This play is all about heroes, that is, individuals who fit into the hero’s mold. The two main actors in the play act as a hero ought to act. Each is driven by his or her own motivations. There is no thought for the family as a unit; in fact, the family has already been shattered by Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphegenia, by Clytemnestra’s infidelity, and, of course, by her plan to kill her husband.  Agamemnon is a king and Clytemnestra a queen, but neither of them has a care for the state that they rule. Let’s examine the characters themselves.

Agamemnon is ever the hero in pursuit of the hero’s goals — war, plunder, combat, and above all, honor. He has just returned from Troy, where as leader of the Greeks, he has just won his greatest victory. That victory is, however, tainted. In the process of plundering the city, the Achaeans have committed the

sacrilege of despoiling the temples and bringing down upon themselves the gods’ anger.  But even before the Greeks departed, Agamemnon incurred blood guilt by sacrificing his daughter in order to placate Artemis and obtain favorable winds for his armada. Faced with the choice of killing his own child and fulfilling his heroic destiny, Agamemnon chose the self-gratification of glory, war and honor over home, paternal duty and family.

Clytemnestra  is driven by her own needs, primary among which is a thirst for vengeance. Her hatred of Agamemnon as a result of the sacrifice of their daughter has simmered for over a decade. She is no longer a wife or mother. She has betrayed her husband with his cousin, the killer of Agamemnon’s father, Aegisthus. Her son, Orestes is sent away, her daughter treated little better than a slave; she has, in effect, rejected motherhood in favor of revenge. Her only goal is to kill Agamemnon, and she has prepared a complex trap for that very purpose. First, she has caused to be built a series of bonfires, strung out across the Aegean, that will give her a precise timetable of Agamemnon’s return. Next, she has prepared a stratagem that will entice Agamemnon to commit an act of sacrilegious hubris that will condemn him before the gods, making his murder both an execution and a sacrifice, that, in Clytemnestra’s eyes, will acquit her of murder and bring her honor — that quality that all heroes prize. She has no qualms, no regrets, no momentary pause in her compulsion to achieve vengeance. Even her adulterous relationship with Aegisthus seems little more than a means to defame and punish her husband. This sordid side of Clytemnestra’s vengeance is hardly even hinted at until the end of the play, and the cowardly, weak creature that is the Aegisthus of the Agamemnon is hardly a match for his mistress. Clytemnestra may not wear the pants in the family (Ancient Greeks, of course, don’t wear pants), but it is she, not her lover, who wields the axe.

Secondary Characters

The Chorus of the Agamemnon plays an important role in setting the emotional stage for the viewer. The chorus is comprised of the elders of the city of Argos, those whose job it was to advise the ruler on policy. They represent the people of Argos, and therefore, the subjects of King Agamemnon.  At their first appearance the chorus sets the plot in motion. They sing, not of the glory of victory or their joy at the return of the king, but of the fall of pride, the sorrow of war and the curse of  the royal house. The chorus listens as Clytemnestra speaks in sly and cynical language, the “doublespeak” of a politician, of avenging the dead, of rewarding the returning king. The chorus, at first celebrating victory, become increasingly doubtful, increasingly dark in their expectation of Clytemnestra’s motives and intended actions. The chorus finally accepts Clytemnestra’s treachery as part of the natural order that the gods have in store for the House of Atreus.

Cassandra further complicates Agamemnon’s guilt in the eyes of Clytemnestra. For starters, the Trojan priestess is a source of jealousy, although, given Clytemnestra’s relations with Aegisthus, it is hard to fault Agamemnon on that particular score. But Cassandra has a story as well.  She was a priestess of Apollo. Apollo fell in love with her and she spurned his immediate attentions. There are several variations of the story, but in essence, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but ordained that no one would ever believe her.  The prophetess is left outside of the palace when Agamemnon enters. She knows that Agamemnon will soon die, and knows also that she is awaiting the same fate, a grisly death. A key theme of the plays of Aeschylus is the idea of “suffering into truth.” In Agamamnon, Cassandra embodies that theme. She foretells the death of her master as well as her own death. In the telling Cassandra sums up the carnage of the heroes of the House of Atreus, all of the violence, torture and pain inflicted by Agamemnon’s ancestors and kinsmen from Tantalus through the uncountable deaths at Troy.

No . . . the house that hates god,

an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen

torturing kinsmen, severed heads,

slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood ...

See my witnesses -

I trust them to the babies

wailing, skewered on the sword,

Their flesh charred, the father gorging on their parts...

Oh, No, what horror, what new plot, new Agony is this?

It’s growing, massing, deep in the house, a plot, a monstrous thing

to crush the loved ones, there is no cure, and rescue is far away...

Well, I must go in now,

Mourning Agamemnon’s death and mine.

Enough of life!

Cassandra has been identified as a “passive victim of misfortune,” but she goes to her death, not lamenting her fate, but filled with anger and indignity, symbolizing the lot of all humans. So powerful is her vision, that, for the first time, her prophesy is believed. She suffers into truth, and does so with such power that she carries over the chorus into that truth. Cassandra’s looming death, for a moment, gives strength to the elders (chorus), who can now accept the grisly fact of Agamemnon’s slaughter.

If Cassandra is vision personified, Aegisthus is the Atreides Curse personified. He is the product of incest, bred to be the instrument of his father’s vengeance. He has passed much of his life as a brooding exile. He has, essentially, given up his honor and even his masculinity to Clytemnestra, and it is difficult to see what he had obtained in return. In the Odyssey, Homer makes Aegisthus the murderer of Agamemnon; but Aeschylus gives that task to Clytemnestra, making the hero here, avenger of Thyestes, barely more than an accessory after the fact. He is no longer a hero, barely even a man before the glaring power of his mistress. The chorus despises him as a coward; “why did the woman, the corruption of Greece and the gods of Greece, have to bring” Agamemnon down while Aegisthus  awaited the success of the trap and then cravenly mutilated the king’s corpse? Yet, once the deed is done, Aegisthus is ready to become the master of Argos.

The Agamemnon represents a study in social disfunctionality.

1. Each individual is a flawed hero, and each either dies an ignominious and, perhaps with the exception of Cassandra, unheroic death in this play or the next. They either commit or receive violence without honor, achieve death without glory.
   

2. The blood that should unite the household (oikos) of the Atreides, husband/father, wife/mother, uncle and even slave (slaves were, after all, an integral part of the oikos), is tainted by the Atreides curse, by the unfatherly sacrifice of Iphigenia, and by the savagery of the rape and murder of Troy. The palace of Agamemnon is not a home, but a slaughterhouse.
   

3. The city of Argos is similarly broken. The war has taken the youth of the city leaving no household untouched. In the words of the chorus:

Above: Cassandra at Troy.

Below: Clytemnestra murders Cassandra.

But as for us, whose old bodies
      confer no honor, who were left behind
      when the army sailed so long ago, 

      we wait here, using up our strength
      to support ourselves with canes,
      like children, whose power,
      though growing in their chests,
      is not yet fit for Ares, god of war.
      And so it is with old men, too,
      who, when they reach extreme old age,
      wither like leaves, and go their way
      three-footed, no better than a child,                                          
      as they wander like a daydream.

As the editors of your text note, the chorus of elders is “the voice of the home front anguished by the war, and the war itself appears a dubious battle.” The state is also crippled by ten years without the leadership of a legitimate king. The elders look to Clytemnestra for leadership, as they look to her to preserve the security and order of the state, to maintain the peace between the state and its gods, and to maintain balance social within the state. In her blind drive to achieve vengeance, she will do none of those things. Poorly led by illegitimate rulers, bereft of a generation of youth, and populated by those too old and too weak to serve the state, Argos awaits liberation, justice and appropriate government; it will have to wait for the next generation of Atreides to mature and come home.