In watching the story unfold, there are a
lot of themes we can tie into. The story is made with there's a spareness
in terms of the plot. There's a spareness in terms of the set
decoration and the presentation in antiquity.
There's also a spareness roughly in terms of, of the thematic elements that are
there. There are a few really important themes
that just keep getting worked and re-worked in lots of different guises to
help us unfold the details about what our, what's behind our story.
I'll start off with a couple of references, you'll see in parentheses up
here I've got line numbre of references, these are to the translation we're using
in the class. They're going to be close-ish to other
English translations and close-ish to the Greek, but not of them are going to line
up unless this is the translation in the University of Chicago series edited by
Green and Latimore. We have lots of references in the story to
nets and webs. The story that we get from, for example,
contrasting with Homer's Odyssey, we've got there Penelope who is weaving and
un-weaving. And recall, what she does with that thematically that fits into a larger
story. It's Penelope staling people that are
trying to break into her connection with Odysseus and pushing them off.
She is using the weaving and un-weaving in a, in a not completely intuitive way of
keeping people away. It's a method she used to protect herself.
Nets, such as they appear in this story, are going to be nets that trap those
nearby you. The nets webs, entanglements, all these
interweavings. In the Odyssey, remember, that closeness
of interweaving was a symbol of connection.
Both Odysseus and Penelope together were plot weavers.
Here, the plots and connection and nettedness is all going to be a sign of
too much closeness and a sign of nasty closeness actual, violence that gets
brought between the groups. The Crimson Tapestry itself is the I
think, the most prominent example of the kind of theme, theme of nettedness and
knots that gets turned into a net. Remember what happens Pene, cuz
Clytemnestra says to Agamemnon, please, honey.
I haven't seen you for a long time. Step on out of your boat with your muddy
boots and trample on this beautiful cloth that I've woven for your return.
Now, you can imagine, I mean, the scene is quite loaded with bitterness.
Clytemnestra is, yes indeed, inviting Agamemnon to step on this thing and you
can hear in the back of her mind, she's saying to herself, Yeah.
And you're just the kind of person who would trample over such a fine thing that
I've been making for you to trample on. It's as though she has been carefully
nurturing her own bitterness over a year as she's weaving this thing thinking, oh,
I bet he'll step on it, I bet he'll step on it, I bet he'll step on it.
Well, yeah indeed he does, he goes off and steps on it.
And it just proves, it helps quiet a master of that thing becomes an instrument
by which she can prove what a clod he is and how he does trample on fine things.
With the, the color of this tapestry is not just happenstance.
It's a deep rich purple dye that colors it.
This is a color that surely has a connection with blood, that's clear and
obvious in our story. It also, which may be obvious or, or may
not, has a close connection with royalty. The color purple was very hard to get.
It came from seashells off on the far eastern side of the Mediterranean.
Huge numbers of seashells, which were required to make small bits of this dye.
So, purpleness was associated with royalty from quite far back.
And to have an exotic beautiful tapestry here, died purple makes it even more
valuable. And also in, interesting, interestingly,
more a sign of Agamemnon's grandeur. So, he's being invited basically to, kind
of, you know, trample and muck up his own his own grandeur.
So, the closeness that gets shown up in these connections with nettedness and the
crimson path, All these show the dark side of intimacy.
Closeness can become inward turning and nasty,
Not supportive and, and mutually beneficial.
We have references to nets that are all over the place as represented by these
line numbers. There's a fishing net.
Cassandra talks about herself as fenced in by fatal nets.
There's a spiders web that gets mentioned. We talk about cords of justice.
Aeschylus seems to be going out of his way, to, to use imagery of cordedness and
of nettedness to talk about lots of different things in this story.
Each time it's worth picking these apart and finding connections.
Secrecy, in this story. We talked about how secrecy in the Odyssey
had a way of creating intimacy. There were secrets that were kept between
people, away from other people, and help them maintain a connection.
Here, the secrecy is working to produce connections that are not being authorized
by the normal course of events. The secrets that Clytemnestra and
Aegisthus hold. notice how Agamemnon is outside the,
He doesn't know what's happening. They becomes divisive, the secrecy becomes
a divisive instrument not a connecting instrument.
We've got examples of this also in that fire beacon.
I recall at the beginning of the night, everyone kind of knows what's going on
with that. And when Agamemnon shows up, he doesn't
necessarily know that a signal has been put out and to try to catch him out,
To try to announce his arrival ahead of time so that his wife can now betray him.
The meaning of that signal is not going to be at all clear to anyone else except,
except Clytaemnestra. Then, further, we have a set of
meditations on the theme of medicine and drugs.
In Greek, the term pharmacon, interestingly indicates a drug.
And like the English, it has a, an ambivalence to it.
It could mean both poison, In the sense of a drug that drugs a person
to death. It could also, though, mean a cure.
A drug in the sense of a medicine. So, the term pharmicon shows up in this
double valenced way several points in the epic.
Or sorry, in the several points in the story.
You'll see it in the lines referred to here.
And then, also, in a couple of points where Clytemnestra mentions that there's
really, things are just not quite working out right in this story.
There's no God of healing, she tells us toward the end as she's making her final
walk into the into Clytemnestra's palace. There is no god of healing.
It's not going to be possible to find healing here.
And then, a further theme, a further development of this theme, Cassandra says
that she's, again, as she's walking in, Clytemnestra intends to shred me in a
bowl. Now, for you and I, this might not sound
like an obvious connection to medicine, but in antiquity, it absolutely would've
been. This is the normal way that drugs are
delivered. You take roots or other herbs, and shred
them into a bowl, and mix them all together and this then becomes sort of
drunk and potion, a potion that's ready for you to drink, and that's the mode by
which drugs are normally delivered. For her to say Clytemnestra intends to
shred me into a bowl, would have been sounded like you and I saying,
Clytemnestra intends to, you know, swallow me like a pill or something.
It would have been a clear and direct reference to medicine.
So, Cassandra here is making the death of Clytemnestra into some kind of a medicine
that's going to cure this whole thing. She is presumably going to now be having
killed her, Clytemnestra will have exorcised her own guilt. And, yes, now
this whole crime is going to be over. At each time, at each turn in the
development of the story, Another generation treats the, the, the,
the, the, the, what they need to do as a kind of medicine that's going to cure the
nastiness that's in this family. When Agamemnon is out on his awful is out
on his, on his campaign and is lead, We find out by the Choral Ode, is led to
this terrible wvent of having to kill his own daughter, Iphigenia.
He's told he must kill Iphigenia for the winds to get corrected,
He goes ahead and does it. The killing of Iphigenia is referred to,
yes indeed, as a pharmacon. As if she is going to cure things in this
story. She's going to heal the winds and fix
everything, that's line 200. She's referred to as first for slaughter's
kind of necessary. A journey can get started and the, and the
war can be launched. Well, no, she's not going to be a cure.
She's actually going to be a poison. When she is killed, this event is what's
going to absolutely poison Agememnon's own household.
Clytemnestra will turn this against him which she obviously has every right to do.
Now Agamemnon also the story as it unfolds makes contact with a lot of themes of
purification. This is harkening back to some of the
events that we saw earlier in the tale of The House of Atreus.
But definitely brought home here in, in Aeschylus's version of the story.
Recall when Clytemnestra wants Agamemnon to come into the house, please, honey. I
haven't seen you in so long. Come in.
Let's give you a bath." We will purify you, we will clean you of all the nasty
stuff that's going on out there in the war. And then, of course, this bath
becomes a blood bath. The idea that purification now actually
leads to pollution is at yet another addition to our string of themes in which
something thing is meant to cure or purify or fix things, also has the unintended
side effect of undoing things, making them impure making them diseased.
And nets that are supposed to keep us together drive us apart.
Secrecy that's supposed to create intimacy actually creates wedges between us.
The Agamemnon shows the inversion of a lot of, very common themes of connection. we
get to see the utter and complete nastiness the dark side of intimacy.
In this way, it's kind of a mirror of what we saw with Odysseus and Penelope where we
saw the good sides of intimacy, here we get to see all the dark sides of it.
So focusing on these pieces and the themes as they get drawn out gives us a chance to
see a sum of how Agamemnon pulls through this tale for his audience.