Love and Hate in Ancient Greece and Rome
Terms and Examples

Quote responses:

In a quote response, your goal is to give information and a perspective that would help in interpreting the quote.  This can include situation of the quote in the work/works; information about the nature and emphasis of the work; commentary on themes, images, and ideas; noting where parallel themes have occurred in the literature; and commentary on social/cultural perspectives that give insight on the quote.  You will have the quote's author and work; this is about commentary rather than identification.

The Quote:

Citizens and elders of Argos! I feel no shame in expressing to you my love for
my husband. With time, modesty between humans erodes.
What I'm about to say is not something I've heard from others. Rather, let me
tell you what Ive suffered all this time that he was away, fighting beneath the
walls of Troy.
Firstly, it is a dreadful thing for a woman to stay home alone, without her
husband. Her house is filled with fearful rumours: One person comes and tells
of one terrible event, followed by another person who adds yet another worse
event.

Bad response:

This is a speech given by Clytemnestra to the chorus, who are citizens of Argos.  She says she isn’t ashamed to show her love for Agamemnon.  Then she says that she has suffered worrying about Agamemnon while was away fighting in Troy.  She also says that it’s terrible for women to have to stay home, and that women always suffer when their men are at war, because they are always hearing rumors of their husband’s death.

This is a reiteration of the quote, not a response to it.

Improvement:

This is a speech given by Clytemnestra to the chorus, who are citizens of Argos, when Agamemnon is about to return home.  She says she isn’t ashamed to show her love for Agamemnon.  Then she says that she has suffered worrying about Agamemnon while was away fighting in Troy.  She also says that it’s terrible for women to have to stay home, and that women always suffer when their men are at war, because they are always hearing rumors of their husband’s death.  This is ironic because Clytemnestra was having an affair the whole time Agamemnon was away, and is now planning to kill him.

Shows context of speech, adds information about the situation, points out irony.

Good responses:

#1. This scene takes place when Agamamnon has just come back from the Trojan war.  Clytemnestra is pretending to love and miss him, but actually she has been having an affair with Agamemnon’s cousin, Aegisthus, the whole time, and is planning to kill Agamemnon.  This shows the way Clytemnestra uses deception to further her aims. In the last part of the speech, she expresses fear of rumors, meaning the rumors of Agamemnon’s death, but with the beacon light she set up to show his return, she’s made sure to find out the facts.  Immediately afterwards, Clytemnestra pretends to honor Agamemnon by getting him to walk on a fine carpet, luring him into committing hubris.  Throughout the  whole scene, everything she says and does is the opposite of what she actually thinks and plans to do.

The author (1) situates the scene very effectively in the play, showing a strong, detailed knowledge of this specific work of literature; (2) emphasizes a motif (deception) very thoroughly in the play;  (3) relates the speech and scene and related to specific themes & images (the beacon, rumors, hubris), incidentally incorporates vocabulary from class; and (4) has a good concluding summary.

#2.  Aeschylus wrote Agamemnon as one of a trilogy of plays (the Oresteia) that deal with the themes of family murder, incorporating images of light and darkness, and often opposing masculine and feminine actions.  In this scene, Clytemnestra is acting like a loving wife (like Andromache in the Iliad) but actually in Agamemnon she has been described as a man-like woman, and commits deeds of masculine daring.  This is one example of a relationship that might have begun as normal, but was corrupted into hate, and is similar to other warped family relationships, such as Electra who hates her mother, and Orestes who kills her for revenge.  This kind of hatred came down from earlier generations (with acts like killing a brother’s sons and feeding them to him).  Family hatred motivates many of the central actions of the play.

The author: (1) gives more information about the context of the quote; (2) identifies a motif a motif (faithful wife) in another work of literature and contrasts it with Clytemnestra; (3) brings in the theme of C’s manlike behavior; (4) mentions other relationships in the Oresteia that share characteristics with the relationship of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, as well as the wider theme of family slaughter (even though s/he forgot the names of Atreus and Thyestes); and (5) comments on hatred in the play as a whole.

#3.  The main point of Clytemnestra’s seemingly sweet speech is deception, since she’s only glad Agamemnon is home because she intends to kill him.  When she does kill him it’s also deceptive (entrapment when he’s not expecting it by throwing a net over him & stabbing him in the bath).  The idea of women as hateful and deceptive appears in many situations in Greek culture.  Euripides’ Medea is another play that features a woman who acts nice while planning terrible things.  In general, women are often shown as harmful to men in Greek literature. The comments in Athenaeus show the attitude that real women are also harmful to men, ordinary wives because they make men miserable and take away their freedom, and hetairai because they are crafty and greedy.  In Aeschylus’ plays, the men (Agamemnon, Orestes) act openly, but the female characters are more deceptive.  Even Electra, a “good” character, is able to deceive her mother when Orestes comes home. 

The author: (1) takes a central aspect of the speech and explores its thematic place in Greek culture and literature; (2) demonstrates thorough knowledge of the literature, including giving specific examples from other works; (3) shows that s/he’s able to apply this theme to the way other characters function in the play; (4) demonstrates creative approaches to interpret the play’s action and message.

Terms

Cultural concepts

hamartia: a “fatal flaw” (literally, “missing the mark”) that triggers the tragic downfall of a character; it is usually an aspect of character (e.g. stubbornness, failure to see the obvious, kind-heartedness) that is not necessarily a flaw in the sense of being bad, but in the sense of opening the character and those around him/her to disaster.

hubris: something like “arrogance” or “excessive pride”; stepping out of one’s place in a way that offends the gods, or challenges the social order supported by the gods; it may be a direct challenge to the gods (e.g. comparing oneself positively to them, or honoring / praising one’s own accomplishments and status sin a way that seems to challenge the superiority of the gods.)  Adjective: hubristic.

ate: “blind infatuation,” something like an advanced state of hubris, when the hubristic person is so far gone that they multiply their offenses and fail to see the ultimate punishment coming that everybody else can see is bound to befall them.

nemesis: the destruction visited on a hubristic character, directly by the gods in some myths, and by human events in others; nemesis reduces the hubristic person so completely that they are aware that their pride was misplaced and that really they are completely insignificant; often the character is killed or destroyed, but may also suffer bereavement or other losses that bring him the recognition that he is …

erastes: (literally, “lover”) in the kind of valorization of pederastic relationships found in some times/places in Greece, and many of our sources, the erastes is the older or pursuing partner, and (where the relationship is seen as sexual) the penetrating partner; he is expected to model behavior that will improve his younger lover and bring him for fully into honorable manhood.

eromenos: (literally, “beloved”) the younger partner in the pederastic relationship, and in sexual terms the receptive partner; he is expected to be modest and resistant to unwanted advances; with his (appropriate) older lover, he learns how to be a better man.  (NOTE: There is a great deal of scholarly controversy about the nature of Greek homosexuality; the erastes/eromenos model is not the only one, and evidence suggests that the older/younger [i.e. pederastic] relationship is not the only way to interpret the erastes/eromenos relationship.)

miasma:  “pollution,” the taint that adheres to someone who has done something terrible (such as killing his mother or eating his children) whether or not it was justified or intentional.  It can be purified by ritual action, but some characters (such as Thyestes) are more or less defined by it.

pathei mathos: “learning from suffering,” a dynamic very evident in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, but present as one of the main dynamics of all tragedy (and probably of human life as well).

Theatrical terms: theater

theatron: the semicircular seating of the theater, built into a hill (i.e. using the natural landscape)

parodos: The corridors between the theatron and the orchestra, through which the patrons enter the theater and the chorus enters the orchestra

orchestra: the round area in which the chorus performs its dances, and (probably) where actors performed some (or maybe all) of their scenes

skene: the structure behind the orchestra, sort of like a backstage and backdrop in one; possibly where actors performed some (or all?) of their scenes.

mechane: the crane that lifted characters who were flying across the stage – for example, Medea and her dragon chariot

Theatrical terms: aspects of plays

masks: Greek drama was performed in masks, which (we think) had aspects of “typical” characters (e.g. young woman, old man, king, messenger).  Some have speculated that masks encouraged the connection of the events of the play and the timeless and universal, others disagree.

actor: there were three actors in most Greek plays; the first actor usually played the title role, which might involve singing; this character is often on stage for much or most of the time.  Actors were male professionals.

chorus: Greek plays had a chorus (played by men if it was a chorus of men (e.g. city elders, by boys if the chorus was female (e.g. Corinthian women).  The chorus punctuates the action, singing odes between episodes (see below).  Often it situates the viewer in the moral issues and background of the play, sometimes suggesting a particular viewpoint as central to the play, at other times more ambivalent (or maybe, multivalent).  The chorus sang and “danced” (the nature of this dancing is debated; in any case, it may be primarily something like “ritual movement”); this has led to the comment that Greek drama is more like opera than like our own idea of what a “play” is.

episode: The scenes featuring characters that take place between the choral odes.

stychomachia: “battle in turn,” the back and forth 1 or 2 line exchanges in which characters argue key points, try to establish a moral position in the face of someone who thinks the opposite, trade insults, illustrate different versions of how something in the play came about …