Status Updates From Aeschylus I: Oresteia, Agam...

Reading the book because I'd watched a video (forgot the speaker) in which they compared Athena to the government/justice system and the Fates to the police.

A central plot point of the Libation Bearers is that Electra finds a lock of hair on her father's grave, recognizes it as belonging to a member of her family, and by process of elimination since it can't be her mother's or her own, determines it is her brother's. Can anyone actually identify hair that way??

One does have to ask one’s self. Given all the murder of family members going on in the entire Atreus family…are these people really heroes worthy of praise just because they’re nobility? Maybe plays like these helped democracy come about.

“High fortune is a thing slakeless
for mortals. There is no man who shall point
his finger to drive it back from the door
and speak the words: “Come no longer.”
1331-1334 of Agamemnon.

“Alas, poor men, their destiny. When all goes well
a shadow will overthrow it. If it be unkind
one stroke of a wet sponge wipes all the picture out;
and that is far the most unhappy thing of all.”
1327-1330 of Agamemnon.

There’s something really chilling about a wife who welcomes her husband home so graciously while plotting to kill him all along.

Aeschylus is considered the master of lyrical tragedy; his language is much more poetic than Sophocles and therefore much harder to read in translation. I find myself going “what the hell exactly am I reading??” But it is beautiful.

matricide moment

he has to die there is no other way