then I weep for the miseries of this house
that lacks the good management of the past.
O for lucky relief of these labours
and the fire of good news in the darkness!0 Hail bright shiner, daylight at midnight,
beginning of dancing in all Argos!
Yooo! Yooo!
1 signal clear to Agamemnon's wife
to come quickly from bed and raise her cry
in thanksgiving and welcome to this light,
because the city of Troy has fallen,
so says the messenger of fire at night.It will be seen at once, even through the smoky medium of a modern translation, that this is a poet of brilliant and
yet simple strokes. His images are very simple, his observation is acute, and he tells us far more than he says. His
language has a stately formality but it moves swiftly and vividly. This is cumulative poetry; it builds on itself as
music does. It is intensely dramatic. The special interest of this particular piece is that it begins from nothing, and
from a minor character. But it leads into a magnificent set-piece, a long, very lively account of the chain of signal-
fires on every mountain top and headland from Troy to Argos; spanning the whole of eastern Greece. It is curious
and characteristic of Aeschylus, that he often highlights long geographical catalogues, real or half imaginary, and
that this taste goes back to Homer and can be found after Homer, and (interesting to note) in each of the three long
Homeric hymns, to Demeter, to Apollo, and to Hermes. It expressed one of the ancient purposes of poetry. Ancient
Irish poetry has it; so has ancient French poetry.
Some scholars have spent time recently in tracing particular images through whole works of Aeschylus. I doubt
whether those complex patterns have great significance. He works cumulatively, but quite simply. His thoughts are
not hidden in the imagery, but stated in so many words, or stated and contradicted, as must happen in dramatic
poetry. His mightiest strokes are often simply to turn a homely and familiar image inside out and make it
terrifying: the friendly komos, for instance, which is a controlled alcoholic riot, and the visit from relatives, and the
friendly dog a word or two turns sinister. In such simple terms Cassandra tells her vision of Agamemnon's house.
I shall not speak in riddles anymore.
Be witness that I smell out swiftly
the tracks of evils that have long been done.
There is a choir that never leaves this roof,
unmusical, in concert, unholy.
And it has grown drunken and overbold
on human blood, it riots through the house,
unriddable, blood-cousins, the Furies.Most of what Aeschylus has to teach is dark, though the sublimity (simple once again) of his view of Zeus
constantly bursts out, with the same naivety as the psalms of David have, and a poetry perhaps nearer to our own
expectations of poets. The force of the Oresteia is dramatic; the same lines would work much less well in an
anthology, or if they were fragments. There is an important sense in which all this wonderful language is about the
murder of Agamemnon by his wife. The scene of his death, which happens like nearly all horrors in the Greek
theatre off stage, is well prepared at a conscious and an unconscious level; when it comes, the thud is terrible.