I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.

Agamemnon is the first play in a trilogy of ancient Greek plays called The Oresteia., the only such trilogy out of the canon of Greek drama to survive to the present time. The Oresteia was originally performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BC, where it won first prize. Aeschylus himself is is the oldest of the three great Greek dramatists, and of his eighty or more plays, seven survive.

Characters:
Agamemnon: King of Argos
Clytemnestra: wife of Agamemnon
Cassandra: daughter of (deceased) King Priam of Troy and now slave of Agamemnon
Aegistheus: son of Thyestes, cousin to Agamemnon
Watchman
Herald
Chorus of Argive Elders

Quotations:
Chorus: “Zeus–if to the Unknown
That name of many names seem good—
Zeus, upon Thee I call.

Agamemnon: Twixt woe and woe I dwell.

Chorus:
The show of weeping and of ruth
To the forlorn will all men pay,
But of the grief their eyes display,
Naught to the heart doth pierce its way.
And with the joyous they beguile
Their lips into a feign`ed smile,
And force a joy unfelt the while.

Chorus:
The slayer of today shall die tomorrow–
The wage of wrong is woe.
(For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:23)

Agamemnon:
For few are they who have such inborn grace,
As to look up with love and envy not,
When stands another on the height of weal.

Clytemnestra:
Already we have reaped enough the harvest field of guilt:
Enough of wrong and murder, let no other blood be spilt.

Oh, but the blood-spilling is only continuing in Agamemnon; revenge must be taken. There is no “gift of God” to put an end to the cycle of an eye for an eye.