song of experience and the only force that can inspire it:
    These roofs - look up - there is a dancing troupe
that never leaves. And they have their harmony
but it is harsh, their words are harsh, they drink
beyond the limit. Flushed on the blood of men
their spirit grows and none can turn away
their revel breeding in the veins - the Furies!
They cling to the house for life. They sing,
sing of the frenzy that began it all,
strain rising on strain, showering curses
on the man who tramples on his brother’s bed.
    A brutal irony and a brutal truth. The Furies’ revel, passing through the house, becomes as permanent as the roaring in the blood. They offer a form of recreation, which re-creates our pain and makes it inescapable. ‘Evil is unspectacular and always human,’ they might say with Auden, and they reveal what lies behind the traditional, sensational version of Thyestes’ banquet and the curse - a simple breach of faith. That is the curse, so human it is a perennial menace and, as we shall see, a well-spring of compassion. It is mortality itself that can, at any time, consume one’s offspring and one’s future, but it may provide a kind of sustenance as well. Live with the curse and with the Furies, and we may live intensely, even perhaps invigorated by their force. Apollo is oblivious to our origins; the Furies are our origins. Through them we may articulate ourselves, if we can bear to sing their song and take Cassandra’s lead.
    The old men are struck by her knowledge. She has passed the customary test of seers; she can report events she never witnessed. And she owes her vision to Apollo, but not its credibility. She committed a breach of faith herself, she explains; she deceived the god, and that is why he aborted his gift of prophecy. What added pathos to her lyrics, in other words, now gives her kinship with the story of fallibility she is telling, and increases her effect. Again she approaches Agamemnon’s murder, but now she begins at its source, Thyestes’ children,
    holding out their entrails . . . now it’s clear,
I can see the armfuls of compassion, see the father
reach to taste and -
For so much suffering,
I tell you, someone plots revenge.
    Here she assembles her own vision, basing it on insight, not the lightning of the god. In her eyes history becomes a living force, a continuum of movement and motivation. The suffering children, more than victims, have a new potential; it is less the macabre crime of Atreus than their grief and the grief of Thyestes, even of his insensitive son, that breeds the murder of Agamemnon. And Cassandra sees other human factors, too. There is the blindness of the king who, by obliterating Troy, destroys his own perception. Above all, there is the queen’s manipulation of appearances. Detest her as she may, Cassandra sees as Clytaemnestra sees, and brings to light her terrifying powers. There is a relationship between the murderess and the victim, as if Cassandra’s vision might inspire the queen’s revenge, the queen’s revenge fulfil Cassandra’s vision.
    The old men cannot accept the murder of the king. Hoping against hope, they look for a man to do the work and cannot see the woman, but this is a matter for the matriarchal hearth, as Cassandra’s third, climactic speech implies. Indignant at Apollo’s cruel indifference, she revolts against the god. She rips off his regalia, stamps it into the ground - an act of trampling that is the opposite of Agamemnon’s. She is not surrendering to her destiny, she is struggling to create it; not committing an outrage but decrying the abuses of the god. As she tramples on his robes she re-enacts his trampling out her credibility at Troy and now her life in Argos. And, by implicating Apollo so severely, she may strip him of his power in this play. Not until she