Please note that the line numbers are those of the Greek text, not of the translation.
Agamemnon
3 Agamemnon and his younger brother Menelaus are often paired as the “Atreidai,” or “sons of Atreus.” In the Oresteia, they rule jointly at Argos; in Homer’s epics, Agamemnon has his palace at Mycenae, not far from Argos, while Menelaus rules at Sparta, quite far away to the south.
59 An Erinys (plural Erinyes) is usually translated as a “Fury”; but since the Erinyes are so important in the Oresteia, this translation retains their Greek identity. For further explanation of their role and centrality, see p. xxx.
116 Supposed to be the side of good omen.
123 Calchas was the seer and prophet who accompanied the expedition.
134 The virgin goddess Artemis traditionally protected wild animals.
168–75 A short stanza has been omitted here, because it is so obscurely allusive. Its subject seems to have been the violent acquisition of power, with reference to the succession passing from Uranus to Cronus to Zeus himself.
191 Aulis is a bay on the mainland coast just across the strait from the island of Euboea. There are strong, frequently reversing currents in this strait.
281 Clytemnestra starts from Hephaestus because he is the god of fire. For some of the places named, see the map on p. xi.
341 The Greeks did commit some notorious sacrilege when they sacked Troy.
419 “Aphrodite” here means Menelaus’ desire for sex, because without Helen he is inconsolable.
438 Ares, the god of war, is evoked as a gold trader.
511 Scamander is the main local river at Troy.
513 Apollo had been opposed to the Greeks at Troy.
681ff. In Greek the syllables hele-, used as a prefix before words such as “ships,” mean “destructive of.”
696 Simois was one of the rivers near Troy.
827 The leap from the wooden horse to the ground was famous.
870 Geryon was a legendary giant-man with three upper bodies; he was killed by Heracles in the course of one of his labors.
881 Phocis, where the child Orestes has been sent, was the area of central Greece to the east of Mount Parnassus.
914 Leda was the mother of both Clytemnestra, whose father was Tyndareus, and Helen, who was fathered by Zeus.
958 The highly prized purple dye was produced by a process that extracted it from murex shellfish.
1040 The story was that Heracles was sold as a slave to the Lydian queen Omphale.
1080 Cassandra calls Apollo her apollon, her “destroyer” (this is reflected by “appalling”).
1096 The first allusion to the story of Thyestes’ being served the meat of his own children.
1143 The song of the nightingale was often linked to the story of Procne, who killed her son, Itys, and then lamented him constantly after her metamorphosis into the bird.
1160 Acheron was one of the rivers of the underworld.
1186ff. These lines take the form of a riddle, to which the answer—Erinyes—is finally supplied. The apparently fantastical picturing of the Erinyes as a “chorus” will in the third play become literal.
1192 The allusion is to Thyestes’ adultery with Aerope, the wife of his brother Atreus.
1233 The snake with two heads is in Greek the Amphisbaena; the female monster Scylla (already in the Odyssey) was sometimes envisaged with dogs’ teeth around her vagina.
1297 It was regarded as auspicious when an animal went to the sacrificial altar of its own accord.
1386 A third libation was conventionally made to Zeus soter (“saver”); Clytemnestra makes her macabre variation to “Zeus, saver of the dead,” meaning Hades.
1439 This alludes to Chryseis, the slave concubine of Agamemnon at the start of the Iliad. The following lines about Cassandra are strikingly obscene.
1468ff. “Daimon” is used for the Greek daimon. This word indicates some sort of unspecified deity, but in this passage it is repeatedly tied to the curse on the house and family. The dissimilar brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus married the sisters Clytemnestra and Helen, who are alike in being bold and dangerous.
1524 This may bring to mind the story that Agamemnon used the false pretext of fetching Iphigeneia to Aulis to marry Achilles.
1558 An allusion to the ferry of Charon, which transported the newly dead across the river Acheron.
1629 A weak jibe, characteristic of Aegisthus, about Orpheus’ powers to lead with his music.
Women at the Graveside
1ff. The sole manuscript preserving this play begins at line 10 and does not contain the twenty to thirty lines that must have come before that point. Some of those lines survive in other sources, but most of the passage is lost; this translation supplies between angled brackets (< . . . >) some guesses as to the kind of things that might have been there in the original.
1 Hermes was associated with messages, trickery, and passage to and from the underworld (the realm of Hades). So he is especially relevant to this play.
6 Inachus was an important river running through the plain of Argos.
248 It was believed that the female viper bit the male to death after copulation; the baby snakes then killed the mother by biting their way out from her womb. So this is an apposite analogy.
308 The name Moirai is conventionally translated as “Fates,” but it is more meaningful to retain their Greek name—see p. xxx. They are a group of goddesses, closely associated with the Erinyes, whose role is to ensure that humans get what they deserve, especially in punishment for misdeeds.
423 The “beat” of their dirge is evoked through exotic Eastern terms: “Arian” and “Kissian” both refer to parts of what is now Iran (formerly Persia). This suggests that the music and choreography of the chorus convey traces of the lands of origin.
439 This refers to the primitive ritual of maschalismos, in which the ears, nose, and genitals of dead men were cut off and put under their armpits in order to counteract the power of vengeance.
602ff. This song accumulates mythical examples of destructive female passion to compare with Clytemnestra. The first is Althaea, who had been told of a log that would keep her son Meleager alive for as long as it smoldered. When he grew up and killed her brothers, she burned it.
613ff. Scylla’s father, Nisus, was the king of Megara. When the city was besieged by the Cretans, she was bribed by the offer of a gold necklace to cut off the magic lock of hair that kept her father strong.
631ff. The women of the island of Lemnos killed all their husbands; they then paired up with the visiting Argonauts.
653ff. The scene, which has previously been set at Agamemnon’s tomb, is now “refocused” in front of the palace.
783ff. Unfortunately, the manuscript version of this choral song contains many problems of text and interpretation, and quite a lot has been trimmed.
899 Here, the only time Orestes hesitates (and the first time he says “mother”), he turns to Pylades, who utters his first and only lines. Since Pylades comes from near Delphi, it is appropriate that he should speak for Apollo.
924 This apparently figurative expression for her revenge turns into the actual gathering of the Erinyes, as Orestes will see clearly at lines 1053–54.
935ff. The manuscript of this song also contains many problems of text and interpretation and has been substantially trimmed.
1038ff. Suppliants who threw themselves on the mercy of a god would usually hold a branch of olive or laurel bound round with ribbons of wool. Apollo’s famous shrine at Delphi contained a stone, the omphalos, which was held to be the navel of the earth; there was also a sacred fire that never went out.
1048 This epilogue by the Chorus plays a subtle variation on the trilogy structure of the plays. The third episode reflects the shape of this, the second play: what had seemed like a final resolution (“kind of savior”) has turned out to be leading to yet further tribulations (“more a death knell”). The play ends with an unresolved question: What will happen in the fourth episode, viz the third play?
Orestes at Athens
2 Gaia (“Earth”) and Themis (“Order,” “Right”) were traditionally said to have been the first gods worshipped at Delphi. The usual story of what happened next told about the dragon Pytho and its violent defeat by Apollo; this is replaced here by what is emphasized as a peaceable succession.
9 Delos is the island in the Aegean Sea where Apollo and Artemis were born.
21 The temple of Athena Pronaia was below the main sanctuary to the southeast; it was on the road up from the gulf far below.
22 The large, numinous Corycian Cave is higher up, not far below the highest parts of Parnassus.
24ff. Dionysus was believed to inhabit Delphi in the winter, while Apollo was away. The myth of how he punished his nephew Pentheus, the king of Thebes, was well known, although it was usually, as in Euripides’ Bacchae, located on Mount Cithaeron rather than Parnassus.
27 The river Pleistus flows in the valley far below Delphi.
29 The priestess sat on a throne, or in other accounts on a tripod, and then the oracles were delivered through her voice.
40 The omphalos stone was oval-shaped and stood about a meter high.
50 Phineus was a mythical king who was pestered by the winged Harpies. The Gorgons were characterized by their horribly ugly faces and snaky hair.
140ff. The original staging is uncertain. The opening lines of the Chorus were probably broken up between individual members.
234ff. At this juncture, the setting of the play changes from Delphi to Athens, and a considerable amount of time is understood to have passed, with Orestes on the run and the Erinyes close on his heels. This brings out how long and relentless the pursuit has been.
292ff. The significance of these two locations—the river Triton in Libya and Phlegra in Thrace—is not clear, except that they represent the distant south and north, respectively.
333 For Moira (plural Moirai), see p. xxx.
470ff. It takes Athena’s wisdom to see that while humans cannot solve this crisis by themselves, it cannot be resolved simply by divine will, either, since it has such human consequences. Her solution is to set up a jury under her supervision.
After 573 There is a major change here from the usual text as it is transmitted in the Greek manuscripts, as is indicated by the marginal line numbers. Athena’s founding speech for the court (lines 681–708) has been moved back from some one hundred lines later to this context, where it makes appreciably better sense.
Before 574 A few lines have been added at the end of Athena’s speech to make the arrival of Apollo less abrupt.
685 The Amazons were believed to be a tribe of warrior women, located in Thrace or in Asia Minor, who participated in various mythical conflicts. The usual myth was that they invaded Athens in reprisal for a raid mounted against them by Theseus.
641 The tradition was that when Zeus overthrew his father, Cronus, along with Cronus’ Titan brothers, he imprisoned them below in Tartarus.
657ff. There is some evidence that this embryological theory had been put forward by some protoscientists around the time of Aeschylus. It can hardly be treated as definitive, however, since, for the whole trilogy so far, it has been taken for granted that the mother is indeed one of the two parents. Apollo’s case is also diminished by his crude language in the next line.
676–80 and 711ff. During this dialogue the jurors come forward, one for each couplet, and deposit their votes. There were two urns, and the procedure was that each juror would put his hands into the top of both but drop the voting pebble into only one.
718 The mythical hero Ixion killed his father-in-law and so became the first murderer; he then appealed to Zeus for absolution and became the first suppliant.
723 In gratitude for hospitable treatment, Apollo arranged for Admetus, a king in Thessaly, to be spared from imminent death, provided someone else died for him (this is the story in Euripides’ Alcestis). Apollo did this by getting the Moirai drunk.
734 In classical Athens, if the votes were tied, it was taken as acquittal, thanks to “the vote of Athena.” Athena makes this declaration after the voting is over, and so does not influence the jurors with it. Her reasons are personal and supernatural; she does not offer her birth as a relevant consideration, as Apollo had done earlier.
858–66 Nine strange lines that clearly do not belong in this place have been omitted.
944 Pan was a god of the wilds, but he was also a patron of shepherds and their wandering flocks.
1028 These purple robes, which are put over the Erinyes’ black ones, may allude to the robes worn by noncitizen settlers (metics) at the annual Panathenaia festival in Athens.
1043and 1047 The call here is to raise the ololygmos, the “triumph-cry,” which was especially associated with women. This has had sinister uses earlier in the trilogy, especially in connection with Clytemnestra, but is now used joyfully.