Word: agamemnon
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...they were vague. The historian Herodotus mentioned a temple of Artemis that flourished at Vravron. Aristophanes hinted at strange orgies. The rest was a tantalizing mixture of myths and the real civilization of the time. Euripides, in plays, described how Artemis rescued Iphigenia from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon, and how later, at the behest of Athena, Iphigenia became Artemis' priestess at Vravron. She dwelt near some "holy stairs." and when she died, her grave was adorned "with braided gowns of softest weave" left to the shrine "by women dead with child...
Like all the Greek tragedies, Electra is divided into heroes, gods and women. Here, the gods are remote, the hero Orestes largely absent, and it is the women who seem demoniacally possessed. Before the play begins, Clytemnestra and her ambitious paramour Aegisthus murder King Agamemnon, Electra's father, upon his return from the Trojan War. After that, treated like an outcast in the palace, Electra counts on her brother Orestes to return and avenge their father. At Orestes' seeming death, a clever display of Sophoclean theatricality, her hopes are dashed only to spiral into joy when her brother...
...that could be Mammoth Cave swallowing the Parthenon of Nashville, the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Conn, last week opened a production of Troilus and Cressida. But what ho? There, on a camp stool, sat mighty Agamemnon, stroking his beard, smoking a ten-inch cigar, wearing the uniform of a Union general and looking for all the world like an actor dressed up to play Ulysses S. Grant. There too was doddering old Nestor, also wearing the blue, with binoculars around his neck. Menelaus wore pince-nez, and they all used the spittoon and the likker jug. The Trojan...
...magnificent as thought, but it is deficient as a play. The incidents are diffuse and not well related, as such threads as there are end inconclusively. The work lacks the focal personage of two it badly needs. All these soldiers are gathered, but Priam is no Lee and Agamemnon is no Grant, not to mention an Alexander of a MacArthur. Nor is the work mainly about Troilus and Cressida any more than Julius Caesar is mainly about Caesar...
Paul Sparer is a stuffed-shirt Ulysses who delivers his two lengthy disquisitions on degree and on time with imposing sonority. During the first, the satirical touch comes when Patrick Hines' gruff Agamemnon clearly doesn't suffer garrulity gladly and impatiently drums his fingers on the table...