"Agamemnon" by Aeschylus

Tolstoy had it right:  "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  And you definitely don't want to be unhappy in the way Agamemnon's family is unhappy.  For starters he sacrificed his daughter to the god Artemis in order to insure favorable winds for his voyage to Troy.  I don't recall if that was mentioned in The Illiad or not.  I'll trust SparkNotes for now.

Then, angered by her husband's wrong, Agamemnon's wife, Clytaemestra, kills him and the concubine he brought back with him from Troy.  Men and their spoils of war.

But Clytaemestra wasn't alone.  She had been planning this for the ten years Agamemnon had been gone conquering Troy with the help of his cousin Aegisthus', who is understandably peeved at Agamemnon because Agamemnon's father Atreus fed Aegisthus' father the flesh of his own son, Aegithus' brother, during a feast.  O_O  I know, right?!  I just hope I conveyed that properly.  I need to work on my syntax.

Now there's a screwed up family.  You could shorten the synopsis to say "Agamemnon dies for his sins and the sins of his father."  That about sums it up.  But you would miss out on the prose if you left it at a simple synopsis.  And that's one of the better parts of these plays.  The length of the dialogue is impressive.  And it's frustrating at times to slog through the flowery prose, but you come out feeling good for having accomplished this feat.

As I've recommended before, if you have A LOT of trouble reading the stories with the prose and styling, read the SparkNotes first.  Then you shan't be burdened with the task of deciphering the story along with the already heavy task of translating this difficult syntax.

A phrase that caught my eye:  "Who over this great man's grave shall lay the blessing of tears worked soberly from a true heart?"  That was said by the Chorus after seeing Agamemnon dead.  I don't have much to say about it, but it struck me as finely worded.  Specifically, "tears worked soberly from a true heart" caught my eye.

There were many other quotes I enjoyed, but, alas, they are lost to the sea of prose I had found them in.  I might update this entry if I find them in the future.

Ciao!