The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, Orestes in Athens

179 Pages·2018·1.24 MB·English

by  Aeschylus

THE ORESTEIA
AGAMEMNON | WOMEN AT THE GRAVESIDE | ORESTES
AT ATHENS
AESCHYLUS
A NEW TRANSLATION BY OLIVER TAPLIN
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK • LONDON
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In gratitude to the poets I have had the good fortune to know
CONTENTS
Map: Places Relevant to the Oresteia
Introduction
On This Translation
AGAMEMNON
WOMEN AT THE GRAVESIDE
ORESTES AT ATHENS
Notes
Recommended Pronunciations of Proper Names
Acknowledgments
“Publisher’s Note: On older legacy e-readers, line numbers will flow into the
lines of poetry, instead of appearing off to the side. Please do not treat these
numbers as part of the text. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Places Relevant to the Oresteia
Map by Mapping Specialists, Ltd., Fitchburg, WI.
INTRODUCTION
Popular Performance
T
he Oresteia trilogy was created by Aeschylus to be performed in the open air
before his fellow citizens in Athens on a spring day in 458 B.C.E. Although it
comes from so early in the record of world literature, it retains an extraordinary
power to grip and to provoke to this day. In fact, it is probably more widely
known and widely performed now than at any other time in the last twenty-two
hundred years. It remains a challenging yet accessible work which embodies
conflicts about family, gender, and justice in ways that still arouse disturbing
thoughts and strong emotions.
The Oresteia was not—and is not—just a text: Aeschylus was the director,
composer, and choreographer as well as the playwright and poet. The text in this
volume is the verbal record, the libretto, of a work of art that interwove action,
costume, objects, dance, music, poetry, and voice. Furthermore, it did not come
into being for an exclusive or elite public—and there is no good reason why it
should be regarded like that today, either. It was produced, on the contrary, for
an audience of at least six thousand, quite possibly many more, gathered in the
theatron, the “viewing place” dedicated to honor the god Dionysus, beneath the
walls of the Athenian Acropolis. It was a huge event, the popular entertainment
of its time.
This is all a far cry from most modern theatrical experiences, which are
constrained within enclosed, darkened spaces where actors move naturalistically
and speak colloquial prose. Also, as well as the actors, there was the chorus,
which provided an essential layer in Greek drama. Many modern productions
have found that, far from being a problem, this group of witnesses, with their
searching attempts to make some sense of the tragedy through their poetry and
music, supply an extra, vivid dimension. This is especially true of Aeschylus’
plays, where the choral songs (or “odes”) are so strong and full. It makes sense
that Richard Wagner, with his ideas of a “total artwork” (Gesamtkunstwerk),
said that his impressions of the Oresteia molded his ideas “about the whole
significance of the drama and of theater.”
More recently, many of the leading stage directors have seized the
opportunity to put on Agamemnon or the whole trilogy in order to push the
boundaries of routine theater. A roll call of names gives some idea of their
variety: Max Reinhardt, Jean-Louis Barrault, Tyrone Guthrie, Vittorio Gassman,
Karolos Koun, Peter Stein, Peter Hall, Ariane Mnouchkine, Katie Mitchell,
Michael Thalheimer. These productions have not been acts of antiquarian piety
to make passive audiences feel complacent; they have been innovative
explorations to provoke those who want to have their ears and eyes and emotions
freshly opened.
So where did this story of theatrical revolution begin? Aeschylus was born in
about 525 b.c.e., and the Oresteia, put on in 458, just two years before his death,
was recognized as his masterpiece. The art form of tragedy had developed with
amazing rapidity, given that theater, in the core sense of the word, had most
probably been invented within Aeschylus’ lifetime. For theater to happen, there
had to be a fixed viewing place (theatron) and a fixed time for the audience to
gather; and rehearsed players, both actors and chorus, had to be organized to
enact a structured story. The evidence all suggests (though not beyond dispute)
that these conditions coalesced not long before 500 b.c.e. It can hardly be
coincidence that at just that same time, in 508, the Athenians radically changed
their political constitution to transfer ultimate power to the people (demos)—in
other words, they inaugurated the world’s first democracy. So the first
performance of the Oresteia may well mark the fiftieth birthday both of
democracy and of theater.
The Athenian theatron was inherently democratic, in that it was not select or
exclusive: every citizen was admitted, and the seating was not segregated or
privileged. Furthermore, tragedy calls for understanding and sympathetic fellow
feeling toward the situations and sufferings of other, very different people; and a
thoroughgoing democracy arguably calls for an enhanced sense of the
variousness of humanity and of human suffering. Open-mindedness and a
plurality of viewpoints are needed if true participation in any society is to
become extended to all its citizens. This is epitomized in the third play of the