The outstanding event of the Agamemnon drama, the pivot upon which the plot revolves, and the catastrophe which gives it meaning, is the brutal murder by Clytaemnestra of her husband, Agamemnon, King of Argos, after his triumphant return from Troy. In this play Aeschylus follows in the main the Homeric story, but there are one or two non-Homeric features which must be indicated.
In the gloomy chants of the Chorus, in their veiled fears of coming danger, one finds something more than the echoes of a political conspiracy, one finds the unmistakable influence of the creed of the ancestral curse. Are we to suppose that Aeschylus invented this non-Homeric doctrine which, in his own day, was a ‘creed outworn’? Such a supposition is improbable, for we know from Stesichorus[12] that this doctrine had already in the sixth century been incorporated in the legend. We have already[13] attributed the floruit of this doctrine to the post-Homeric age of chaos. Such beliefs survive in dogma and in ritual long after men have ceased to adhere to them. In Aeschylus the ancestral curse began with the famous ‘feast of Thyestes,’ but Euripides attributes its origin to the murder of Myrtilus.[14] The Erinnyes of the children who were brutally slain by their kinsman Atreus continued to pursue the children of the slayer. Hence, in this play Cassandra, the prophetess, cries out on her arrival at Argos[15]:
Yea! There, there, there! Here’s evidence enough!
Smell? Nay, I see, I hear them! Little children
Whose throats are cut, still wailing of their murder,
And the roast flesh a father tasted—swallowed!
Again[16]:
See the beginning of sorrows: what are these,
What dreamlike forms kneel on yon roof? Young boys
As they’d been slain by those who should have loved them,