Agamemnon
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Agamemnon

Agamemnon

by Aeschylus

Overview

Agamemnon, King of Argos, returns to Greece a victor in the Trojan War. He has brought with him the seer Cassandra as his war-prize and concubine. Awaiting him is his vengeful wife Clytemnestra, who is angry at Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia to the gods, jealous of Cassandra, and guilty of taking a lover herself. The events that unfold catch everyone in a bloody net, including their absent son Orestes.

Aeschylus (525/4–456/5 B.C.E.) was the first of the three great tragic dramatists of ancient Greece, a forerunner of Sophocles and Euripides. His early tragedies were largely choral pageants with minimal plots. In Agamemnon, choral songs still predominate, but Aeschylus infuses them with such dramatic feeling that the spectator or reader is constantly spellbound.

Translator David Mulroy brings this ancient tragedy to life for modern readers and audiences. Using end rhyme and strict metrics, he combines the buoyant lyricism of the Greek text with a faithful rendering of its meaning in lucid English.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780599899193
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Publication date: 05/04/2020
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: NOOK Book
Pages: 64
File size: 48 KB

About the Author

David Mulroy is a professor emeritus of classics at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His translations of The Complete Poetry of Catullus and of Sophocles' Theban trilogy—Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus—are all published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Read an Excerpt

Sleep disappears and in its stead
            the memory of pain
drips around the restless heart
            a never-ending rain.
Self-knowledge comes to those who wish
            and those who wish it not.
Our helmsmen are divinities,
            and they’re a violent lot.
—chorus from Agamemnon

Table of Contents

Preface                       
Introduction   
 
Agamemnon    

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