This and the following two posts are lectures that were delivered at St. John’s College in the fall of 2016. They are still a bit rough in places, and contain many intrusive notes, mostly references, in parentheses. But I hope they may have some value as they are. An appendix, better read only after the lectures, sets out a scheme of comparison between the two works in question.

Except incidentally, I do not address various major topics, such as war in the Iliad, or justice in the Oresteia; on the other hand I make much of some details. I keep summary of the story to a minimum, and present only some of the evidence for my claims. The first two lectures deal primarily with the Iliad, in the light of the first Chorus of Agamemnon; the third, with the Oresteia. I think they become more interesting as they go on; at any rate they become less reasonable. Knowing how hard it is to pick out what is important in hearing a lecture, I tried to call attention to points that seemed most worthy of it. —As to the notion of treating epic and drama together, one may imagine the playwright Aeschylus facing the problem of how to deal with Homer’s Agamemnon in crafting his own.

Some translations are from the Loeb Iliad (Murray, rev. Wyatt) or Oresteia (Sommerstein or Smyth). The wife of Agamemnon is called Clytaemestra as in Oresteia, rather than Clytemnestra as in Homer. DP = Denniston and Page’s Agamemnon. Thanks to three people who have read Agamemnon with me: Jiayue Zhu, Brendan Boyle, Jon Tuck.

The line references, which are not exhaustive, are given as follows. There is an inconsistency: sometimes the relevant range of lines is indicated, sometimes not.

     The number 5 (e.g.) by itself means line 5 of Agamemnon, except as noted below at *. If there is a possibility of confusion, the line is indicated as A 5.
     Ch 5 means line 5 of Choephoroi (Libation-Bearers).
     E 5 means line 5 of Eumenides.
     8.5 (e.g.) means Iliad, book 8, line 5.
     *In a sequence of references from Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, or Iliad, the source is not repeated if it is clear that all are from the same source.

 

Introduction

I aim to draw out some recurring patterns and persons from the Iliad and the Oresteia. These will suggest how deep is the stain of the curse on the house of Atreus, how hard to eradicate. The daimôn (1468–84, 1569, 1660, 1667; ἀλαστώρ 1500–12) that executes the curse—what is a daimôn? A divinity, a god, whether high or low; or the power of such a spirit; and also fortune, and specifically the fortune that attends one, one’s fate. In the present context I have in mind a special deity or spirit whose charge is the curse—the being that Clytaemestra and the Chorus in Agamemnon conceive as falling heavily upon the house (1468ff). If you prefer, you may say that the daimôn is the curse. This daimôn, then, tends to work in similar ways, variable in detail, but always looking to the fated and fatal end. It sets people at odds through their children and spouses; it arranges to have them doom their own kin, and themselves (1573); always it entraps. It is patient, and insatiable.

Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein;
Ob auß Langmuth er sich seumet, bringt mit Schärff er alles ein.
                                                            Friedrich von Logau

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.
                                                            trans. Longfellow
(Cf. 4.160f.)

 

Part 1

I’ll begin with the Watchman, that endearing character whose monologue opens Agamemnon. He has long idled on the roof of the Atreidae (“elbowed dogwise,” in Lattimore’s memorable translation), watching and waiting for the beacon-fire from Troy to reach the house, sometimes singing to ward off sleep, and troubled by thoughts of the good times that are gone. When the fire comes, he shouts. Now who is the Watchman? Why, he is Achilles in his tent: idle, watching and waiting for the fire to come from Troy to the ships, amusing himself by singing of former glories (9.186); and not long after the fire arrives, he too shouts. The hero that is gone is come again in Argos. —To be sure, the Watchman is not exactly Achilles, but only rather like him; and in fact the analogy I have just drawn, while correct in essence, will turn out not to be the closest one, as I will explain later. Regardless, as the Achilles-like figure that introduces the Oresteia he surely signals an intimate relation between the drama of Aeschylus and the epic of Homer. The relation is inescapable, since the first play of the trilogy embraces its vast predecessor. Indeed, the Oresteia and the Iliad constitute a single story, in which the house of Atreus expands to take in the Troad, and then contracts again. We would hardly expect the lessons of Homer to be lost on Aeschylus.

So we begin again. Atreus killed the little children of his brother Thyestes, who cursed his house (1602). The Chorus sings of the next generation: Helen has been taken from the sons of Atreus, the Atreidae Agamemnon and Menelaus; they cry out like birds of prey that have been robbed of the children (παίδων 50) for which they toiled (πόνον 54). Baffled, they revolve in eddies (στροφοδινοῦνται 51) above their eyries, until a god takes notice. Here at the beginning of the story we observe a certain confusion between a wife and a child, a lack of distinction between them; this will persist. For that matter the lamenting birds might as well be female as male, which suggests another blurring that will recur, that of the sexes.

Agamemnon and his brother ready a fleet at Aulis, but when Zeus affords them the omen of a pair of eagles killing a hare pregnant with offspring (112), Artemis takes offense (134), and makes the wind to blow against them (147, 193); to placate her, Iphigeneia must be lost if lost Helen is to be regained. The resultant sacrifice—the killing of his daughter—is hard for Agamemnon, who has to “put on the yoke-strap of necessity,” surrender his mind to the wind (218), and suffer a kind of derangement (παρακοπά 223, cf. φρενῶν κεκομμένος 479), in order to steel himself to it. The north winds from the far-away Thracian river that hold the ships are somehow akin to the “blasts of fortune” (186, 193, 214, 219) that buffet his will. This is a breath of the gods that calls for sacrifice. As for the victim, like the Watchman, like the house of Atreus itself as he conceives it—“If it could find voice, it might speak very plainly” (37)—she is denied the breath that makes speech (243); formerly she sang for her father (243), now a bridle forestalls any curse she might bring on the house (235). But it has long since been cursed through the deed of Atreus, if not before that, and the prophet Calchas knows that “remembering wrath,” μνάμων μῆνις, abides (μίμνει) in the house, wrath that avenges a child (154). His word is μῆνις, the first word of the Iliad, reserved there for gods and Achilles (as is its associated verb μηνίω, with one exception when Agamemnon’s passion merely reflects Achilles’, 1.247); and he calls the wrath παλίνορτος, “rising up again.” If these lectures have a key word, that is it.

And now Agamemnon is at Troy. The loss of his daughter goes far to explain his harsh rejection of the prayer of Chryses that he return his daughter to him (1.106)—the child of a priest of Apollo, an important man—and then his inordinate rage at the prophet’s counsel that the maiden must be given up. Having lost one valued high-born girl, one daughter, he is infuriated at the prospect of losing another. Of course years have passed—years of calendar time, but not of dramatic time; the beginning of the Iliad follows at once upon the sacrifice presented by Aeschylus. It may also be objected that the daughter of Chryses is no daughter of Agamemnon, rather is to be his concubine, whom he prefers to Clytaemestra (1.113); but I maintain that in his mind there is that confusion I spoke of between daughter and wife; which is not inapt, since having sacrificed one at home he will prove to have lost the other as well. His preference for Chryseis over Clytaemestra is reminiscent of his calling Iphigeneia “the glory, the delight, of his house” (ἄγαλμα 207), a being superior to his wife. As if to drive home the point that Chryses’ daughter is standing in for Iphigeneia, it is Calchas who forces Agamemnon to return the girl to her father—the same “prophet of evil” (1.106), as he now calls him, whose declaration of the divine will forced the leader’s hand at Aulis (198). There his girl was sacrificed to Artemis; here, she is lost to the priest of her brother Apollo; and in each case the sacrifice is demanded by the needs of the armed host.

Under compulsion Agamemnon gives her up; and now he is desperate to fill the void left him. For quite unawares, he is striving to undo his original act; that is, to deny the finality of his murder of Iphigeneia. Since that is impossible, he cannot be satisfied: he suffers in himself the insatiability of the daimôn. As he now presents the case, his dignity requires a prize (1.118). A few words from Achilles (1.122) are enough to provoke him to talk of taking Achilles’ Briseis, a threat which could be counted on to set the hero off, as it does. Of course it is wholly appropriate that Agamemnon should have his eye on Achilles’ woman. The prophet is under the protection of Achilles (1.85), who by calling the assembly (1.54) has usurped the leader’s role; and since Achilles is practically an armed host in himself, he seems to Agamemnon doubly responsible for his second loss. Moreover, it is asserted in the Cypria (that is, in the prose epitome of that lost epic, Loeb ed. pp. 492–94), and seems to be hinted at in Agamemnon (227, 1523), that Iphigeneia was lured to Aulis by a promise of marriage with Achilles; then she was the one who was to marry Achilles, and now Briseis may be regarded as taking that role. In fact Achilles will call Briseis his ἄλοχον θυμαρέα (9.336), his “wife, the darling of his heart” not just his “prize,” before allowing that his father Peleus at home will be ready to choose him a bride (9.394ff); and Briseis herself tells us that Patroclus, at least, promised her that she would be Achilles’ “lawful wedded wife” (κουριδίην ἄλοχον, 19.297­–98). If indeed Iphigeneia was lured according to the story, as I like to believe, it is Agamemnon who laid the bait; and so it is in Euripides (Iphigeneia at Aulis 98). So Briseis, another daughter (possibly the wife of a king, viz. Mynes 2.692, 19.295; her mother is “queenly,” πότνια 19.291) seems to Agamemnon the right one to appease the obsession that preoccupies him. For the third time—but only for a time—he has his girl; who, he asserts, never shares his bed—this he will solemnly swear on a later occasion (9.132, 274, 19.175, 187, 252ff).

Achilles too has long been repeating himself, fighting for Agamemnon only to see that unworthy leader take the fruits of his toil (1.161; he has taken twelve cities by ship, eleven by land, 9.328f; Troy would complete the latter count). He has the chance to break free by killing the king; prevented by divine persuasion, he withdraws to wait. Agamemnon takes Briseis, his counterfeit Iphigeneia; against the king Thersites springs up (2.212), a vulgar imitation of the hero’s noble angry soul, and is suppressed by Odysseus: Agamemnon with his false Iphigeneia has overcome only a false Achilles. But a strange thing happens: Achilles is drawn in to perform the same kind of self-condemning sacrifice as Agamemnon did at Aulis. Thinking to scorn the king, he is brought to imitate him—which he has already done, in a way, by withdrawing, establishing himself apart from the Greek encampment with the object of bringing it into submission, like Agamemnon outside the walls of Troy. He will call himself an exile, outcast, “refugee without rights” (ἀτίμητον μετανάστην 9.648 = 16.59, μετανάστης < ναίω “one who has had to change his home,” only here in Homer); we may recall that when Agamemnon and Menelaus were compared to birds robbed of their children, the birds were called “metics” in the upper air (μετοίκων [< μέτοικος] 57), dwellers without citizenship in the realm of the gods.

What (you may ask) does the daimôn have against Achilles? Nothing personal, I think, even if having served Agamemnon he is owed a share of his master’s suffering. Rather, Achilles is an instrument to sharpen Agamemnon’s adversity, to reduce him and bring him to know his folly so far as he can, and then to prepare his victory; nor will the hero’s work end in Troy. But more of this later. —Is the daimôn too hard on Achilles? Consider that while its power is great, its means are circumscribed; it must act according to its nature.

So doing, the mimetic daimôn enlists as its agent Nestor, the supreme tactician, for whom the present always repeats the past, though in diminished glory. (In his view of things we may recognize a motif of our story.) After the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, he had tried to bring them together (1.247); he will ultimately succeed, by establishing Achilles in the pattern Agamemnon has set, which will force him into the common cause. The sacrifice of Patroclus will move the goddess’s son Achilles to end his stillness as that of Iphigeneia moved Artemis to free the fleet.

At Aulis the Greeks were worn away by the stasis imposed by Artemis, angry over the hare: “unsparing of ships and cables” (195) were the winds from Thrace, the Chorus tells us, and the men were suffering sadly; at Troy, when Achilles withdraws from fight, time there has done its work on the army’s materiel, as Agamemnon says, using similar language: “Our ships’ timbers are rotted, and the tackle is slackened” (2.135); but the personnel are as yet fit for battle. Their case grows worse, their hearts are troubled like the sea stirred by the winds from Thrace (9.4), and the embassy to Achilles brings no relief. At last Achilles’s anger over Briseis has worn away the men too: all the best are wounded (11.825–26), says one of them, his exaggeration revealing his panic (the wounded are five: Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Machaon, and Eurypylus, as Nestor has already observed, 11.660–64). At Aulis a sacrifice was in order; so too here; and the man to recognize that is Nestor, who has seen so much more than the others.

The old warrior rescues the wounded healer Machaon from the battlefield (11.516); Achilles sees them returning to safety (11.599), and wishing to inquire, summons Patroclus; “and this to him was the beginning of evil” (11.604); for Achilles himself sends Patroclus to Nestor, whose words will lead him to his death. Thus Patroclus’s doom springs from an impulse of Achilles, expressive of his interest in the suffering that might recall him to battle. Now Nestor may be unaware that Achilles’ final response to the embassy (9.649–55) was more promising than Odysseus reported (9.678–92) (but see 11.666–68); in any case, since, as Phoenix observes, “It would be a harder task to save the ships when they are already burning” (9.601), Nestor aims to bring Achilles back to the fight before that happens. Perhaps believing that only personal vengeance will move him, he fires Patroclus with a story of his own youth, in which, when “all our best had been slain” in prior fighting (11.691), he, a mere stripling, astonished his father Neleus by his prowess in battle. “Neleus would not allow me to arm myself, but hid away my horses, for he thought that as yet I knew nothing of deeds of war. But even so I was preeminent among our horsemen, on foot though I was” (11.717–21: imagine young Nestor on foot among the mounted warriors). Coming to the relief of his city that was under threat (11.732–33)—here Patroclus can hardly fail to draw the obvious comparison to the present plight of the Achaean ships—the untrusted youth slew the leader of the enemy horsemen (738–46). “But Achilles,” Nestor tells Patroclus, “will have profit of his valor alone” (762–63).

Then he reminds Patroclus of his duty to Achilles (11.765), and proposes that if Achilles will not go out himself to fight, Patroclus may go in his stead (11.796). This is a substitution, not only reminiscent of Agamemnon’s successive replacements for Iphigeneia, but cruelly appropriate in the present case: for on his way to Achilles, Patroclus stops to treat wounded Eurypylus, which he can do, being himself a healer—taught the art by Achilles (who learned it from his tutor Cheiron, 11.831–32). Incidentally, the Achilles-like Watchman too seems familiar with it, since he uses several medical terms. —Undertaking to help Eurypylus, Patroclus is already standing in, so to speak, for his master Achilles in that role—and as Eurypylus suggests, he can take the place of Machaon and a wounded colleague (11.833); we may infer that having saved one healer, Nestor can sacrifice another. After all, Nestor’s way is to replace one thing with another, present events with past; one tends to discount his long-winded tales of the past, a capital error, since it is by them that he affects the present. Of special importance in this case is the deception he urges: “Let him give you his fair armor to wear into the war, in the hope that the Trojans may take you for him” (11.798–800). This Patroclus is to ask of the hero who has declared, in Patroclus’s hearing, “Hateful in my eyes as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his mind and says another” (9.312–13)! Whether or not deception in appearance is substantially different from deception in speech, the truth is that deception succeeds where forthrightness fails: for example, the fleet leaves Aulis in consequence, they say, of the treacherous pledge that doomed Iphigeneia; frank Achilles cannot slay Agamemnon as he wishes (1.216), but guileful (δολία 155, cf. Ch 888) Clytaemestra will do it; by a false dream—in the likeness of Nestor—Zeus undertakes to “do honor to Achilles and slay many beside the ships of the Achaeans” (2.3–4); not assault, but the Horse, will open Troy; Orestes only gets into the house of Aegisthus as a stranger (Ch 560). True, victory requires force; yet it is by deception that force is released. So Achilles, of all people to be enmeshed in falseness, once unwittingly Agamemnon’s bait to destroy Iphigeneia, now will be subtle Nestor’s instrument against poor Patroclus.

After much delay and intervening battle, the Trojans have driven the Greeks to their wall, and Patroclus seeing this can remain no longer with his wounded patient (15.390ff). Off he hurries to Achilles; and before he arrives, we learn that Zeus like Achilles has been waiting for the fire to reach the ships, in order (says the poet) to “fulfill completely the monstrous (ἐξαίσιον “beyond what is ordained or fated, outstepping right, lawless”) prayer of Thetis” (15.596ff) : that event will mark the turning point of the epic. By now it is evident that fire is something one waits for: Achilles, Zeus, the Watchman; and not least the army, anxious to have Achilles rage everywhere like wind-driven fire (20.490), that one day they may see Troy burning.

Patroclus’s coming is described by two similes. The first of these, offered by the poet, presents him as weeping in the very way that Agamemnon had wept before he sent the embassy: “like a fountain of dark water that down over the face of a sheer cliff pours its dusky stream” (9.13–15; 16.3–4). Achilles is not aware of the likeness, but we are; so the harshness of the second simile, to be presented by Achilles himself (who uses more similes than any other character; he was brought up to be μύθων ῥητήρ [ῥητήρ only here in Homer], 9.443), need not surprise us; for what is the coming of Patroclus but another embassy from Agamemnon, like the one Achilles has already rejected? The man asking to be sacrificed is one behaving like Agamemnon, therefore deserving of his fate. Sometimes the daimôn is ironical.

Achilles represents himself and Patroclus as mother and little daughter: the mother has somewhere to go; the daughter, toddling along like young Nestor on foot among the horsemen, hinders her, tearfully begging until she is picked up, presumably to be carried off to the destination that was not supposed to be hers. As for the image of carrying, that is quite appropriate for Achilles, as we will see presently. The meaning of the simile is transparent: the weaker fighter, ignorant of his peril, is to be swept along to the doom prepared for the stronger one. But it has a deeper fitness: not only does the comparison express unconscious apprehension of a fresh loss akin to that of Briseis; in multiple ways the death to which Achilles will send his friend, his alter ego, is a sacrifice analogous to that of Iphigeneia. Let me assemble some evidence in support of this claim.

Although Patroclus is older than Achilles (11.787), his shade reminds Achilles that as a little boy he was saved by Achilles’ father Peleus (23.84), and the two of them grew up together. Patroclus is a healer, as we know, having been Achilles’s pupil in that craft; he is kind and gentle (17.670, 19.300 [Briseis’s lament]), and he does the domestic work (1.337[?], 9.202ff). Achilles sings to him, as a mother would to her child (incidentally, behavior in keeping with his poetical flair for similes); like an obedient child, he is patient, but maybe not really listening (9.186–91): Achilles is taking the role of mother, Patroclus unintentionally finding himself the child, as in the simile. We may say that he is child and wife both to Achilles; as we know, that conflation of roles is not unexpected; and by sacrificing the child Achilles will lose the wife, as Agamemnon did. He has come to Achilles to take his appearance and armor, as Iphigeneia once was intended to take his name and protection. At first he cannot speak, as at the altar she could not, but only sought pity with her eyes (240); so too in the simile the girl’s “asking” (ἀνώγει 16.8) seems principally non-verbal—she clutches the mother’s robe, cries, and looks. When Patroclus is able to speak, he delivers a kind of curse, as Iphigeneia never could: “So he spoke in prayer, great fool that he was, for it was certain to be his own evil death and fate for which he prayed” (16.46–47)—“great fool,” μέγα νήπιος; that is, “greatly childish,“ after Achilles’ phrase in the simile, κούρη νηπίη (16.7–8), “childish girl,” possibly with a flavor of the meaning of Latin infans, not yet speaking (cf. Ch 755, 9.490f ἐν νηπιέηι ἀλεγεινῆι “in [your] troublesome childishness”). Agamemnon is hindered in his going by the delay caused by Iphigeneia—the waiting to learn her fate, and then the reluctance to sacrifice her; when it happens at last, she is held aloft, as the girl will be picked up; and the mother’s robe that the girl tugs at recalls the robes of Agamemnon at which Iphigeneia fell as a suppliant (233, on one interpretation), as well as her own robe of saffron that she “poured toward the ground” like a libation once she had been raised above the altar (239).

Thus even as Patroclus is carried to his death, Achilles is brought into the fatal pattern of child-sacrifice that entrapped Agamemnon. But then he was already in it, having gone to his mother Thetis to obtain the promise that would doom him. There it was he that wept (1.349, 357ff). Nor need we be astonished that in the simile Achilles is the mother rather than the father: it is Thetis through whom he touches the divine most immediately; his care for the army (not to speak of Calchas 1.85ff), he tells the embassy, has been like that of a mother bird watching over her chicks (9.323, fem. by αὐτῆι 324). Now he invites Patroclus to speak, using words much like, and in part identical to, the ones Thetis used to him. Thetis: “Child, why do you weep (τέκνον, τί κλαίεις)? What sorrow has come upon your heart? Speak out: do not hide it (ἐξαύδα, μὴ κεῦθε) in your mind, so we both may know” (1.362–63). Achilles: “Why, Patroclus, are you tearful (τίπτε δεδάκρυσαι, Πατρόκλεες)…? … Speak out: do not hide it in your mind, so we both may know” (16.7–19). (ἐξαύδα, μὴ κεῦθε only in these two places in Homer and at 18.73–74, when Thetis comes to Achilles to ask, τέκνον, τί κλαίεις;) But Thetis said, “Now you are doomed to a speedy death” (ὠκύμορος “quick-doomed” 1.417), so the repetition extends to Patroclus’s death, as Achilles should know, playing Thetis’s role and recalling her words. (She repeats ὠκύμορος to him at 18.95—his death will come right after Hector’s—and to Hephaestus at 18.458.)

“Be not indignant,” Patroclus begins—at my chiding you, ostensibly; but perhaps also at the suggestion which he well may be uneasy about making, that Achilles be a party to deception. But he must speak out, or be himself guilty of the behavior he knows Achilles cannot abide. So he puts forward Nestor’s proposal (quoting him), and Achilles responds “in great agitation”—the same state of mind as that in which Zeus replied to Thetis (1.517) when she came to him to plead Achilles’ case (μέγ’ ὀχθήσας 16.48, a phrase used nine times out of ten of Zeus, Poseidon, or Achilles [exception: Menelaus 17.18, whose first word is “Zeus“]; similar in sound and sense to words for carrying: with ὀχθέω “be moved” cf. ὀχέω p. “be carried,” ὄχεα “chariot”)—he responds in great agitation, not alluding to the deception, but cautioning Patroclus not to go too far; that is, not to try to be Achilles. If Patroclus is a mere child, he can be controlled; the little girl only goes farther than intended when carried by her mother. So he accedes. Here the timing is all-important. At the conclusion of the embassy Achilles had indicated that the Trojans would be stayed at his ship (9.654–55, 16.61–63); and since they aimed to burn the ships, this meant that he would wait for that to threaten. No sooner has he promised to send Patroclus out (16.64ff) than the fire reaches the ships (16.122–23). A little earlier, and Achilles would have had to join the fight himself; now having indulged Patroclus, he is reduced to spurring on the Myrmidons to war (16.155ff). Homer adjusts the timing of the fire with precision, bringing Achilles to the point of his promise just as he has led Hector to the ships.