Clytemenstra

This is Agamemnon, my husband, but of course, the work of my right hand, a just architect, this is how things are. Clytemnestra has been a popular figure in Greek myth from Homer to the present day, featuring in plays by all three great traditions and appearing more recently in opera, ballet and even a spaghetti Western adaptation. However, it is her depiction in Escalus Oresteia that dominates the tradition.

A trilogy dramatising brutal revenge killings within the cast house of Atrius, sister of Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War with her lover Jesus, his cousin, only to be later murdered herself by her son, Orestes Iman's Harvard.

And joining me today on In Our Spare Time are Nili Aaronovitch, my tutorial partner and fellow literary humanities finalist at Corpus Christi College, and Emily Clifford, a master's student in Greek, also at Corpus, who is currently focussing her research on themes of art and vision in e-commerce tragedies. I thought it would be great if we could start by just looking at the background to the Oresteia story and then perhaps you could fill us in on that.

Well, I suppose that immediately before the is that we've had 10 years of war. Troyes, the city of Troy, has been besieged by the Greeks and then eventually beaten by the Greeks, which is something we discover in the first scene of the play. But before that, before Agamemnon that husbanded quiet investors set out for Troy, he had sacrificed Iphigenia, his daughter and her daughter so that they could get the wins that the army needed to get to Troy.

It's something that's obviously burning in her mind. I see. And what are the Devean traditions about the sacrifice of a virgin? I had one interesting variant of the story is that it's not entirely clear whether or not the daughter was actually sacrificed. So I think what we need to believe for the Agamemnon is that quite a master believes that her daughter has actually been killed.

But there is a variant version where the goddess Artemis sort of steps in at the last minute and whisks her away to Taurus and replaces her with a with a sacrificial animal of some sort. So full of anger, the death of her daughter, Iphigenia Clytemnestra is waiting. How long for her husband to come back from Troy? Ten years. Ten years. A long time. And so is that when does the play begin? Is does it begin with him walking through the door or what sort of a scene we set at the start?

That's an interesting question because he has been away for ten years. But when the play begins, the pilot gets word that the war is over and by the by noon, he's home. So there's a kind of dramatic licence sort of taking place in terms of the timing. But no, he doesn't appear and he doesn't speak until halfway through the play. The first half is conversation between Herold's who are announcing his entrance, as is, I think, traditional when someone comes back from somewhere.

So how does a master behave in that first part of the play? Do you think we're invited to feel sympathy for her position? She's actually already proven to be pretty devious because she doesn't reveal Rachel, anger, emergency. What you have here, you have on this stage when she enters the chorus of Old Man, you haven't been able to go to war. And then later the Herald. And she doesn't at least in my view, she doesn't really reveal her anger and bitterness, at least openly.

Maybe she just received a gleanings that instead she appears to be a sort of delighted wife who's discovered that Troy has fought. And I suppose we see her exaltation at the victory and the fact that her husband is going to come home. Actually, we we would know through dramatic irony is actually for very different reasons. The one of the chorus. Yeah. And did you think we get a sense of that through the way the chorus responds to her behaviour?

I mean, she and, of course, enjoy quite a combative relationship, and although she doesn't speak openly about her anger against Agamemnon, nor does she talk about the denial in any detail, her reaction to the chorus's questions to her is incredibly hostile, they say to her. Is it some rumour that's got you so excited about about the end of the war? And she says, What do you take me for a child? She's not so much hostile to Agamemnon.

By adopting this male position early on the play as the ruler and as in charge of the chorus, she is setting herself up to be his his rival and not his wife. Yeah, and how is that compounded by her relationship with Jesus? I'd say it's complicated by her relationship with the guys. This because. She set up, as Lenny was saying, she set up sort of from the very start as a powerful figure and essentially the steward of the palace who later become to be rivalling her husband like a madman.

And that kind of runs right through until almost the end of the play when she reveals that she has this lover, I guess this who is basically the cousin of her husband anyway. And then he comes on and claims the credit and sort of takes back the reins or appears to take back the reins. So it's it's actually complicated, I think, on the component. Yeah. It's definitely interesting to look at how her actions as a woman might be

different to what you might expect for the position of Greek women at that time. I mean, we have no records of any Greek women in leadership roles. For example, I think that her that quartermasters role as the king in this speaks to a wider kind of war anxiety. So at the time that this was written, Athens was constantly skirmishing. There were or taking part in big wars. And I thought I've also written the play The Persians, which is about the war with the Persians.

So Aeschylus and his audience are concerned about what happens when people come home from war. How are they rehabilitated? Per's, I suppose, as a return from war and also a queenly narrator. I believe so. Having a woman in charge is a symptom of. Of the absence of order, it's a type of chaos we see again in the Odyssey where you have where Penelope's not in charge, but the masculine role is being fulfilled by Telemachus, who is ill equipped, and all these suitors who are doing a terrible job.

So, again, you have this this chaos sort of vacuum of male power, which is squabbled over rather than sort of settled. Yeah, I think in this case, it's been resolved in having the wrong gender in charge. Suppose the next question would be how that interacts with her role as a mother, as a leader and a mother.

Do you think that the two come into conflict? I think they I think they come into conflict just within the context of great society, because a mother as a woman is essentially expected to stay indoors, to obey her husband, not to ideally not to speak more than she should.

And so in a leadership role to master and coming out of the palace and announcing what the fire beacons have have told her, which is that choice for them to even conversing with the chorus in the very first place and that thereby setting yourself up as a leader is already transgressing what you'd expect from a woman armed as a mother. Yes, this this important link between Clytemnestra and control over meaning.

So I clearly said the play actually opens with a messenger noticing that a fire has been lit. Now, what is quite a monstrous investment in this fire, that [INAUDIBLE] begins. So how does that work? They will form a chain when one considers a fire in the distance and light their own fire, and it would continue on here until August. Now, her and her investment now is incredibly ambiguous. The watchman who first notices the fire is acutely aware of that.

He knows that this both means the Agamemnon is coming home to his wife, which is traditionally a happy thing. And he also knows that that is going to be a very complicated reunion. So complicated, in fact, that he refuses to speculate about what he think will happen for fear that if he he talks about his fears, they're more likely to come true. So I think from the offset from the first site we have of this this fire, which is very vividly described by the watchmen, we already don't know.

Whether it portends good or bad. Yeah, and I suppose that's complicated by a speech later on Clytemnestra gives detailing the precise path of a beacon, which I personally find difficult to interpret because it just gives the track. I'm not not a gloss on that track. How do you read that? I speak to a certain extent.

I, I perhaps interpret it more as shocking that she would have such a detailed knowledge of the procedure for the fire, which perhaps in a positive light would show that her stewardship of the extent to which she is aware of the workings of the state. But given that she is a woman, given that we know that she's got these plans for Agamemnon when he returns, it's quite alarming that she knows this much.

And either she knows too much about the state as women or she's inventing it, which would fit, I suppose, with the theme of deception. Yes, deception and language are very closely intertwined in this play. I believe perhaps took a little bit more about how that functions with ambiguous symbols like the Beacon fire, I suppose, which could portend either. The course talks a lot about prophecies, Cassandra, who we haven't yet, but whose is brought to Argo's by Agamemnon as a sort of.

War provide service only speaks in prophecy, to be honest, and so she's been brought back from Troy in Georgia. She's one of preamps daughters and she is killed alongside Agamemnon. And she's. As a prophet, the weather is going to happen, which is interesting, the prophecy. That we associate with the Agamemnon is the one of the happy being torn apart with a young still sort of warm in her belly and so dear, it's creepy. Yeah, I think that, again, it's ambiguous. It could be.

In the context, the chorus of the young could be all of those men who have died at Troy, the young could be Iphigenia, people dying before that generation is due to die. I mean, I think. But how we called the generation of World War Two the lost generation. Yes. It's the lost generation that that they're talking about. And I'm not sure whether it's so much ambiguous as polyvalent polyvalent.

Well, I suppose that's if the lost generation is that has brewed that also foreshadows perhaps the eventual murder of Clytemnestra herself, would you say? Yes, by her by her children, it's a perversion of the order, and that's exactly why we end up in the last place having to resort to a new kind of justice, to sort out whether or not a rescue house is a criminal and not that sort of.

The inauguration of the Athenian court system, because it is so complicated, the situation they find themselves in, that they have to create a new way of sorting it out. So, yeah, so that this is based on something we haven't really talked about yet, which is the curse of the House of Atrius. So perhaps I mean, could you take us through that a little bit? Yes.

So the curse, the house of you say initially we have Tantalus who have served up his own son, Pelops to the gods, I think, to try and trick to trick use. And I think only one of the gods actually fallen for it. And each in the shoulder of pops lost a metre because she was so upset that her daughter had been seised by Hades, the God of the underworld. So that initially starts the issues with the house, the house of starting with payoff's.

And then I think his children are firesides and atrius. And then we get the real curse, which kind of kicks off a lot of the suffering in this play, which is that Atrius serves up to Celestis like Estes's own children, and Bias's does eat his own children, although he subsequently, I think the heads are brought out of parts of recognisable parts of the body of water and he recognises what's happened.

So this theme of generations perverting the order which they're supposed to live, begins very early on in the chain and particularly within families. They slaughter within families has has been happening and is a sort of cyclical as it's a cycle of revenge and of bloodshed and killing people within your own family.

So Cassandra, on that note, was talking about say, Cassandra says that she can actually see the dead bodies of these two sons holding their guts to the children of these children who are sitting in front of the palace. So this kind of already, this stain that is spreading and then continue to spread in the rest of the trilogy as people continue to take revenge upon each other. So how does that work with the Jesus? Because Ajith being Agamemnon's cousin is KSTP son.

Yeah. He says that he's the reason that he has apparently instigated the whole the whole revenge plot is in revenge for, I guess, the murder of his brothers and his children by Atrius who the father of. Yeah. So where will we see a Jesus's motive there. But this does not really I can't see to the fact of the motivation for quite a mystery. Is it more sort of metaphysical reckoning as concerns that matter as close as matters is truth?

Is this myth that the family just delineated for us is very complicated and exclusive truths in this moment. So when Emily was talking, I was thinking, why is Clinton after the focus of this play? Why haven't we heard from her gifts? Is what is so interesting about his relationship, but much more kind of canonical, you might write, than especially for tragedian who seem to be so for want of a better word, stayed in his innovations.

I mean, not amusing, largely absent, but when he does appear at the end, there is a sense. There is a strong sense of impotency, so clearly hard to master has this has a tragic quality or compelling quality that you have chosen to bring out in the tradition surrounding the death of Agamemnon. It's not clear before this point that that had to be this way. So Pindel had a very similar point to Aeschylus pinned on his 11th. Pythian sort of gives us an either or.

He describes what happened to Agamemnon's as did happen because she was sad about him sacrificing her daughter, Iphigenia. Why did it happen? Because she was seduced by a as who who he himself had this revenge motive. So it was no one had decided what the truth was. But Escalus clearly has a version that he prefers.

Yes. And I think it's interesting how we weave the character of Cassandra into that version, because it may seem that Cassandra herself is a further motive to murder, you know, waiting 10 years for a husband to find that he's brought home another woman. But I suppose perhaps the great context of gender politics might make that a more vexed question than we might consider it. I mean, I think you definitely have a point most of us would object to.

Before Plotless came back from a long trip with someone new, unexpected that to a good time to be fine, but the tradition of war booty is different and it would have been common for people to bring home women, although it's interesting that other sort of returning hero, Odysseus, at no point makes any attempt to bring anyone home with him. In fact, it turns out entirely by himself.

So, yeah, I think you're right. We might give a media audience of this great human a sensitivity to do the other woman. There is certainly a sense in which it is very Cassandre, in some level inappropriate. So is that perhaps the reason is she came to because of her being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then more than pure hatred? I think it's a combination of many things. And it's it's complex because on the one hand, she is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is unlucky for her that she is in the past when quite a monster is near the bottom line on how she kills them when they're both in the bath together. So, yeah, seems like the kind of crime of passion in an odd way. But it does also because it was premeditated. It seems it's premeditated. It it seems that this probably would have happened. It's impossible to say that probably would have happened had even if Cassandra had not come, come back with my mom.

And so on the one hand, she's in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she also does foretell her own doom and will die with obviously skipping several years into the future and a later played by refugees that try to teach more children women. She also foretells what's going to happen to her even as far back as Stroy has fallen, which suggests that there's some greater fate at play here and.

It it doesn't seem that she is at fault in any way, it's just some part, some sort of Mercilus hand of fate. Yes, I suppose it just compounds the irony, though, that the primary motivation of the killing seems to be anger at sort of an influence to top that off with further slaughter of an innocent. I suppose it's just a commentary on the harshness of fate really more than anything else.

Yeah, I was I was thinking that when both you were talking about the the many motives for Titanosaurus murder, and I can see that Virginia potentially Cassandra, then I guess this is own motives. And then you get the oil, say, the curse of the house of H.S. and I think.

The fact they were denied any sort of clear reason for exactly why things have happened and what's driving people, it may well be an interesting psychological enquiry into people under pressure, emotional pressure and control of their thought process. But it may also just be a very terrifying vision of a world where things are determined, but will say there are human agents at play and therefore things just spiral out of control. Now, I think this murder has been 10 years in the making.

You very much like a master decides to go Agamemnon the moment before Jini died. And so Cassandra is an inconvenience. And in fact, in the Agamemnon, prime minister meets Cassandra and says, get off the chariot and come inside. And Trumpton. No, I don't want to. Or rather, she says something that makes no sense. The only thing she speaks Trojan for a long time, but which would be a different language in the time of the plague seems to be a different yes to what they speak.

And she stays in the chariot and quite often goes inside. And it's left to the chorus to find out why this why Cassandra is so reluctant. And eventually they persuade her to go inside the palace. They don't deceive her. She knows she's going to die, but they sort of talk it into meeting, meeting what's going to happen. Yeah, quartermasters not interested, although I suppose that maybe we should see the character perhaps as functioning more of a guarantor of her fate.

Then you both of you discussing earlier the what the power that word seem to have in this play as a predictor, where if you say something, it's more likely to happen. So perhaps articulating a prophecy in this way is more than simply stating a fact in terms of prophecy. This is a trilogy. The Oresteia briefly, I think we've mentioned this, but just to confirm the Agamemnon, the collaterally and then the humanity right through.

And it's an established trilogy. They would have been performed at the same time, unlike what we call the Theban trilogy with all about Oedipus. Yes. It has a common theme, but it's not a trilogy, your style is a trilogy, and having Cassandra talk about prophetically about about fate and things like that prepares us for the next two plays, especially because her. Her guardian is Apollo, and he becomes very important in the humanities.

So it's significant, I suppose the humanities is quite an important place for giving a final assessment on Titanosaurus character, because it seems to take the form of a court case deciding whether or not to acquit her son for killing her. Yeah, it's interesting, the latest production of the first time that I saw was at the Olmeda and the conceit of it was the arrest these.

Throughout the play is recalling what happened from Virginia's death to his killing of Cassandre with a school psychologist who's trying to determine if he is fit to stand trial. So it's fascinating because I suppose the throughout the play, I believe he's pursued by theories that are perhaps a way of looking at madness then. And yes, I mean, I think there are definitely parallels for sure.

And it does become a trial of quite a master instead, because they're deciding did she behave so painlessly or was she so toxic as a mother and in what she did that he deserves not to be put on trial for her death in the first place so that it's not so much a case of did she behave so wrongly that she deserves to die? But did she behave in so, so unnaturally as to drive arrestees to do this? I see. So are sort of different types of of her being culpable.

And what's the verdict there? I mean, is the same as humanity cleared by decisive victory? No, I mean, it's a hung jury and I think a female does make an appearance, but it's always brilliant, actually, in the it's they've got wigs on and gowns and it's it's quite fun. So conjecturing here that she's a terrible mother to arrestees. Do we see remnants of her sort of mothering skills with other children and other plays in the tradition?

What is at this end in the Agamemnon? I guess the focus is mostly on her as a potential overly loving mother of Iphigenia that in later plays, for example, in the electrical, say, suffocations, the lecture. And then she's portrayed as a monster, Mother Teresa, who is as much presiding palace Penya lover, I guess this is treating her daughter is essentially a slave to serve the household.

And there's a lot of tension. I mean, it's not. Of course, I think it's more complex than just her as a horrific mother. There is a lot of psychological tension between Electra's own feelings about the murder of her father and her relationship with her mother, part Envestra. So this is weird dichotomy between Titanosaurus identity as a mother of Iphigenia and then an inadequate mother of a lecture.

And we have three plays that deal with the refugees. Costner and I can't remember which one it is, but in one of them she's told the You've died. She deceived and she celebrates. And I think she says, you know, you never stop loving your children no matter what I do, no matter if God predicted to be your eventual murderer. It's also the scene where she offers she she buys her breasts universities to try and prevent him from killing her, which is appealing to her, to his identity as a son.

To have sympathy on the mother. We probably ought to discuss presentations of her as having a kind of deviant, bestial sexuality throughout the tradition, which are quite, quite dominant, especially in that sort of interfamily a way. Well, in the Book of Mormon, she's described at various points as essentially a monster. So she's compared to the monster Skidder. He was a sea monster with dogs from the groyne below. She says she used to tear apart ships in the Odyssey.

And she's also described as a lioness, say a competitor for the king, the lion king of Agamemnon. She's described as a lioness figure. She would say that she was inappropriately savage for an ancient woman. Yes. And I believe that at the very end of the Agamemnon, she describes pleasure that she derives from killing Agamemnon and Cassandra in a way that some have postulated is almost sexual as well.

When she she talks, when she first greets, I remember she talks about the rumours she heard about about his death of Troy. You know, the type of news that filters home that that's not true. And she talks about wounds inflicted. And there is a dark kind of appreciation of the slaughter that she's describing. She talks about memos full of holes and it's unsettling. And I think the verb used that full of holes, doesn't it? Is there a passive verb meaning to penetrate?

So what she means is sort of fully penetrated, which obviously suggests a kind of female sexual transgression in reversing the kind of normal narrative of what happens in heterosexual sexual intercourse. No, certainly. I mean, as a woman in a heterosexual relationship in Greece, you would always be the passive. We can see that from the male, female or male relationships because the man penetrating has to be older.

Otherwise, to be penetrated by younger men would be disgraceful. As a woman, you always penetrated. That is your role. She's talking about penetrating. I suppose it ties into the claims of kingship as well. Penetration and power very, very closely, very closely intertwined. So far. To talk about it isn't necessarily weirdly sexual, but it is pointing to a version of the normal scheme of things.

I suppose it's worth highlighting. She's but she's also talking about messages that are ambivalent that could be true or could not be true. And perhaps what this means in terms of her role as the font of communication in this play and the way the female roles interception naturally do or don't cohere in the great classical tradition. And really, perhaps you could speak a bit more about that. Yeah, see, there's two ways in which I interpreted that.

And the first one, which is just Nasreddin immediately, is that women are traditionally associated with deception and that's often interpreted as them. I guess maybe the male suspicion of what they're doing when they're indoors, where they're meant to be potentially weaving, say weaving becomes one of the images that's associated with women and with men is deception. You get some words of weaving while sort of spinning together on complex contrivances.

And that's particularly interesting because in the play, the way one of the symbolic ways in which quite a Nestor overcomes a moment as she she convinced him to step on some and tapestries. And then, of course, she also traps him in some nets before she kills him. And that's come up several times throughout the play, both based in relation to what she's done in the course of Faten, that nets are also full of holes and the holidays.

Yeah, I think she actually says that when she's describing how she she sort of imagined that her husband would have been full of holes and she describes as as full of holes, as a gnat. So they they do keep coming up. And that's probably connected to her her gender role as a deceitful female of that second way in which I think it's also interesting as a sort of ongoing theme of words and stories and can we can we trust stories?

Are stories real? So, of course, her words are not real when she she tells them that she is crying herself to sleep, would be able to sleep. She's a beautiful wife. He's welcoming her husband. Hey. But you also have the messenger who does tell broadly the truth. But he also says, I'm not going to tell you about how bad the war was because that's not what will bring you pleasure. That's not what you will what you want to hear this time. And is watching a tragedy.

Perhaps we're thinking precisely what has been fabricated, woven together to give us pleasure. Maybe it brings us pleasure through pity and fear. But the overwhelming reason to be watching the tragedy is for is for pleasure. And then a positive given that presented the number of people presenting words in very careful ways to persuade the contextual actors, along with the link that that gives the link between weaving a narrative.

I mean, modestly speaking, we don't think of painted art on its own of necessarily having a narrative. It often seems like a freeze frame perhaps, or the picture you might be able to include, say, on on a tapestry or a quilt might not seem as if it can tell a linear story necessarily. Do you think that's the case in painted narratives of the ancient world, or is there more of a theme atomisation?

I mean, it's complicated because a lot of the live pictures of Agamemnon being killed on vases, vases around you can create more of a temporal quality of them, I suppose, in that it takes time for the art to travel. Exactly. Well, and also like the phrase around a temple. Yeah, you literally have to follow it around. And then sometimes the freeze will depict a procession and a procession is sequential. Serenata, you have to follow.

So the way where the Greeks have that art means that they had they have more opportunity to to present temporal narrative. But you have both temporal narrative, but you also have a kind of a temple. That's the way to put it. But you have multiple instances happening within one image. You can catch essentially the whole story in one go. Yeah. So I'm just thinking of examples.

Temple Pediments, I think it's Artemis bottles of coffee where you have the slaying of the Gorgon, but you also have the horse that leapt out of the Pegasus. He leapt out of the Gorgons head and that the child that leapt out of her head, that while the head is still on. So you have kind of multiple temporal moments in the story. So I suppose that sort of narrative by context, isn't it, in that you can't really you can't actually show all of the events in sequence that happened.

So you just show a lot of events together, I suppose, so that people can select it from a tradition that they're familiar with. Yeah, and I think that's that could easily be a criminal tragedy because traditionally they they happened in one day. You mean the events of the play take place one day or so in the Agamemnon, you have the sun coming up at the end of the start and frequent mentions of the stage of the day throughout.

Yeah, there's certainly a way in which kind of a snapshot is why this is a trilogy. So interesting what days was was chosen by. Interesting, interesting to days where a lot of them suffer. Yeah, and I suppose that's also we can. Assume an element of familiarity with various mythological narratives in the audience, and so this isn't their first introduction to the story, not like we've discussed before, it's there in The Odyssey if they're in it, and they'd be familiar with its own values.

It's a very popular myth. So do you sympathise with Clytemnestra? It's a difficult question because the trope of of wife killing husband is so. Many times referenced and in my sort of research, rather than reading the Agamemnon or any of the associated plays, I, I looked up Black Widows, which is a wife who kills a husband. I found this really interesting case that that created an entire media circus about a woman who killed both of her husbands and then tried to frame her daughter for it.

And I know we've not talked much about Electra, but it seems like a similar case of someone. You saw the daughter's relationship with the father. Yes. With lethal consequences. And it's come back up again. This all happened in 2007, but this woman died in prison over the summer. And again, it's been brought up and people have some refreshed interest in this kind of crime. So do we sympathise with quite Envestra? We're seeing it through the lens of a lot of baggage, a biblical pop culture.

Women killing their husbands is as taboo now as it was then, but with many different connotations. So do I sympathise with her? Yes, because I think if I strip away that kind of internalised misogyny, fear of of these kind of Black Widow devious types, then. What I see is a mother who was ruined by the death of her daughter at the hands of her husband, and we talked about whether she's a good mother or not. How can you be a good mother when you let your husband kill your daughter?

And I'm not saying that in a pejorative way. What I mean is how do you continue to mother after that? How can you. Take on the role of a good mother when your husband has killed your child and that has been sanctioned and when she left him, she says, well, I'm not crying with joy because you're back, because when my tears were exhausted, she's wanting to imply the exhausted over worry for him.

And whereas actually, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that she has been crying for 10 years, but not for him. So, yes, I do have sympathy for folks like Mr. Wow. I mean, I suppose just to confirm the gendered element of these Black Widow figures, I mean, the O.J. Simpson trial is the obvious other place to look at spouse killings, which I mean, a recent documentary made it very, very clear that it's likely that he did it.

Obviously, I shouldn't speculate, given that theoretically justice has been served. He absolutely did it. He certainly beat women and it takes a misplaced blow to beat him to death. So he as good as did it if he didn't do it. I think one of the most uncomfortable things that makes us can confront is abuse for typical behaviour for genders and the way that acting typically constitutes being a frightening person.

Do you think maybe you comment on that to an ancient audience, particularly in each audience, probably mostly composed of men. They would hate to see a woman taking charge, speaking out, speaking her mind at her exultation speech at the end, when she describes the of joy with which she kills her husband combined with her killing of her husband would have been particularly terrifying. So do you have sympathy for Mr. I was just reflecting on this because.

I think I I sympathise with some of her motives. So the fact that she she has obviously experienced this sorrow over Iphigenia, her daughter. But I think I think I don't feel much sympathy for her characterisation in that play. I don't feel that there's much emphasis on her sorrow on the story of Iphigenia within the plane.

I think my sympathy comes to have much more in other places. For example, in a fictional are less, which is later played by different parties, essentially about that moment where Agamemnon decides to kill off it or not. And I think in that world where you, Rapides, is exploring the trauma that Agamemnon feels in making that decision and then the impact that has on Clytemnestra and on and on his daughter, I feel my sympathy comes to through much more forthright in that he was in the agamemnon's.

She is incredibly powerful, dominant, exultant. In the moment of the killing, she sort of drenched in blood and pleased with that. So do you think the fact that you feel more sympathy from Euripides Clytemnestra figure says anything about the traditional roles we give to those two traditions and one perhaps being a little more progressive than the other?

I wouldn't put it like that. So I think my sympathy in in Chinatown is because he is focussing on a very different moment in the story and he's chosen to kind of unpack a lot of different emotions. I also have sympathy that Agamemnon and and I have sympathy for all of them. Essentially, the reason that I feel different is because it's looking at a different set, a different drama and a different moment, a different set of alternatives.

I would actually disagree with the view that Aeschylus was not innovative. He's credited with introducing the second actor. What does that mean? There are only two actors on stage all the course also on stage. They're not called actors. They're called the chorus. You also might have had a number of voices passed. And that might be what's particularly exciting about the work.

Sandra, for example, because in the we have three actors. We have Sandra on stage at the same time as Clytemnestra and at the same time as Agamemnon. And potentially for a lot of the audience, it's hard to know. We have to speculate, experienced a lot of plays, but potentially for the audience, that would have been a totally astounding moment where Cassandra actually speaks up and gives a prophecy because they may well have thought she was another voiceless actor who was tended to only use to.

So would the same actors rotate parts then if there was more than two characters in the play? Yeah, exactly. So you can sometimes reconstruct who would have played who because you can study who must be on stage at a particular time. Someone exists probably because they're going to change their Massachusett costume. That's just one example of how this plays the whole our star is incredibly innovative. We only have seven, maybe six plays that we can do by oestrus.

And so the three of them to be incredibly innovative, I think is actually very striking. You also have a very unusual chorus in the humanities, say the course are actually kind of actively driving the drama there, of course, of fairies chasing Orestis. We've already talked about the very fact that he's chosen to look at the mess from a different perspective.

So he's taken the identity of quite a master who was involved to a certain extent in killing Agamemnon and given her potentially a much larger role than she'd had before. The course in the Agamemnon appeared to spend most of the time actually giving back stories.

Do you do you think that's the case or would you say that instead of actually driving force in this play, they do something almost like an artwork at moments that kind of as you know, we were talking about how you kind of get this explosion of different talking points and art and they also reflect on what's happened. They reflect what's going to happen. They took the prophecy, things that were going to happen in the past.

They kind of bring a lot of moments together in that it's that I suppose you do have to two particularly interesting moments where they take a more of an active role. And one is when they debate whether to sort of burst in and prevent cartoonists from killing Agamemnon.

That, I think, is that there is a lot of debate over whether they would have said all the lines or whether the course would have actually split into a number of voices at that point, because the script seems to suggest there's different views coming through in the chorus that later will see when it comes out. And I guess this is come out the core seem to be trying to assert some authority.

And although they in the end do seem to succeed in in in asserting any authority and it appears cowed by this, they do seem to be trying to push back against the leftist. It's quite interesting. One thing that interests me about the course in this play is that they seem to be just old men, which provides quite a strong foil for a character like height. Well, all the young men are dead. Well, it is a necessity. At some point they address themselves.

We say, well, our bodies were too weak to go to war, but with the power of song that defies age will be your chorus today. And again, I think this feeds into the themes of war and lost and lost generations and papering over the gap that should be filled by the most productive and vital members of society because because they've been lost in war. And although war was a Greek reality, I don't think they ever stop reflecting on on the heavy burden that it leaves behind the people at home.

So what does that say about Jesus, that he's still there? He is presented as a sort of emasculated, maybe better effeminate character. I know he comes on at the end and sort of claims that he's masterminded the whole thing. He does seem to take kind of tyrannical control, essentially, of the Congress and of state. But he does come across in the myth as a sort of effeminate character, which would fit with the idea that he'd maintain knock on to fight and still in the play.

It's not as if he earns the right to say to claim that tyranny. He doesn't come across as forceful. He doesn't come up earlier in the book. I mean, the subject of his citizenship is disputed because he I think he had to leave after what happened to his father and brothers and was raised elsewhere. So whether or not he would have been part of a draught if he had a clear allegiance to any particular country that he would fight is difficult.

He seems to be like sort of one of the men left behind by not having a clear identity because his role as ominous as its less of a of deep seated reason. That is interesting as well, because they have they have often been seen to be kind of intermediaries, to be somewhere kind of between actors and audience to to view events themselves. But then they participate in the events. They see things that part of this kind of alternate Lyrica performative tradition.

But then they're also saying sometimes they stand up and they actually participate in the drama as well and say to them, to the old man, that's been a pattern of old man women, just kind of marginal characters that come up as the chorus and the plays and the passions as well.

They are the old man again, that the old men have been left behind, the ones that didn't go to war, that you get in the same way of women on a woman on stage and a lot of old men in the chorus and say you have a lot of kind of interesting other characters presented before an audience of probably a lot of young men, a lot of glorious.