An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind

Don’t hit first, but hit back. An eye for an eye. Tooth for tooth. It isn’t an uncommon thing, this concept of repaying what is done to you. We live in a world in which we believe we are the center and everything revolves around us. Because of that, we are inclined to treat others the way that they treat us rather than the way that we want them to treat us. It’s not always a bad thing, but when it starts to sound like a broken record of hurting one another it becomes impossible to end the cycle of pain. Similarly in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, the first in the trilogy of plays referred to as The Oresteia, there are obvious chains of evildoing which become intertwined and irreparably tangled and drive the house of Atreus into inescapable darkness.  

It’s most likely that the beginnings of this incredibly long series of unfortunate events (Lemony Snicket knows what’s goin’ on!) began far before any of the characters present in Agamemnon were even born. Atreus is long gone before this play takes place, but his “feast that seemed a feast for gods”(Ag., 1622) is the root of just one of the interwoven threads in this tapestry of evil and pain. Because Atreus fed Thyestes “a love feast of his children’s flesh”(Ag., 1623), several years later Thyestes’ son Aegisthus is one of the driving factors of the death of Atreus’ son Agamemnon. Even though Agamemnon had no part in the horrific feast he eventually “pays for the plot his father’s hand contrived”(Ag., 1611) because it caused so much pain to the house of Thyestes. (Or rather, what was left of the house of Thyestes… so basically just Aegisthus.)

Agamemnon is brutally murdered by his wife, Clytaemnestra, after being away at war for ten years and leaving his already furious wife behind to be further encouraged into anger by Aegisthus (who at this point has pretty much declared Agamemnon his arch nemesis or something). Before the war Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter Iphigenia in order “to charm away the savage winds of Thrace”(Ag., 1444), an action that seems to be required by the goddess Artemis in order to grant them safe passage into Troy. Whether his intentions or desires are evil or not, he causes the death of their daughter and Clytaemnestra definitely blames him for sacrificing Iphigenia even though “his flocks [are] rich, teeming in their fleece”(Ag., 1441) and he has plenty of beasts he could sacrifice instead.

The act of murder itself is inherently evil no matter the cause behind it, and the evil Agamemnon commits is quite possibly the largest factor in Clytaemnestra’s decision to sacrifice him in a similar fashion. “Act for act, wound for wound”(Ag., 1555); she kills him the way he kills their daughter, for “by the sword [he does his] work and by the sword [he dies]”(Ag., 1558). She justifies her actions by claiming she is only doing to him what he did to their daughter, but by doing so she becomes just as terrible as Agamemnon himself if not even worse because she has been plotting to kill him and get her revenge for up to ten years. Aegisthus just nudges her closer to her murderous side in order to achieve his own desires, and get a wife in the process. (Somehow a shared hatred for someone and intent to murder them doesn’t seem like the ideal way to bond with your bride-to-be, but maybe that’s just me.)

Aside from Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra and ol’ Agamemnon, the entire plot of the play starts because of a completely different thirst for vengeance. Helen, wife of King Menelaus, is “stolen” by (or more likely she ran off with) young Paris of Troy and taken away to Troy to be his own wife. Obviously, this makes Menelaus incredibly angry, and he wages war against Troy because of it. The evil action of Paris causes an entire war as well as the destruction of his entire people and city by the Greeks. Had Paris not taken Helen, war would not be waged, Agamemnon would not sacrifice Iphigenia because they would not be sailing to Troy at all, and Clytaemnestra would have no reason or intention to murder her husband. (At least, none that we know of. Let’s face it, he also could’ve just been a bad husband.) Aegisthus would probably still be a crazy, murderous psychopath, but it’s unlikely that he would actually kill Agamemnon on his own.

According to Isaac Newton, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. His third law applies pretty similarly to human nature: every action of one human to another has a reciprocal reaction of the second human to the first or even to a third human. Humans take their pain out on each other, and it becomes a never ending cycle of hurt and malicious action. Newton’s first law, an object in motion tends to stay in motion, applies to humans pretty well too: people who have been hurt tend to continue to hurt others. This chain of evil and pain continues and continues.

Like the original sin with Adam and Eve, one erroneous action causes more and more until like a snowball it grows and grows and becomes an avalanche of undesirable and misguided actions that can never be halted by human power alone.