The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Aeschylus · a tragic trilogy · three plays · 3,796 lines · Athens, 458 BC · in Aeschylus’ Greek, with Smyth’s Loeb translation (1926) for sense and quotation, and Browning’s literal <i>Agamemnon</i> (1877) where his English keeps the Greek compounds
Mode
Tragic trilogy as civic foundation myth; revenge drama turned into the founding of a court
Mythos
The curse on the house; the avenger avenged; the hunted son; the old powers given a home beneath the city
Phase
Three actions: a homecoming at Argos, the son’s return to the same door, the pursuit to Delphi and the trial at Athens; killings at 80 and 86 per cent of the first two plays, the verdict at 72 per cent of the third
Presentation
Drama for the Athenian festival; three plays of 1,673, 1,076 and 1,047 lines in the standard numbering, Greek verse spoken and sung by actors and a chorus
Register
From the Watchman’s proverb and the Nurse’s swaddling clothes to Cassandra’s lyric and the Binding Song; 45 per cent of the lines go to the chorus
Scale
One house, two cities, three storms on the royal line, the old gods and the new
Governing Proposition
A king comes home from a war he bought with his daughter’s life and is killed in his bath by his wife; their son comes home and kills her at the same door; the Furies hunt him to Athens, where a court acquits him on an equal vote. The wager of the trilogy is that retaliation cannot end itself, and that the court which ends it must give the old rage a home in the city instead of driving it out.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The trilogy opens on a man lying on a roof. “Release from this weary task of mine has been my plea to the gods throughout this long year’s watch,” the Watchman begins. He is watching for the fire that will tell of Troy’s fall. He keeps the watch because “thus commands my queen, woman in passionate heart and man in strength of purpose.” Smyth needs a phrase for what the Greek does in one word, androboulon: “gynaikos androboulon elpizon kear”
“The man’s-way-planning hoping heart of woman” (Ag. 11), as Browning’s literal version keeps it. When the beacon flares he calls on her to raise “a shout of joy in welcome of this fire” (28), and then he stops: “For the rest I stay silent; a great ox stands upon my tongue” (36). The house itself, he says, “could it but speak, might tell a plain enough tale.”
Around that silence stands a building of three plays, of 1,673, 1,076 and 1,047 lines. The first two are made to one plan: a homecoming, a deception at the door, a killing inside, a tableau over two bodies. The king is killed four-fifths of the way through the first play, and the mother is forced inside to die at 86 per cent of the second. The man the first play is named for is on stage for 193 of its lines, a little over a tenth; his wife speaks 337, a fifth, more than anyone else in it. The third play breaks the plan. Its verdict falls at 72 per cent, and more than a quarter of the play comes after it. Across the three plays the chorus moves from watching to urging to bringing the case: old men of Argos, captive women at a tomb, and the Furies themselves.
The Watchman’s fire is the first of the threads that run the whole length. The signal-flame he watches for (lampados, Ag. 8) returns as the torches of the last procession (lampadōn, Eum. 1022; lampadi, 1042). The shout of joy he calls for (ololygmon, Ag. 28) is raised by Clytemnestra in deceit (587, 595), heard again in Cassandra’s visions (1118, 1236), wished for and raised in the second play (Cho. 387, 942), and taken up in the last line of the third (Eum. 1047). The net is thrown over Troy (Ag. 358), round the king, over the robe his son holds up, and in the Furies’ hunt (Eum. 147), seventeen times in all. One law runs with these threads, and the first play states it before anything has happened.
Movement II
The elders’ first song is about an omen. Two eagles, “one black, one white of tail,” fall on “a hare with offspring unborn” as the army sets out, and the prophet Calchas reads it two ways: Troy will fall, and Artemis is angry. Each stanza closes on the same line, “ailinon ailinon eipe, to d’ eu nikatō”
“Sing the song of woe, the song of woe, but may the good prevail!” (Ag. 121, 139, 159). The refrain holds both halves of the omen at once and does not choose between them. Then the elders turn to “Zeus, whoever he may be” (160), and give the trilogy its law: “ton pathei mathos / thenta kyriōs echein”
“Zeus, who has established as a fixed law that wisdom comes by suffering” (177–178).
The song goes back to Aulis, where adverse winds hold the fleet and the price of sailing is the king’s daughter. The choice is made in a single line: “epei d’ anankas edy lepadnon”
“But when he had donned the yoke of Necessity” (218). The Greek word is the strap of a yoke, and the man puts it on himself. Iphigenia is lifted over the altar “as if she were a young goat,” gagged to “hold back the shouted curse against her house,” and “struck each of her sacrificers with a glance from her eyes beseeching pity, looking as if in a picture, wishing she could speak” (232–243). The elders go no further: “What happened next I did not see and do not tell” (248).
Between the sacrifice and the return the war keeps coming home. Ares “barters the bodies of men for gold” and sends back urns of ash (437–444). The Herald tells of the camp and of the storm in which “fire and sea, beforehand bitterest of foes, swore alliance” (650). The elders sing of a man who “reared in his house a lion’s whelp,” which grows up and defiles the house with blood, “A priest of ruin, by order of a god” (716–736). Then the king arrives, at 782, in a chariot with Cassandra beside him, and his wife has the way to the door laid with cloth: “Quick! With purple let his path be strewn, that Justice may usher him into a home he never hoped to see” (910–911). He walks in on it.
Movement III
Cassandra has stood silent since the chariot came in, 290 lines in all. When she speaks it is a cry: “otototoi popoi da. / Ōpollon Ōpollon”
“Woe, woe, woe! O Apollo, O Apollo!” (Ag. 1072–1073). The elders answer at first in spoken verse and reprove her (1074–1075), but by 1121 they are singing with her: “Back to my heart surge the drops of my pallid blood, even as when they drip from a mortal wound.” They are drawn into song by what they cannot yet understand. She sees the crimes of the house and the one about to be done in it, and a company that lives there: “For from this roof never departs a choir chanting in unison, but singing no harmonious tune” (1186–1187). It is the Furies, and they will be the chorus of the third play.
Her last words before she goes in are about all human fortune: “if misfortune strikes, the dash of a wet sponge blots out the drawing” (1328–1329). A few lines later the king cries out behind the door, twice: “ōmoi, peplēgmai kairian plēgēn esō”
“Alas! I am struck deep with a mortal blow!” (1343), and “And once again, alas! I am struck by a second blow” (1345). The killing is heard, not seen. The chorus breaks into twelve speeches of two lines each (1348–1371). One would summon the townsfolk, one would burst in while the sword is still wet, one reasons that “surmise differs from assurance,” and they agree only to find out how it stands with Atreus’ son. The chorus that has watched the play cannot decide what to do in it.
Then the bodies are shown, and Clytemnestra stands over them and tells it plainly: “Round him, as if to catch a haul of fish, I cast an impassable net—fatal wealth of robe” (1382–1383). She struck twice, and a third time as he lay, and his blood struck her “with dark drops of gory dew; while I rejoiced no less than the sown earth is gladdened in heaven’s refreshing rain at the birthtime of the flower buds” (1390–1392). Browning, keeping the Greek order, gives the image in its compounds: “The sown-stuff in its birth-throes from the calyx.” Before the play ends the elders find the law in what she has done: “pathein ton erxanta; thesmion gar”
“to him who does it shall be done; for it is law” (1563–1564). The law that brought the king down now stands over his killer.
Movement IV
The second play begins at the father’s tomb, with the son come home in secret. His sister finds the signs of him: “a lock cut as an offering for the tomb,” footprints, and a piece of her own weaving (Cho. 167–232). The play’s centre is the long lament at the tomb (306–478), a sixth of its length, in which son, sister and chorus call on the dead king until a reluctant son is made a killer. The chorus gives the first play’s law back in two words: “drasanti pathein”
“Let it be done to him as he does, says the age-old wisdom” (313–314). The law is the same, and it has a new subject.
Then the dream. Clytemnestra has dreamed “she gave birth to a serpent,” laid it in swaddling clothes and offered it her breast, and “it drew in clotted blood with the milk” (527–533). Orestes takes the dream on himself: “For I, turned serpent,” he says, “am her killer, as this dream declares” (549–550). The Greek has one word for “turned serpent”, ekdrakontōtheis, and with it the son becomes the snake of his mother’s dream. Of the ten times the trilogy names a snake, eight are in this play. Between the plan and the deed the play makes room for the Nurse, who remembers the infant’s linen: “laundress and nurse had the same function” (760). What the killing costs the household is measured in her.
At the door the rhyme with the first play is completed. The mother bares her breast to her son: “Have pity, child, upon this breast at which many times while you slept you sucked with toothless gums the milk that nourished you” (896–898). He turns to his friend: “Pylades, what shall I do? Shall I spare my mother out of pity?” (899). Pylades speaks the only three lines he has in the trilogy, ending “Count all men your enemies rather than the gods” (900–902). When she sees the dream come true, “I myself bore and nourished this serpent!” (928), he answers with the law in another form: “You killed him whom you should not; so suffer what should not be” (930). Over the two bodies he holds up the robe, “No, rather it is a net” (999–1000), and then he sees the Furies, whom no one else can see. The chorus asks: “Oh when will it finish its work, when will the fury of calamity, lulled to rest, find an end and cease?” (1075–1076).
Movement V
The third play opens at Delphi, where the priestess goes into the temple and comes out in horror: the Furies are asleep around the suppliant. Their noise is written into the text, a whine and a moan, mygmos and ōgmos (Eum. 117–129). Then the scene does what the house could not do. It leaves. At 235 the play is in Athens, and Orestes speaks to the goddess: “Lady Athena, at Loxias’ command I have come.” The Furies circle him and sing the song that binds, “a spell to bind the soul, not tuned to the lyre, withering the life of mortals” (332–333), and its refrain binds by coming back word for word (328–333, 341–346).
The trial opens with a trumpet “filled with human breath” (567–568). Orestes has no answer when the Furies ask how his mother could have nurtured him beneath her belt: “Do you reject the nearest kinship, that of a mother?” (607–608). He passes the question to Apollo (609–610), and Apollo answers with an embryology: “The mother of what is called her child is not the parent, but the nurse of the newly-sown embryo” (658–659). In the same speech he promises Athena, “I will make your city and people great” (667–668). Athena casts her vote for the son and gives her reason: “mētēr gar outis estin hē m’ egeinato”
“For there was no mother who gave me birth” (736), and she is “entirely on the father’s side” (738). The ballots are counted: “the numbers of the casts are equal” (752–753). The verdict rests on a goddess who had no mother, and the text does not hide it.
The verdict comes at 72 per cent, and the play spends more of its length persuading the Furies than trying Orestes. They answer with rage: “Younger gods, you have ridden down the ancient laws and have taken them from my hands!” (778–779). They sing that strophe twice, letter for letter (778–792, 808–822), and the next one twice as well. Athena answers each time with a new speech, the first beginning “you have not been defeated; the trial resulted fairly in an equal vote” (795–796). The rage keeps its words, the persuasion changes, and the rage gives way. Under torches and “robes dyed scarlet” (1028) the goddesses are sung to their home beneath the city: “deur’ ite, semnai”
“come here, venerable goddesses” (1041). The last words of the trilogy are the shout the Watchman called for on the roof: “ololyxate nyn epi molpais”
“cry aloud now in echo to our song” (1047).
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the Greek, where the verbal test costs nothing: refrains and strophes repeat by design, and the compounds fold a phrase into a word. Each play’s action is required by the next. The killing at the door in the first is repeated in the second so that the third can refuse to repeat it. The kommos at the tomb (Cho. 306–478) circles its appeal to the dead father, but it is where a reluctant son is made a killer. What holds the axis is civic matter fixed to 458, the Argive alliance (Eum. 289–291, 667–673, 762–774) and Athena’s claim in the Troad (397–402), 29 lines in all, with the Herald’s Menelaus, who points to the lost satyr play.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: retaliation cannot end itself. The first play gives the law, “pathein ton erxanta”
“to him who does it shall be done” (Ag. 1563–1564), and the second repeats it, “drasanti pathein”
“Let it be done to him as he does” (Cho. 313–314). The third breaks the chain by a vote, then spends a quarter of its length persuading the Furies to stay. The court rests on the mother’s demotion (Eum. 658–659), and the Greek marks that ground as partial. Orestes cannot answer the Furies (607–610); Apollo offers alliance in the same speech (667–673); the votes come out equal; Athena reasons from her own birth (736–738). Held below the top because the acquittal stands and the city is founded on it.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Height and frequency stand near the ceiling, and the elevation is mostly dread. The first play rises again and again: Aulis and the Hymn to Zeus, the king walking in on purple, Cassandra breaking almost three hundred lines of silence, the two cries behind the door (Ag. 1343, 1345), Clytemnestra over the bodies. In Cassandra’s scene the elders are drawn from spoken verse into her lyric: “epi de kardian edrame krokobaphēs / stagōn”
“Back to my heart surge the drops of my pallid blood” (1121–1122). The second play rises at the tomb and at the Furies no one else sees. Held below the top by the trial (Eum. 566–777), a fifth of the third play, flat by design.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The trilogy takes an inherited family curse and makes it the founding story of law. The archetype carries the structure: a daughter sacrificed, a husband killed, a mother killed, a son hunted, and a passage from chthonic to Olympian, from household to city. The Erinyes are not defeated but re-housed under the Areopagus as the Revered Ones, semnai, Smyth’s “venerable goddesses” (Eum. 1041); the title’s Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, never names them in the text. The figures stay particular. Clytemnestra is the avenging mother and a political mind: “gynaikos androboulon elpizon kear”
“The man’s-way-planning hoping heart of woman” (Ag. 11, Browning). Held a tenth from the top because the gods of the third play are more emblem than person.
Score: 9.7 / 10
The inheritance is known: the Odyssey’s Orestes, whose revenge is an example; Stesichorus’ lost Oresteia; Pindar’s eleventh Pythian. The departures are large. Clytemnestra becomes the killer and the trilogy’s dominant mind, the matricide becomes a question, and the myth ends in a court, which Athena calls the “first trial for bloodshed” (Eum. 681–682). She names the hill from the Amazons’ sacrifice to Ares (685–690), not from a trial of Ares. The stake was civic: the trilogy came within four years of Ephialtes’ reform of the Areopagus. What holds it lowest of the twelve is Aeschylus’ own precedent. The connected trilogy was his practised form, and his Danaid plays may also have ended in a settlement.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Change the form and the trilogy loses what it knows. Its claim is that justice is learned over time and through repetition, and only a sequence can make it. The first two plays rhyme: a homecoming, a deception at the door, a killing inside, a tableau over two bodies, the trapping robe shown both times (Ag. 1382; Cho. 997–1000). The third breaks the rhyme by changing the form itself. The scene leaves the house for Delphi and then Athens (Eum. 235); the chorus, which watched in the first play and urged in the second, becomes a party to the case; votes replace the blow. One signal fire opens the trilogy, and a procession of torches closes it.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Evidence counts over promise, and there are some twenty-four centuries of it. Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BC) picks apart the opening lines of the Libation Bearers. Hegel read the trilogy as an argument about ethical order; Bachofen, and Engels after him, read the third play as the passage from mother-right to father-right; Nietzsche built on Aeschylus in The Birth of Tragedy; Froma Zeitlin’s “The Dynamics of Misogyny” read the court’s founding as the founding of a hierarchy. The image systems are still being traced: the net from Troy (Ag. 358) to the Furies’ hunt (Eum. 147), the lion cub (Ag. 716–736), the snake of the dream (Cho. 527–533). Held below the top because several readings reach the work through its third play alone.
Score: 9.6 / 10
A published work, so both components are scored together. The intrinsic force is large: the trilogy made the connected trilogy a single argument across three actions, moved a myth from the house into the city’s institutions, and made the chorus an agent rather than a commentator. Reach is discounted for a long eclipse. From late antiquity to the eighteenth century Aeschylus was scarcely read in the West. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Sophocles and Euripides each answered the Libation Bearers with an Electra, Seneca’s Agamemnon follows, and after the modern recovery come Wagner, O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Sartre’s Les Mouches, Eliot’s The Family Reunion, Pasolini and the National Theatre’s 1981 staging in Tony Harrison’s version.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over some two and a half millennia, and the trilogy has been played in every recent decade. Part of its surface is fixed to 458: the Argive alliance, the quarrel over the Areopagus, Athenian self-praise in the closing blessings. The trilogy has outlived all of that, and its gods, and the court it celebrates. Its survival was narrow. The satyr play that completed the set, Proteus, is lost, and the opening of the second play is damaged, with gaps in its first ten lines. The axis credits survival, not the risk of it. The topical surface still costs something. The trilogy’s depth pays nothing for it; its survival pays a step.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Judged on Aeschylus’ Greek. The lyric is built. The entrance song turns on a refrain, “ailinon ailinon eipe, to d’ eu nikatō”
“Sing the song of woe, the song of woe, but may the good prevail!” (Ag. 121, 139, 159). In the persuasion the Furies sing the same strophe twice, letter for letter (Eum. 778–792, 808–822). The compounds fold a phrase into a word: ekdrakontōtheis, “turned serpent” (Cho. 549), makes Orestes the snake of his mother’s dream. Staging is written into the words: the purple path, the cries behind the door, the knock (Cho. 653), the trumpet, the torches. Held below the top by the trial’s question-and-answer (Eum. 585–608) and Agamemnon’s entrance speech (Ag. 810–854), which carry argument more than life.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The two most distant elements are the Nurse’s comic memory of the infant Orestes, “laundress and nurse had the same function” (Cho. 760), and the Furies’ Binding Song, “a spell to bind the soul” (Eum. 332). They obey one law. The Nurse measures what killing costs a household, and the Furies are that cost made into a power. One principle governs all three plays: the doer suffers. The third play changes the law’s instrument without breaking the law: the Furies keep their office and their honour. The strain is in register and argument. The trial turns tragedy towards civic pageant, and Apollo’s embryology is thin, perhaps on purpose, since the verdict comes from an equal vote and is completed by persuasion: a declared seam.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Many orders are held in one action of under 3,800 lines, and they are integrated, not listed. The family: marriage, parent and child, siblings, a curse handed down. War: Troy, and Ares who “barters the bodies of men for gold” (Ag. 437–444). The state: tyranny in Argos, the court in Athens. The sacred: the old chthonic powers and the new Olympians brought to terms. The natural order: the eagles and the pregnant hare, the storm at sea (650–673), the closing blessings on soil, flock and birth. One law of consequence places each. Two orders are held lightly. Consciousness is brief: Orestes deliberates in a line, “Pylades, what shall I do?” (Cho. 899). Labour appears in the Watchman, the Herald’s camp (Ag. 555–562) and the Nurse.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep and The Living Form at 9.7, with The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and The Made at 9.6. A family curse built into the founding story of law, a claim about justice that only a sequence of three plays could make, and a Greek whose strophes, compounds and staging carry the argument at every scale.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 9.1, held by Aeschylus’ own precedent: the connected trilogy was his practised form, and his Danaid plays may also have ended in a settlement. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 9.2, held by civic matter fixed to 458, the Argive alliance and Athena’s claim in the Troad, 29 lines, and by the Herald’s Menelaus, who points to the lost satyr play.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.7, The Inner Law at 9.5, The Made at 9.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.7, The Imperishable at 9.5, The Unconcealment at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.4 and The Swerve at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 9.1, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.5. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a full reading of the Oresteia in Aeschylus’ Greek, Smyth’s text as given by the Perseus Digital Library — Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides, read whole and in order, 1,673, 1,076 and 1,047 lines in the standard numbering, 3,796 in all. Read alongside Smyth’s Loeb translation (1926), Perseus, chosen because it is close prose that follows the Greek line by line in all three plays and can be checked word for word. It is used for sense and for every English quotation on this page but two, and its English is not charged to the trilogy. Browning’s literal Agamemnon (1877), Perseus, supplies those two, at Ag. 11 and 1392, because his word order keeps compounds that Smyth spreads into phrases; he covers only the first play and is not used for continuous quotation. Greek is given in transliteration where a point turns on the words. References are to the Greek line numbers; Smyth’s numbering and order differ from the Greek at Ag. 1654–1673. The metre, music and dance are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged.