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Agamemnon
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Themes
The Relationship of Justice to Retribution and Suffering
In many ways, the central theme of Agamemnon is justice and its relationship to retribution and suffering. In the world of the play, justice is a harsh concept that is interpreted as essentially punitive or retributive. Justice in Agamemnon, in other words, means that those who do wrong are punished. This retributive justice requires either the gods or the characters to inflict suffering upon others.
The play is filled with examples—which may serve as cautionary tales—of punishments being inflicted upon wrongdoers. Paris and Helen—and, as a result of their actions, the city of Troy—are punished when the gods grant the Greeks victory in the Trojan War. This punishment provides justice both for Paris and Helen’s adultery and for his violation of the laws of hospitality when he stole the wife of his host, Menelaus. Likewise, when the Greeks desecrate the temples of the gods during the sacking of Troy, they are punished with a storm, sent by the gods, that destroys and scatters many ships. Justice is also meted out to Atreus and his descendants, whose atrocities are punished violently across generations: The crimes of Atreus are punished by his brother, Thyestes, and Thyestes’s son, Aegisthus; Thyestes and Aegisthus are, in turn, punished by Atreus’s sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon simply represents the next step in this cycle of suffering, retribution, and justice, with Clytemnestra and Aegisthus conspiring to kill Agamemnon as punishment for his earlier crimes, including the sacrifice of his daughter. The remaining plays in the Oresteia trilogy, Libation Bearers and Eumenides, represent the continuation and culmination of this seemingly interminable cycle, as Orestes returns to punish Clytemnestra and Aegisthus and the Erinyes come, in turn, to punish him.
Justice in Agamemnon, as in the other plays of the Oresteia, is ultimately seen as originating with the gods, although the vehicles who exact it are often human. Thus, it is the gods who decree that Troy must be punished, with even Agamemnon insisting that this judgment is unanimous:
Not from the lips of men the gods
Heard justice, but in one firm cast they laid their votes
Within the urn of blood that Ilium must die
And all her people; while above the opposite vase
The hand hovered and there was hope, but no vote fell (814-18).
Likewise, the murder of Agamemnon can also be interpreted as punishment from the gods for his own misdeeds, especially after Agamemnon commits hubris by stepping on the crimson tapestries set out for him by Clytemnestra. She prompts this process by encouraging him to take those steps, as it serves her interests to encourage his prideful tendencies and induce Agamemnon to commit hubris. Having suffered gravely since the sacrifice of her daughter, she does not hide the murders she commits; rather, she presents them triumphantly as justified acts of retribution.
Intrinsically tied to the play’s vision of justice is the idea that wisdom—that is, knowledge of how to behave justly—derives from suffering. Thus, being punished when one does wrong leads to the development of wisdom. This cultural belief underlies the chorus’s remarks that “wisdom / Comes alone through suffering” (177-79); “Justice tilts her scale so that those only / Learn who suffer” (250-51); and “he who has done shall suffer; that is law” (1566). However, this concept of learning through suffering is not fully realized or demonstrated by any of the characters of Agamemnon. Only Orestes, in the final play of the trilogy, will truly learn from his “suffering,” rather than simply being killed off and perpetuating the cycle of suffering and retribution with no development of moral understanding or wisdom.
The Inescapability of Fate
Related to the theme of retributive justice is the theme of The Inescapability of Fate. The notion of fate or destiny—in Greek moira—existed in a complex relationship with justice in the classical world. In the play, the inescapability of fate exists alongside the inevitability of justice, so that fate and justice are different yet interconnected and inseparable concepts. The theme of fate also raises the question of whether and to what extent the characters of the play may be held responsible for their own decisions.
The inescapability of fate is highlighted throughout Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Troy, for instance, is fated to be destroyed, and the outcome of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans is predicted before the fighting begins in the omen of the pregnant hare torn apart by eagles, which the seer Calchas interprets in the chorus’s parodos as a sign of the fate of Troy. The complex fates of Agamemnon and his house provide the central example of this theme and reveal that the intertwined processes of fate and justice encompass generations. The play stages the fate Agamemnon must suffer—being murdered by his wife and his cousin. His fate, though, is an extension of that of the house of Atreus, his father. Cassandra and Aegisthus reveal that fate drove the crimes of Atreus, Thyestes, and, ultimately, Agamemnon. The intricacies of the fates of Agamemnon’s killers as well as those of his avengers—Orestes and, to some extent, Electra—are explored in the remaining plays of the Oresteia.
The Oresteia demonstrates that what is fated is often synonymous with what is just: The fall of Troy, decreed by fate, is also necessitated by justice, much as the murder of Agamemnon may be viewed as retributive justice for his misdeeds. However, the fact that certain things are fated or just does not preclude the role of humans’ responsibility for their actions. Although Paris and Helen were fated to bring about the destruction of Troy, for example, they remain accountable for their sins against the gods, just as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and Aegisthus are morally responsible for the deeds they were fated to carry out. Thus, the overlapping ideas of fate, justice, and human responsibility put forward in the play may be categorized as overdetermined, or the result of more than one cause. While humans are held accountable for their actions, these forces conspire to render them almost powerless tools in the course of the events that they initiate. As Clytemnestra says to the chorus, “We could not do otherwise / Than we did” (1658-59).
The clearest illustration of the nature of fate comes in the exchange between Cassandra and the chorus in the fourth episode. Cassandra, as a prophet, knows exactly what the future holds—what is fated to happen. Yet her knowledge of her fate cannot help her escape it. This is due, in part, to the curse that prevents her predictions from being believed, but it demonstrates fate’s inalterable nature. As Cassandra realizes, she must “take my fate” (1290). This realization, as the play continually demonstrates, applies to each of the play’s characters. Whether they are aware of their fate or not, their actions are driven by and contribute to the fulfillment of their fates.
The Interdependence of Hope and Fear
Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is marked by a pervasive sense of foreboding that is developed most notably in the interdependence that it establishes between hope and fear. Its impending central disaster—the murder of Agamemnon—is foreshadowed throughout the play.
From the beginning of the play, the attitudes of many of the characters exhibit the themes of hope and fear. When the watchman delivers the Prologue, he prays for Agamemnon’s safe return, even as he hints at some obscure fear that he prefers to “leave to silence” (35). The herald, announcing Agamemnon’s return, begins to give voice to his fear but concludes by stating his hope that “it all come well in the end” (674). The chorus, in particular, takes up the theme of the interplay of hope and fear. In the sullen parodos, for instance, the chorus repeatedly breaks into the refrain, “Sing sorrow, sorrow: but good win out in the end” (121, 139, 159). Throughout the play, the chorus balances its fear that something terrible is imminent with its hope that everything will turn out well.
This constant state of apprehension is integral to the tone of the play, in which hope and fear are inseparable. More broadly, ambivalent senses of hope and fear were recurring ideas in ancient Greek culture. Especially famous is the myth of Pandora, which is best known from the poems of Hesiod, who unleashes all the evils of the world on humanity by opening a jar given her by the gods. When Pandora closes the jar, only hope—elpis in Greek—remains contained inside. Similarly, Greek philosophers explored the idea that opposing qualities such as hope and fear, good and evil, or pleasure and pain are mutually interdependent. In Plato’s Phaedo, for instance, Socrates famously notes that it is the pain of wearing a chain on his ankle that produces the pleasure of having the chain removed. The interplay of hope and fear in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, likewise, establishes the interdependence of these qualities: There can be no hope without fear and no fear without hope.
The psychological manifestation of the phenomena of hope and fear also functions on a deeper level to further the moral themes explored in the play, especially the theme of justice and its relationship to suffering and retribution. Throughout the play, the contrast and complementarity of fear versus hope mirrors and reflects the relationship of suffering to justice. The play espouses a trajectory from suffering to justice that is essentially hopeful: Whatever catastrophes must occur or evils must be suffered, that which is good will ultimately triumph.
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