Classical Wisdom Litterae - January 2021

39 Plato. etching by D. Cunego, 1783 Crossing the Hellespont. Ink and watercolor to illustrate Xerxes XXXIX Agamemnon was the first of a trilogy of plays (the Oresteia ), performed back to back during the Great Dionysia of 458BC; it focused on two generations of ‘The Cursed House of Atreus’. Regular readers will be well-aware of the bad blood flowing through, and often out of, the members of this unfortunate dynasty. Tantalus (grandfather of Atreus) founded this woeful household of parricide, infanticide, cannibalism, incest and hubris. The sins that doomed his descendants? Not merely stealing from the gods, but also serving them his murdered son, Pelops for dinner. His punishment? Eternal hunger and thirst in the darkest recesses of the underworld (Tartarus) and a bloodline with filth in its veins. Aeschylus‘ trilogy begins three generations later. By its end, the family’s seemingly perpetual cycle of hubris and nemesis, sin and vengeance, betrayal and blood will have drawn to a close. However, there was plenty to get through before then, starting with the Agamemnon. Agamemnon, (great-grandson of Tantalus) has returned from leading the Greeks to victory in the Trojan War and is greeted at the door by his ‘loving’ wife Clytemnestra. From this moment on we witness what has, for her, been years in the planning: the total destruction of Agamemnon. Describing Clytemnestra as ‘loving’ is not facetious. Her strength of hate is borne from her strength of love, what we know as philos- aphilos . Clytemnestra’s hate for Agamemnon overtook/replaced her love for him when he killed their daughter Iphigenia in a religious sacrifice (without which the Greeks couldn’t have sailed to Troy). Any lingering doubt she may have had is extinguished when she sees her husband arriving home after ten y ars away bearing, BY B E N P O T T E R Cassandra