Being someone who is not an avid reader I did not really know what to expect of this Athenian tragedy. Agamemnon is particularly interesting because it demonstrates how the common practice of vengeance was used to obtain justice. Notice that Aeschylus portrays Clytemnestra as fierce and shameless as she kills Agamemnon in order to avenge their daughter:
I brooded on this trial, this ancient blood feud
Year by year. At last my hour came,
Here I stand and here I struck
And here my work is done.
I did it all. I don’t deny it, no. (693; lines 1396-1400)
Clytemnestra truly feels that her act is justified and doesn’t once mention that it is a crime. Readers may find her proud tone strange because she has not been entirely faithful to Agamemnon. She speaks as though she has done the world a favor by patiently waiting to kill Agamemnon and gladly accepts any blame (694; line 1428). But is the killing of Agamemnon justified? She says that her work here is done but it also seems as though this would perpetuate the problem and that there may be someone looking to avenge Agamemnon later on. How could someone break away from this cycle of killing to avenge another?
Readers may have also expressed different reactions to the killing of Agamemnon and the killing of his daughter. The story raised a couple of ethical questions: is one human’s life more valuable than another? And are deaths treated equally? I also noticed that I found it easier to sympathize with Clytemnestra, because she was a woman killing a grown man, whereas it was much more difficult for me to support Agamemnon’s choice to sacrifice his daughter, seeing that he was a grown man killing an innocent child. Like we discussed in class, these societies did not have fully developed systems of government, so this was one way to bring someone to justice.
Hi Nadia. You present a solid argument in the second paragraph. It is structured in a strong way; you put the point you want to make as the first sentence of it and then given different pieces of evidence in the rest of the paragraph. You even led up to this argument from the first paragraph and included a quote. I don’t see anything to improve here.
The story raised a couple of ethical questions: is one human’s life more valuable than another? And are deaths treated equally?
There is two ways of seeing this. From the perspective of the victims and the murderers.
When we see the murderers we see two people equally “sinners” On one side we have a father that killed a daughter and also that in not faithful to his wife. On the other hand we have a woman that killed her husband and was also not faithful. To my view both murderers are “unethical and bad people” The difference can be found when analyzing the victims. There is a big difference between a Grown man like you said and a innocent kid. The death of a little girl cannot let the audience perceive this murder as equal. The motive of this deaths is the reason why I think that the first crime committed is more condemn than the other one. One was driven by vengeance the other one was indirectly the consequences of vengeance. The mother was hurt and wanted to look for justice that other ways was not going to be found but the sacrifice of the daughter was for the victory of a war, for the praise that was going to be received and at the end for the simple pleasure of saying “We won.”
I really liked this! You posed good questions. I think this does ultimately come down to, is one life more valuable than another. My answer is that yes, all life is valuable. No one persons life means more than another. However, I do believe in balance and karma. Agamemnon killed his child, so he needed to die. One doesn’t just do wrong and get away with it. If it isn’t the universe that gets to them 1st, another human will. Clytemnestra lost a child…there’s no going back from that. Despite them both being unfaithful murderers, I don’t think they’re bad people; their just human and sometimes our humanness can lead to us doing sinister things.