Clytemnestra’s speech, ‘There is the sea…’
(p. 74; lines 958–72 in the Oxford Text).
In the text of Agamemnon used for this translation, that of the late Professor A. Y. Campbell, this famous speech is transposed to come after line 929, ‘Call him fortunate Whom the end of life finds harboured in tranquillity’. In the traditional text it comes after line 957, ‘Treading on purple I will go into my house.’ Unfortunately Professor Campbell’s exposition of his reasons for this change is found only in notes still unpublished at the time of his death. I give here a provisional outline of his view (necessarily omitting numerous detailed arguments with which he supported his text), based on personal conversations with him.
The speech has two parts. In the first Clytemnestra uses two arguments to persuade Agamemnon to walk on the purple cloth: (1) We are rich and can well afford to waste our wealth; (2) I would have made such a sacrifice many times over, had an oracle prescribed it, in order to ensure your safe return. (Clytemnestra assumes that the purple cloth, after such ritual use, would not be put back into stock, but dedicated in a temple, or even destroyed – compare the ritual of breaking a wine-glass after drinking a health. The possibility of such a dedication, as the result of a vow taken in a moment of danger, is referred to again by Clytemnestra near the end of p. 74.) In the second part of the speech Clytemnestra uses obscure and figurative language to express the welcome that awaits Agamemnon when he enters his house.
If the purpose of the speech is to persuade Agamemnon to walk on the purple cloth, it should surely come at a point where he is still undecided whether he will do so or not. In the traditional text it comes immediately after he has said that he will do what Clytemnestra asks. Further, at that point he is already standing bare-footed in the chariot ready to step to the ground; and to postpone any longer the dramatic moment when his foot touches the purple seems pointless, even if (as was ingeniously done at Bradfield in 1958) Clytemnestra is made to deliver this speech standing directly in front of the chariot, so that Agamemnon cannot descend until she moves. The alternative to this, accepted by the most recent editor, is that Agamemnon should walk up the purple path to his doom while Clytemnestra makes her speech. Dramatically, this is lamentable – to us at least; and it is hard to believe that it was not so to the ancient Greeks. The significance of Agamemnon’s progress to the fatal door must not be spoilt by having Clytemnestra talk all through it; and the impact of Clytemnestra’s dynamic speech must not be spoilt by having Agamemnon walk all through it.
Further, this transposition seems to be suggested, if not demanded, by the movement of the plot. We know that Clytemnestra intends to kill her husband; a formidable undertaking. The tension of the drama lies in the question, Will she succeed? For success, she must have the gods on her side; Agamemnon must be persuaded to perform some act by which he will forfeit the gods’ favour. When at the end of her speech Clytemnestra has the purple cloth brought in, we see her intention. When she finishes speaking, everything turns on the tone of Agamemnon’s reply. That reply is so crushingly complete that her hopes of success seem shattered. What can possibly counter such a broadside of offensive rebuke? Surely not a series of lines in stichomythia The line-by-line dialogue implies already a willingness to be argued with, which is certainly not there at the close of Agamemnon’s speech. What produces this willingness? What but the most telling speech in the play, beginning, ‘There is the sea…’? That is the masterpiece which produces, first, the willingness to be argued with, then its necessary result, capitulation. When we put Clytemnestra’s speech here, we find that it is of almost exactly the same length as the speech to which it replies; two balanced speeches now introduce the stichomythia – a pattern that became familiar in Greek drama. Finally, when Agamemnon at length agrees to walk on the purple, he is now able to do so without further delay, amid the silence demanded by so defiant and irreligious an act. (See Introduction, p. 25–7.)
If this transposition restores the true sequence, how does the speech come to be out of place in the traditional text? There exist only two MSS. which contain this portion of the play; they were both written eighteen centuries after Aeschylus. How many different copies passed on the text during those centuries? How many performances, each with its own reasons for alteration, omission, adaptation, introduced successive changes into traditional scripts? The text of this play is very much more corrupt than that of most Greek plays. Certain rules for textual conjecture can be formulated; but remembering that the MSS. are our primary evidence is not the same thing as saying that a text differing from the MSS. is necessarily improbable. Here it is best simply to state the fascinating puzzle and leave it at that.
Greek Tragedy. H. D. F. Kitto
The Greek Tragic Poets. D. W. Lucas
Aeschylus. Gilbert Murray
Aeschylus and Athens. George Thomson
The Harmony of Aeschylus. E. T. Owen
Five Stages of Greek Religion. Gilbert Murray
Primitive Culture in Greece. H. J. Rose
The Greeks. H. D. F. Kitto
The Greeks and their Gods. W. K. C. Guthrie
The Twelve Olympians. Charles Seltman
Form and Meaning in Drama. H. D. F. Kitto
The Justice of Zeus. H. Lloyd-Jones