Agamemnon — Third Episode

Agamemnon arrives on a chariot with Cassandra seated beside him — the Trojan princess and prophet he has brought home as a concubine. He gives a speech of appropriate piety: the gods have helped the Greeks win; he will thank them properly; there is also a matter of civic disease at home that he will diagnose and cauterize as needed. Then he steps down and Clytemnestra appears.

Her speech of welcome is the great set-piece of the first play. She describes her ten years without him — the false reports of his death that sent her to the noose again and again (others cut her down), the sleepless nights, the tears dried to nothing, the vigils. Every word is selected for the king's ears. It is entirely plausible. It is entirely false. The audience knows she has been Aegisthus's lover; she knows the audience knows; she is performing for Agamemnon, and she is superb at it.

Then she orders the purple robes to be laid out. Walk to your palace on this path, she says — these crimson tapestries steeped in the sea. Agamemnon objects, quite correctly: this is the honour of the gods; he is a mortal; this is hubris. She presses him: Priam would have walked on purple. He gives in, removes his sandals so as not to soil the dye with his feet — still a gesture of scruple that he himself recognises is already contradicted by the act — and walks across. The gods have noticed. The chorus is afraid.