Agamemnon was the opening play in the tragic trilogy Oresteia, produced by the oldest of the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, in 458 B.C.E., when it won first prize at the major Athenian dramatic festival, the City Dionysia held in early March. It told how the supreme commander of the Greek expedition against Troy returned to find himself first supplanted and then murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. The story can be traced back to the earliest strata of Greek myth. The Odyssey mentions in more than one place the supreme commander’s fatal reception by his wife and her lover. Here the primary agent is Aegisthus, who, through the agency of a treacherous watchman, lures his cousin Agamemnon to a feast and there slays him “like an ox at the corn-crib”. Clytemnestra is merely an accomplice, aiding and abetting Aegisthus in the deed (although responsibility for the murder of Agamemnon’s war-prize, the Trojan priestess Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, is assigned specifically to her). The murder also appears as a subject in early Greek art (bronze shield-bands, terracotta plaques, archaic temple sculptures), and here Clytemnestra is sometimes depicted as the primary assailant with Aegisthus as her assistant. The story seems to have gained new popularity in the period just before the production of the Oresteia. The Boeotian poet Pindar presented his own version in his Eleventh Pythian Ode, to be dated probably 474 B.C.E. (Clytemnestra commits the murder), and a few years later the incident was depicted, this time with Aegisthus being the killer as in Homer, on a celebrated and much discussed Athenian red-figure vase now in Boston (Museum of Fine Arts 63.1246).

As Agamemnon opens, a man can be seen leaning over the balustrade on the roof of the skēnē — a building which was set up specially for the drama festival, for a permanent structure in stone was not to be built until decades, perhaps as much as a century, later. In his opening lines, the actor identifies himself as a Watchman in the royal household of the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus; this is their palace in Argos, and his commission, given him by Queen Clytemnestra, is to keep vigilant watch each night for a beacon-flare signal that Troy has been captured and that their King Agamemnon is on his way home. It has been a long, weary wait (the audience remembers from the myth that Troy fell only after a long and difficult – as we shall learn later in the play – siege). He will be glad to be relieved of this lonely and burdensome assignment, and he hints darkly that matters are not as they should be in the realm. As luck would have it, this is the very night when his labors are terminated, for he sights the beacon, dances a little jig to express his joy and relief, expresses genuine pleasure at the thought of seeing his master again after such a long time, and descends, probably by a ladder behind the skēnē, into the palace. (Since only three speaking actors were used, this man will do duty later as the Messenger sent in advance by Agamemnon.)

An invariable feature of any Greek play until the late classical period was the Chorus. Aeschylus’ later dramas used a Chorus of fifteen members, usually generic personages (here, “elders”, a kind of Privy Council of the King of Argos), who entered the area known as the orchestra, “dancing-place”, and were usually present for the remainder of the action. Their contribution to the progress of the action varied from play to play; it would be foolhardy and misleading to try to reduce their function to a single phrase (such as – one often encountered – that the Chorus’ role was to “comment upon” the action of the drama). The important point to make is that their choral songs, which they performed to the accompaniment of the aulos (a double-reed pipe, ancestor of the oboe), were also elaborately choreographed. In Aeschylus’ case we have independent and fairly trustworthy evidence for the high quality of his often intricate and innovative dance-figures. As can readily be seen, the real contribution of an ancient Greek dramatic Chorus to the total effect is now for the most part beyond recovery. All that remains is the verbal content of their songs; the music and the dancing have vanished. But even at that attenuated level what these Argive elders contribute to the piece is considerable.

What we learn from their Entrance-song, the parodos (the longest such song in all surviving Greek tragedy), is that the expedition against Troy has been gone for ten years, and would never have sailed at all if Agamemnon had not been willing to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigeneia to placate the anger of the goddess Artemis. As the army was mustering at Aulis on the Greek coast opposite Euboea an ominous event occurred: a pair of eagles, sacred to Zeus and interpreted by the official seer of the Greek forces, Calchas, as representing Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus, devoured a pregnant hare with her brood. Artemis took this as a presage of the slaughter of young innocents that would invariably occur if and when the Greeks overran Troy and, out of her love and patronage of all young living things in the natural world, stopped the winds from blowing. As the price for reversing her decision and allowing the Greek navy to set sail, she demanded a compensatory offering, the Commander’s daughter. Agamemnon is horrified, crushed in fact, but remains resolute in his determination to comply with what he took to be Zeus’ command to punish the Trojan prince Paris for having violated the sacred guest-host bond when, on a visit to Argos, he returned to Troy taking with him Menelaus’ wife, Clytemnestra’s half-sister Helen. Thus, Agamemnon, after anguished deliberation, decided to close his ears to his daughter’s piteous cries and to carry through with the sacrifice. (In another version of the myth Artemis substitutes a hind at the last moment and transports Iphigeneia to the Crimea to be her priestess in a bizarre, barbarian cult there.) An event of such enormity cannot, the Chorus imply, fail to have repercussions; justice must and will be done. As they are finishing their song, Queen Clytemnestra comes out of the palace. She has ordered the lighting of sacrificial fires in thanksgiving for her husband’s imminent return (the realities of actual time-lapse are here ignored). To counter the Chorus-leader’s dismissive attitude – “Perhaps it was all a dream, or wish-fulfillment...” – she gives them a detailed account of the complicated route she had arranged for the beacon-signal to follow in its trajectory from Troy to Argos. Then, in a kind of visionary trance, she describes, vividly and poignantly, the plaintive cries of the Trojan women as they lament their dead husbands, brother, sons and, contrastingly, the noisy Greek victors foraging indiscriminately for food in whatever still remained of the ruined city.

Another choral song follows, this one a “stationary” ode or stasimon in which the elders remark on the (apparent) justice of Troy’s destruction, a fitting retribution for Paris’ violation of his host’s board and bed. But before their song is over, the mood changes: the price paid by Greek families who sent off men and are receiving back urns full of their loved ones’ cremated ashes may be too high; besides (they now revert to their previous incredulity and suspicion that the Queen may be too gullible), how can one be sure that Troy really has fallen? Their hesitancy is put to rest by the arrival of a Herald who confirms the message of the beacons. He is overcome with joy at being back in his homeland and reunited with the citizen-elders, and they in turn express the yearning felt by the non-combatants for the long-absent army. The Herald then launches into a realistic account of the annoyances and discomforts of a long bivouac in a foreign land: sodden bed-rolls, skimpy provisions, lice, annually alternating frosts and heat waves – all of this now forgotten in the joy of imminent return. Clytemnestra, who either has been present on stage from her first entry or now reappears, orders the Herald to take a message to her husband, reassuring him of her joy at his return and her fidelity to him in his absence. The Herald for his part cannot leave without adding a painful codicil to an otherwise joyous and uplifting narrative: most of the ships returning to their home-cities were destroyed by a storm brought on by the gods as a punishment for certain misdeeds during the final sack of the city.

The Herald exits, and the Chorus sing their second stasimon. They remember and lament the destructive beauty of Helen whose mad escapade with the Trojan prince Alexander brought so much suffering both to his city and to Argos. She was like a lion-cub kept as a pet that, grown to maturity, turns savage and makes a bloody meal of its master’s household. As with the previous song, they have hardly finished their song when Agamemnon makes his triumphant entry in a chariot, accompanied by a female figure. He offers thanks to the gods both for his victory at Troy and for his safe return. His entrance into the palace is barred by Clytemnestra. She addresses first the citizens at large and then her husband with protestations that drip insincerity: loneliness and despair repeatedly brought her close to suicide; their son Orestes had to be spirited away to a connection in the north because of possible civil unrest. She has been pining away for her dear husband and now he has returned; there are rich purple tapestries strewn on his path to their palace, and he has only to alight from his chariot and proceed inside.

This is the crucial moment in the scene and indeed the whole play. Agamemnon knows he should not tread on the tapestries, but he succumbs to his wife’s verbal seduction. Is it not an action (she argues) that the oriental potentate Priam would perform? Surely the royal household has rich weavings in abundance and to spare. In a feeble compromise Agamemnon orders a servant to remove his boots to minimize the effects of an act he senses is both offensive and dangerous. He steps out of the chariot and proceeds into his palace – and to his death.

The remaining action can be briefly summarized. After another ode in which the Chorus give vent to their feelings of anxious foreboding, the identity of Agamemnon’s companion is revealed. She is the Trojan princess Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, whom Agamemnon has brought back as his war-prize and concubine. Resisting all efforts by Clytemnestra to make her step out of the chariot, she only does so after the Queen has left the stage into the palace. In highly emotional lyric outbursts she goes into a visionary trance and prophesies —over the unheeding objections and anxious outbursts of the Chorus-leader, who cannot or will not comprehend the unmistakable import of her words— the impending murders of both herself and her master. (Anticipating the action of the play to follow, she also foretells the return of Orestes to exact retribution for the now inevitable murders.) She enters the palace and in short order Agamemnon’s death-cries are heard. The twelve Chorus-members take turns remarking on and impotently deploring what they think – nay, rather, know – is happening inside when the palace-doors suddenly open revealing the murderess and her victims, Agamemnon still in the silver bath and entangled in the rich tapestries in which his wife had ensnared him and his concubine beside him. In a lengthy series of exchanges with the Chorus Clytemnestra claims vindication for the grievous harm done to her motherhood by Agamemnon’s slaughter of their daughter Iphigeneia, and flaunts her liaison with Agamemnon’s cousin, Aegisthus, as well as revealing her bitter jealousy of Cassandra and her husband’s other amorous conquests. She sees herself as the embodiment of the alastor or avenging spirit of the dynasty, come to take vengeance for a chain of family murders. Somewhat unexpectedly, Aegisthus enters and tries to justify his complicity in the killing: he was taking revenge for the unspeakable horror inflicted on his father, Thyestes, by the latter’s brother, Atreus, father of Agamemnon, who at a banquet ostensibly of reconciliation served up the flesh of Thyestes’ children. The Chorus-leader, in angry disgust, can do no more than threaten, and when his threats are about to be met by action on the part of Aegisthus’ bodyguard, Clytemnestra intervenes and expresses empty hopes for some kind of resolution that will cure the wounds, both long-festering and newly inflicted, that have afflicted this ill-fated family.

Recommended Reading:

Edition (Greek text with critical apparatus only):

Martin L. West, Aeschylus. Tragoediae 2nd ed. (Stuttgart 1998).

Greek-text editions with English commentaries:

Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus. Agamemnon 3 vols. (Oxford 1950).
John D. Denniston & Denys L. Page, Aeschylus. Agamemnon (Oxford 1957).

Greek text with English translation:

Alan H. Sommerstein (ed.), Aeschylus. Oresteia: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides [Loeb Classical Library 146] (Cambridge MA 2008).

Translations:

Christopher Collard, Aeschylus. Oresteia [Oxford World’s Classics] (Oxford 2003).
Michael Ewans, Aischylos. The Oresteia [The Everyman Library] (London 1995).

Studies:

Desmond J. Conacher, Aeschylus’ Oresteia (Toronto 1987).
Alan H. Sommerstein, Aeschylean Tragedy (Bari 1996).
Suzanne Saïd, “Aeschylean Tragedy,” in Justina Gregory (ed.), A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Oxford 2005) 215-32.
John Herington, Aeschylus [Hermes Books] (New Haven 1986).
A. J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy 2nd ed. (London 1999).

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Citation: Podlecki, Anthony. "Agamemnon". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 April 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6812, accessed 17 July 2025.]