Agamemnon — Fourth Episode

Clytemnestra re-emerges and addresses Cassandra — still seated silent in the chariot — with elaborate courtesy: come in, the bath is ready, the altars are lit. Cassandra does not move or speak. The chorus tries. Nothing. Clytemnestra gives up and goes back in, disgusted. And then, alone with the chorus, Cassandra begins to cry out.

Her first speech is inarticulate grief: Apollo, Apollo, Destroyer. The chorus does not understand. Then she begins to see. She names the curse on the house of Atreus — the banquet of Thyestes, the murdered children, the blood soaked into the foundations. She is seeing not only the past but the present: there is a woman and a net and something like a bath. She names the axe. She names the blow that is being prepared. The chorus cannot follow her; it knows her as a prophetess but cannot connect her images to what they mean. She pities them. She is perfectly clear on what she sees.

Then she shifts into direct speech. She is going to die, she says; she knows it; she accepts it. She takes off her prophet's robes — the wreath and staff Apollo gave her — and breaks them. She was right and she was not believed; she has been bought and sold and is about to be killed in a foreign land beside the man she served. She asks only to be remembered. She goes in. The chorus stands outside, trying to find something to say, when a scream comes from within the palace.