(Vahid NAB's Library)

Although no contemporary writers or biographers provide much reliable information about the life of Aeschylus as it actually unfolded, it has been possible to reconstruct, from later ancient chroniclers and historians, a tentative outline. Aeschylus was born around 525 B.C.E at Eleusis, a town west of Athens and famous home of the cult of Demeter, a mystery cult which, through various rituals, prepared Greek souls for their transition into the afterlife. His father was named Europhion and there is documentation of a brother who was later killed at the Battle or Marathon. The playwright matured under as the Athenian democracy regained power after a period of tyranny and sought to hold it against both internal and external threats. Significantly, his adolescent years saw the Athenians overthrow the tyrant Pisistratid family and establish the first democracy. The tension between democratic ideals and tyranny would eventually find its way into his plays, including Agagmemnon. Moreover, the ancient writer Pausanias wrote that Aeschylus' tombstone made no mention of drama's such as the Oresteia, but proclaimed his participation as a soldier in those famous Athenian military victories against the Persians at Salamis and Marathon which contributed to much to the growth of Athenian confidence and power. Athens returned the favor, since it regarded Aeschylus as one of the main representatives of its Golden Age, before the Peloponnesian War and the teaching of the Sophists had weakened traditional Athenian society. Aeschylus is known to have fought with his brother for Greece against Persian invaders at Marathon in 490. It was the first successful major repulsion of the Persians by Greeks; Aeschylus was around thirty-five years old at the time. He went to war again at Salamis and Artemisium in 480 and possibly the next year at Plataea. By this time, however, his career as a dramatist was already well underway. Aeschylus is thought to have written his first plays around the year 500, for the legendary dramatic competition, the Great Dionysa, at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens, where they were performed. The competition, held in the annually in the spring, drew the most talented playwrights from around Greece for several decades. Plays were composed in trilogies, three lofty tragedies in unsequential arrangement or on a common theme, and one satyr play, or burlesque comedy. They were then judged according to high aesthetic criteria as well as the approval of the general audience. Aeschylus won his first victory in 484 and went on to win twelve more after that. In total, Aeschylus wrote approximately ninety plays, the titles of about eighty of which are known. However, only seven tragedies of the prodigious playwright's works survive. His earliest existing play is The Persians, presented in 472. A historical tragedy about the Battle of Salamís, set in Persia at the court of the mother of King Xerxes I, the play drew an invitation from Hieron I, tyrant of Syracuse, to performance before his court. It is highly probably Aeschylus drew on his own experiences at Salamis with the Persians, who had again invaded Greece around 480, in creating the famous play. Although Aeschylus was the undisputed champion of the competition at Athens for most of his illustrious career, he suffered a memorable defeat in 486 to a young Sophocles. There were not to be two in a row, for the next year Aeschylus produced his Oedipus trilogy of which Seven Against Thebes is the only survivor. The Oresteia, Aeschylus' masterpiece and his only intact trilogy, was writen in 458. Shortly after presenting it, the playwright traveled to Sicily for a second time. It was there also, in Gela, that Aeschylus died in 455-6 B.C.E. His son Europhion was a prominent dramatist in his own right, stealing victory from Sophocles and Euripides in a subsequent round of the competition his father had once dominated for so many years. Aeschylus's innovations in the ancient dramatic form were fundamental. Chiefly, he was responsible for the introduction of a second actor. Whereas, previous to Aeschylus, plays had been more like recitations between a single actor and a chorus, the use of a second actor increased immensely the possiblities for flexible dramatic action and dialogue. He also expanded the presentation of drama by means of more elaborate costuming, stage machinery, and scenery. Majesty, profundity, and loft of language and theme are characteristic of the grand style of the so-called "Father of Tragedy."

Agamemnon is only the first play of the great tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia around 458 B.C.E.. It is his sole trilogy to survive intact. The two other plays, Choephori and Eumenides, and a lost satyr play called Proteus won its author first prize at the Great Dionysa that same year. A dramatic competition whose later victors included Sophocles and Euripides, the Great Dionysa took place once a year in Athens during the festival of Dionysus. The conventions of the competition were such that dramatists were responsible for nearly every aspect of production and staging, from composition of the plays themselves to costumes and scenery. In fact, Aeschylus probably acted in the first performances of the Oresteia. Plays were judged according to both high aesthetic criteria and the approval of the general audience. In his own time Aeschylus gained a reputation for dynamic and ornate sets, as well as for stunning sound and visual effects. He is considered by historians of Greek tragedy to be a major innovator in these areas. The Oresteia spans two generations of the house of Atreus, while recounting, in different places, the line's unfortunate history, recent and remote. In Agamemnon, the king returns from Troy to Argos, where he is murdered by his wife; in Choephori, Agamemnon's son, Orestes, avenges his father by killing his mother and her lover, Aegisthus; and finally, in Eumenides, the bloodthirsty Harpies haunt Orestes until his final absolution by Athena's divine justice. It is impossible to understand Aeschylus' grander theological and political project in the Oresteia by reading Agamemnon alone. Agamemnon stands on its own, but it is greatly enriched by the other two plays. One must read the others to see not only the scope and grandeur of this project, but its tightness of theme and symbolism, and its brilliant resolution. However, in Agamemnon we find the kernel of what is to come in Choephori and Eumenides. After all, Cassandra prophecies the key plot events through the end of Choephori, and the Chorus' refrain, "Sing sorrow, sorrow: but good win out in the end," anticipates the just resolution of the trilogy in the final play. But the play itself ends with a barrage of questions particularly centered around human guilt and divine causality. The vicious cycle of vengeance illustrated so poignantly in Agamemnon points to the inadequacy of humans, yet throughout the play gods remain strangely silent. How can this be? Their intervention is sure to come‹that is all we know. The tyranny under which Argos finds itself at the end of Agamemnon corresponds in a very broad way some events in the biographical career of Aeschylus. During his life, Aeschylus is know to have made at least two visits to the court of the Sicilian tyrant Hieron. It was a place that lured some of the other great poets of his day, Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. He was also alive to see the democratization of Athens. The tension between, tyranny and democracy, is introduced in Agamemnon and, again, is developed more in the next two plays.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Troy, the play opens at King Agamemnon's palace in Argos with the lonely Watchman's soliloquy. From the roof of the palace, the Watchman begs the gods for respite from his interminable watch. The stars, his sole, plentiful and steadfast, companions seem to him like so many "dynasties" revolving in endless cycles, waxing and waning, moving out of winter into summer and back again. What he wishes, in short, is rest. He relates how he has been obliged by the queen to keep watch for a fire. Further he cannot sleep for restless fear. In his musings he hints of a great bygone woe, "the pity of this house," which he hopes will soon be redeemed. The flames, he says, would presage positively. Far off in the distance, then, a light glows, and the Watchman spies a messenger's blaze that hails the fall of Troy. He draws a joyous analogy to a sunrise. The soliloquy closes with the Watchman hopeful that his king will return home, since the house, he says, has too long wallowed in a dismal sadness. The senescent Chorus enters and begins its recapitulation of the commencement of the Trojan war tens years previous: the call to action, the deploying of the one thousand ships, the loss of so many young Argive lives. They go on to explain that the devastating fall is the exacting of a procrastinated punishment by angry gods upon the transgressors, mainly, Paris and Helen. Clytaemestra enters and the Chorus continues. They inquire about the bonfires, sacrifices, and oblations the queen has ordered to be executed throughout the city, to all the gods. She is mute. The Chorus recalls the omen, interpreted by a seer, of the hare tore open while still "ripe, bursting with young unborn yet." We are made aware that "the secret anger" which "remembers the child that shall be avenged," refers to anger over the sacrifice by Agamemnon of his maiden daughter Iphigeneia. Next, the disapproving Chorus outlines Iphigeneia's sacrifice at the hands of her battle-impassioned father, though without reaching its climax. What is to come, the future, the action of the play, apparently lies in the hands of Clytaemestra. Clytaemestra announces victory at Troy. The leader of the Chorus, understandably skeptical, questions her source. She cites the concatenation of fires, beginning with the one in Troy, relayed across watchman at various posts, ending with our Watchman. Asked to unfold more of the story, the queen imagines the plundering of Troy at the moment, and warns the Chorus that the men should perpetrate no sacrilege, should maintain reverence for the foreign city's gods and citizens, lest in the act of despoiling, they despoil themselves before the journey home. The Chorus interprets the news as the divine justice of Zeus on Paris, for his having stolen Helen away from Menelaus, her husband. There is no escape, they say, from perdition. But justice has come at great cost, and the lives of young men burn to dust in the flames‹the people of Argos hate the war. The several Chorus voices its skepticism over the signal once again, displaying a jadedness. Then the Herald, a warrior, appears with word of Agamemnon's imminent arrival. He voices how terrible was his homesickness and how sweet its new relief. Following this news, Clytaemestra reminds the Chorus of its haughty attitude toward her "womanish" credulity, then openly proclaims her long, chaste fidelity to her husband. She moves backstage to make ready for his return. An inquiry is made by the Chorus to the Herald as to Menelaus' state and whereabouts. It turns out he has disappeared in a terrible storm at sea. The Herald exits after narrating the storm. The Chorus, left alone on stage, muses again on the lamentable results of Helen and Paris's marriage. Daring is recorded as the undesirable offspring of aged Pride. Soon, Agamemnon, with Cassandra, a captive soothsayer, beside him, enter in a chariot. The leader of the Chorus admits to the king that, although he had despised of his decision to pursue Helen at all costs, he wholeheartedly welcomes his return. Agamemnon is eager to give thanks to the gods for his triumph. Speaking to her husband in front of an assembly of Argive citizens, Clytaemestra relates how trying her wait has been in lieu of myriad tales of wounds and death to Agamemnon, and she implores the disgruntled audience to patience, to maintain the council and order. She greets Agamemnon in full grandiloquence, and the king is asked to step into his home on tapestries of crimson unfurled at his wife's command. But he refuses. I am a only a man, he says, a mortal, and will not support being honored like a god. The spouses clash over this, and Agamemnon is shown as a hard, unyielding man. Clytaemestra tries several different approaches to get him to accept her invitation. Her behavior is suspicious. After some more provocative words, however, Clytaemestra finally persuades Agamemnon to tread against his better judgment. He does so barefoot, as a human, but there is still something ominous in this. They enter the house. The Chorus meditates on its uncured anxiety. Sight of Agamemnon has brought only more of the doleful dread and morbid fear. The Chorus cannot forget the injustice of the past, and neither, they are sure, can the gods. Sick at heart, they await the inevitable flow of blood. Clytaemestra reappears and orders the strangely mute Cassandra out of the chariot to worship at their altar. When the girl stays put, Clytaemestra leaves, not wishing to waste anymore of her time. Cassandra cries out insanely to Apollo, who the Chorus notes is not a god of lamentation, and utters abstruse prophecies about infanticide, fatal baths, and a murderess in the house. The Chorus believes she merely augurs her own death. They discuss the origin of her gift‹and her curse, which auditors forever be incredulous of her veracious forecasts. As predicted, her most clear and disturbing divination, "you shall look on Agamemnon dead," is misunderstood. Finally, she sees in the future a son (Orestes) who will eventually come to murder the mother (we must assume this is Clytaemestra, although her name appears in none of the prophecies) that kills his father. Cassandra then enters the house, having resolutely accepted it also as her tomb. From inside the house a sudden cry is heard. Agamemnon has been stabbed in the bathtub. The Chorus, in a panic, disintegrates, and the individual members speak frantically among themselves. They show themselves to be cowards, and Agamemnon cries out again before they even decide to take action. At once the doors of the palace swing open and behold! there lie Agamemnon and Cassandra, dead, with Clytaemestra standing over them. She describes to them, cold-bloodedly, it seems, the gruesome facts of her seduction, entrapment, and murder of the king who, she says, brought them all so much pain. She struck him thrice and gloried in the warm sputters of blood that shot from the wounds. She is remorseless; the Chorus is appalled at her brutality. The old men renounce her immediately. Next, Clytaemestra tries to justify her action as righteous, as ordained by the gods, retribution for the slaughter of her daughter. She portrays herself as an instrument of divine causality, of destiny. The Chorus will not hear of it and continues to wonder how they should mourn the dead king. The meaning of his death is still uncertain. Normally there would be a public lament for the fallen hero. Clytaemestra indicts all Argos in her action and declares that her husband shall not be mourned. Essentially they are debating culpability; that is, whether Clytaemestra's actions were divinely caused, or whether what she did was motivated by a base, human desire for revenge. In the end, having no other recourse, the fretting Chorus must agree with Clytaemestra. But, just then, Aegisthus, exiled son of Thyests and the queen's secret lover bursts into the palace crying that he hatched the plot‹he helped murder Agamemnon in revenge for his father (His father, Thyestes, was tricked by Agamemnon's father into devouring his two sons, Aegisthus' brothers). The Chorus predicts his downfall as before they had presaged Clytaemestra's. They accuse him of womanly cowardice for not having killed Agamemnon himself. Tyrannical Aegisthus then threatens the old men and the state with torture and bondage. When the Chorus, insolent to Aegisthus's boasting, rises up, Clytaemestra intervenes. Orestes is spoken of as the only hope for Argos. Deaf to the impotent gibes of the Chorus, Clytaemestra reminds her lover and new king that they now have the power. They enter the house together, and the doors close behind them.