The "Agamemnon of Aeschylus"

Yesterday afternoon Professor H. W. Smyth '78 of the Greek Department, who is one of the three professors in charge of the Greek Play, gave a lecture on "The Agamemnon of Aeschylus." After sketching the plot of the drama and outlining the dramatic characteristics of the poet, and of the time in which the play was written, Professor Smyth read a number of selections from Professor Goodwin's translation and criticised the important dramatis personae.

In constructing the modern tragedy, said Professor Smyth, the author explains both cause and effect, while the ancient poet, taking it for granted that the audience understands the antecedent causes of the characters he enstages, depicts only the tragedy. The ancient author can, therefore, move with greater deliberation in evolving the catastrophe, and can find scope for lyric reflection on the relation between divine law and its infringement by the hero whose overthrow he is constructing.

The heritage of Iphigenis, daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytaemnestra, was a calamity provoked by successive violations of the law of God. Deceit, treachery, fatal ambition, adultery, the atrocities, of revenge that studied the refinements of retaliation, the murder of a husband, of a daughter, of a father--these form the tale of the house of Agamemnon. Of this line the most tragic figure is Agamemnon, who slew his daughter as a sacrifice, and, upon his triumphal return from the Trojan war, was ignominiously butchered by his faithless queen. Such, in short, is the plot.

The first 800 verses of Aeschylus' poem, most of them in the form of choral odes, make a kind of moral prologue. It may sometimes seem to us that the plot does not advance with sufficient rapidity; at other moments the author seems to bridge over the past and present, disregarding the unity of time. He makes Agamemnon appear at home the morning after Troy was captured. This, Dr. Verrall and other critics consider a monstrous heresy in regrad to unity. But the sheer length of the choral odes creates a sense of the passage of time, so that no incongruity is noticed by the spectator.