Characterisation in Greek Tragedy

Extract

The editorial introduction to a Greek play will often include a section on the characters, in which their various traits are collected into a series of sketches. There may be sketches not only of the main characters but of minor, anonymous personages together with a sort of collective sketch of the chorus, and they are commonly made without fuss or discussion of critical theory. There has, of course, both here and in general books on the tragedians, always been room for differences of interpretation: as to whether, for example, Pentheus is moral or prurient. It is round such differences that discussion revolves, and the arguments have been heated enough. Why is the Aeschylean Agamemnon made to tread the purple carpet? Professor Thomson suggests that it is by reason of Clytemnestra's irresistible feminine charm. But since this charm, so far from being explicitly attested, is only an inference from three lines of dialogue; since the king has said a little earlier (in Thomson's own translation):

Seek not to unman me with effeminate

Graces and barbarous salaams agape

In grovelling obeisance at my feet—

from which any susceptibility to Clytemnestra's charm seems singularly absent; since, moreover, he has brought with him a concubine who is—

of many chattels the elect flower,

—one might be tempted to maintain that even if the charm is accepted as a help towards interpretation, there must be other reasons also for Agamemnon's acting as he does. Very well, you may say, modify the sketch to suit your taste.