Play: Agamemnon

Overview
Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, first performed in 458 BCE as the opening play of the Oresteia trilogy, depicts the victorious king of Argos returning from the Trojan War to a household poised for revenge. The drama knots together prophecy, justice, and the corrosive memory of past crimes, inaugurating a cycle of retribution that will only be resolved in the trilogy’s later parts.

Setting and Background
The action takes place before the royal palace of Argos. A watchman, stationed on the roof, opens the play by sighting a chain of signal fires that announce Troy’s fall. The Chorus of Argive elders, too old to fight, frames the story with memory and moral reflection, recalling how Agamemnon once appeased contrary winds by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia, a deed that planted rage within his wife, Clytemnestra.

Plot
Clytemnestra, governing in Agamemnon’s absence, reports the beacons and claims the war is over, speaking with a boldness that unsettles the elders. A herald soon confirms Troy’s destruction and the army’s homecoming, praising the king while hinting at the campaign’s ruthless cost. Clytemnestra masks hostility with ceremony, promising welcome for her husband.

Agamemnon arrives in triumph, bringing as a captive the Trojan prophetess Cassandra. Clytemnestra entreats him to enter the palace by treading a pathway of purple-dyed tapestries, a display suited to gods rather than mortals. Agamemnon hesitates, wary of offending divine limits, then consents. The act marks him with hubris and, more crucially, delivers him into the house’s “nets.”

Left outside, Cassandra is silent until seized by prophetic frenzy. She foresees slaughter within the palace and recounts the house’s vile lineage: the feud of Atreus and Thyestes, the banquet of children, the stored poison of ancestral guilt. She knows her own fate as well, yet laments that no one believes her, the curse laid by Apollo when she spurned him. Choosing to enter and face death, she prophesies further that a son will come to avenge the coming murders.

From within, Agamemnon’s cries reveal that he is struck down. The Chorus debates intervention but moves too late. The palace doors open to reveal Clytemnestra standing over the corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra, the king ensnared in a robe like a net and hacked with repeated blows. She declares the killing justice for Iphigenia and rejects any shame, claiming the deed as rightful vengeance rather than illicit treachery.

Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover and Thyestes’ son, arrives to assert his own revenge for his father’s suffering at the hands of Atreus, Agamemnon’s father. He and the Chorus hurl threats, and order seems on the verge of collapse. Clytemnestra imposes an uneasy calm, promising shared rule and a house purged of its ancient fever, even as the elders darkly foresee new bloodshed.

Characters
Agamemnon appears as both war-lord and flawed mortal, while Clytemnestra dominates the stage with steely rhetoric and calculated ceremony. Cassandra embodies unwanted truth, a prophet whose accuracy cannot secure belief. The Chorus speaks for civic memory and fearful piety, and Aegisthus personifies the returning weight of ancestral grievance.

Themes and Motifs
Justice appears as blood-price and counter-price, opposed to any stable civic order. Prophecy pervades the play, yet knowledge confers no power to avert fate. Gendered power is central: Clytemnestra overturns expectations of female silence and domesticity, wielding language, cunning, and iron. The imagery of nets, yokes, and paths entwines free choice with entanglement, while the purple tapestries crystallize the peril of excessive honor. The gods loom as guarantors of moral order, yet their signs propel catastrophe.

Ending and Foreshadowing
The play closes with rule seized but legitimacy unresolved. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus hold the palace, the Chorus retreats in dread, and the prophecy of a returning son lingers. The house of Atreus stands trapped between divine sanction and human revenge, awaiting the next turn in the chain of blood.