Agamemnon

Aeschylus was the earliest of the three great Attic tragedians. He was probably born around 525 BCE and died, after a storied career, around 456 BCE. In many ways, he defined the tragic genre, producing over 70 plays, of which seven are extant—although doubts are often cast upon his authorship of one of these works, Prometheus Bound. Even during his lifetime, Aeschylus was revered, and he became known for his literary innovations, his use of symbolism and metaphoric language, and his exploration of such themes as justice, fate, and the gods.

As with the other tragedians, Aeschylus’s biography is clouded by legend. However, ancient sources preserved a few reliable tidbits of information about his life. Aeschylus was the son of a man named Euphorion and hailed from an aristocratic family. He took up arms against the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE and again at Salamis—and probably also at Plataea—in 480. He began producing tragedies around 499, but he did not earn his first “victory,” or first prize, in Athens’s City Dionysia dramatic competition until 484. After that, his plays won at least 12 more victories. He visited Sicily at least twice. According to legend, he died there when an eagle dropped a turtle on his bald head, mistaking it for a stone.

The Oresteia—to which Agamemnon belongs—occupies a critical place in Aeschylus’s oeuvre as well as in the broader corpus of Attic tragedies. The Oresteia, made up of the tragedies Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides, is a complete trilogy, or a collection of three tragedies that were composed to be performed together. A fourth play—not a tragedy but a satyr play performed at the end of the Oresteia—completed the tetralogy (a group of four works), but it has been lost. The Oresteia is the only complete tragic trilogy to survive from ancient Greece. It is also Aeschylus’s latest surviving work. The trilogy was produced at the City Dionysia in 458, approximately two years before Aeschylus’s death. It won first prize and stands as a notable example of Aeschylus’s mature style.

Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia, displays many of the author’s distinctive stylistic and thematic interests. It is the first part of a connected trilogy, introducing a myth whose continuation is staged in the following two tragedies—a narrative style that Aeschylus was known for. Agamemnon is a play about justice and the role of fate and the gods in human life, some of Aeschylus’s favorite themes. The play also uses a third actor, an innovation that was introduced by either Aeschylus or his later contemporary, Sophocles; ancient sources do not agree on this point. This third actor acts as another interlocutor who engages with the chorus, which in Aeschylus’s style is very central and involved in the play. In fact, there is no dialogue among the actors of the play until the climax; the actors otherwise exclusively address the chorus, rather than each other. These features of the play showcase Aeschylus’s talents at their height and contrast him with his successors Sophocles and Euripides, who almost never produced connected trilogies. Aeschylus’s archaism is clear even in this later play, in contrast to the linguistic perfectionism of Sophocles and the rhetorical subversiveness of Euripides.