Professional Writing Service http://StudyHub.vip/Agamemnon-Prologue--The-Watchman-S-Spee 👈

1. The Gods and the Stars in the Speech of Aeschylus’s Watchman
Φύλαξ
θεοὺς μὲν αἰτῶ τῶνδ᾽ ἀπαλλαγὴν πόνων
φρουρᾶς ἐτείας μῆκος, ἣν κοιμώμενος
στέγαις Ἀτρειδῶν ἄγκαθεν, κυνὸς δίκην,
ἄστρων κάτοιδα νυκτέρων ὁμήγυριν,
καὶ τοὺς φέροντας χεῖμα καὶ θέρος βροτοῖς
λαμπροὺς δυνάστας, ἐμπρέποντας αἰθέρι
ἀστέρας, ὅταν φθίνωσιν, ἀντολάς τε τῶν.
As his very first utterance the watchman makes a prayer to the gods
for release from his toil. His job is not ordinary garrison duty; his shift is
always the same—night. Ordinary sentinels are posted on a height during
the day to observe for traffic coming from afar. The watchman’s duty is
like that of the community watchdog, posted on the roof of the manor
house in the dark. He has been stationed up there for years, his lying-in
buffeted by long nights with their troublesome frosts and dews.
Like any shepherd watching a flock by night, the watchman wishes
for the morning sun with its warmth, and he cheers at its arrival
[hêmerêsion phaos] at 22-3.(1) Perhaps, then, on the simplest level, his
prayer to the gods is a prayer to the Sungod Hêlios to bring the warming
day. Moreover, like any shepherd watching by night over the years, he has

2. come to know the collection (homêgurin) of ordinary stars, and he knows
those stars which usher in the winter and summer (kai tous pherontas
cheima kai theros brotois). After making a gesture in their presumed
direction in the sky, [tous is demonstrative] and seemingly indifferent to
their names and nature, the watchman breaks off (kai nun) at line eight, and
continues his static mission that we learn is watching for the torchlight sign,
a beam that entailed a special auditory meaning: the victory cry announcing
the capture of Troy.
The watchman is compelled to keep vigil by the woman of the house
whom he characterizes as one whose heart makes plans as a man would. He
is terrified of falling asleep, for death would be his punishment. Every tune
he hums as a remedy against drowsiness turns into a lament for the state of
affairs in the kingdom. With this reminiscence he breaks off again (nun de)
and re-utters his prayers for release from toils; freedom will come when a
fire in the darkness appears with its good-news message. His recapitulating
prayer, however, omits mention of the gods whom he invoked in the very
first word of his soliloquy. The gods are not mentioned again in the
prologue, not even to be thanked for having responded to the watchman’s
prayer.
After a pregnant pause at line 21 (the diastêma mentioned by the
scholiast), the watchman shouts as he sees the welcome answer to his
prayers: the torchlight sign that shows the light of day by night (ô chaire
lamptêr nuktos hêmerêsion/ phaos piphauskôn). Transfixed by the light, the
watchman himself acts as the last link in the chain of semaphores, an

3. audible one, as he shouts out the triumphant alert “iou, iou;” Thus he
summons Clytemnestra to arise from her bed quickly and crow out an
ululation for the house to celebrate this, her lamp signal—if, in fact, its
meaning is the fall of Troy as it seems to.
The last part of the watchman’s monologue begins in exaltation for
his masters’ good fortune but veers off, like his remedies against sleep, into
an unexpressed lament. The house, now dark but soon to be lighted up by
Clytemnestra’s torches, has its secrets which the celebratory torches will
give the lie to. Like Iphigenia, muzzled against uttering familial curses
[klêdonas patrôious, 228], the silent walls of the house, could they but take
voice, would make everything clear. The watchmen will tell only those who
already know the plans for dark deeds that the walls of the house have heard
but cannot re-echo; and he will feign ignorance before those who don’t
know. This statement (37-9) foreshadows the dramatic irony that pervades
this play, one filled with many presages (klêdones) that are conveyed not
only by cryptic utterances but by poorly understood visions and images.
The gods whom the watchman invokes with his first word may be
forgotten by him, but they are always on the minds and lips of the choruses
in the first half of the drama as they ruminate on the past and speculate
about its moral meaning. Perhaps the stunning appearance of the expected
sign and the joy he takes in his liberation make the watchman forget the
obligatory thanks owed to them. Perhaps he is too fixated on the personal
meaning that the torchlight sign bears. Ironically, he may himself be duped
by his own observations into thinking that he knows more than he does, the

4. full import of which is clear to some (the audience) but dark to himself.
Specifically, he uses the phrase lampras dunastas, unwittingly, it seems, of
its significance. [See below.]
From the pre-production of the plays and from tradition, the audience
knew how the story would unfold in its starkest lines: Agamemnon would
return home after a stormy voyage and kiss the ground of his fatherland
only to be foully murdered. They likely expected that the watchman was
going to be the man of the interloping Aegisthus, and that the latter would
be Agamemnon’s sole murderer. So they were surprised to learn that it was
Clytemnestra who posted him, and that, despite his being faithful to her
command by waking her with the news that Troy had fallen, he was loyal to
his lord, praying for his safe return (34-5). Agamemnon’s return bringing
Cassandra, his concubine at Troy, was an expected part of the story, but it
must have been a surprise when she appeared riding in his chariot,
seemingly as a typical silent supernumerary (kôphon prosôpon), but while
stubbornly refusing to be goaded into speech by Clytemnestra, spills over
with chanted speech that is still dumb and to the chorus unintelligible. They
knew Orestes would return in the second play and be reunited with his sister
Electra and that Aegisthus and Clytemnestra would suffer death at their
hands. They knew that in the third play Orestes would find expiation for his
crime of matricide.
They knew even more. On their way to the theater early on a March
morning, and then taking south-facing seats in the open air, the audience
were observing the stellar avatars of the pantheon of gods, whose presence

5. permeates the speech and thought of every character in the trilogy. First,
they had a preview of the constellations observed by the watchman in the
dark skies before dawn.(3) The “commonality of stars”(3) or “the armies
of the night” visible at Athens on the 9th of the month Elaphebolion before
dawn( 5:30 AM) on March 16th in the era of 458 B.C.E. would include
(along the ecliptic) Pisces rising, Aquarius, Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio
(and its Claws, considered a separate asterism), Libra, and Virgo.
Elsewhere, above the ecliptic faintly shone Ophiochus, Heracles, Pegasus,
Perseus, Andromeda, Cepheus, Corona Borealis with the brighter
Cassiopeia, and Draco, and the Bears toward the zenith and beyond to the
north. There, just above the ecliptic were the two bird constellations,
Cygnus and Aquila, with Lyra and Bootes. More noteworthy than the
commonality are the bright stars that might over the year be the ones that
bring in both winter and summer, “and there in the lead the ones that bring
us the snow or the crops of summer, the ones bringing us all we have, our
great blazing kings of the sky, . . . .”(5)
By name, those season-telling stars visible to the audience on a mid-
March morning in 458, as one faced south an hour before sunrise, would be
Virgo (Korê) with its bright star Spica (Stachys), Bootes with its brilliantly
yellow Arcturus, Scorpio with Antares, its red eye glaring, with southern
Shaula (Greek name lost) as its stinger, Sagittarius (Toxeutês) with Kaus
Astralis (Greek name lost). The Eagle, Aquila (Aetos) stood almost
overhead with its blazing Altair (Aetos); looking North, the observers
would see Deneb (Greek name lost) the tail of Cygnus (Kuknos); they

6. would note to their east of center Lyre’s brilliant Vega (Lyra) almost
overhead. Later, just before sunrise one would look for Auriga the
Charioteer (Heniochus) with expectation that its bright Capella (Amaltheia)
would soon rise, while above it rode the distinctive shapes of Cassiopeia
with Draco and the Ursae (Arktoi) beyond the pole (which Polaris did not
mark in that era) to the north.
Which of these phenomena would tell the seasons? Since the Dionysia
took place in spring, it comes in the season of the vernal equinox. This
indicates that the sun itself resides near that imaginary point. To determine,
in 458, when, with some precision, the equinox occurred, one looked to
Virgo in the west with its bright star Spica. The last morning visibility
(cosmic setting) of Spica marked equinox day (± 3). This means that on one
day the Spica would twinkle in the western sky at dawn before it set, but
the next day it will have faded into invisibility. A savvy observer would
take this to be a sign that the equinox was near, while related phenomena
would make him certain—the first morning visibility of Fomalhaut (put
among the stars of Aquarius by Ptolemy).(6)
Using a software planetarium which corrects for precession, one can
stipulate phenomena that marked spring equinox in 458 B.C.E. The equinox
this far into antiquity occurred on March 25/26,(7) which happened to be
on the 19th day of the lunar month. Assuming this month to be
Elaphebolion, the month in which the Dionysia was celebrated, we can date
the first day of the festival (9 Elaphebolion) to a solar-calendar date of
March 16.

7. The observation of risings, settings, and fadings to follow will, of
course, be tentative. Mt. Hymettus blocks out a few degrees on the east;
spring weather conditions might drive the archons to delay the festival (no
record of such action is extant) and clarity of sky might be iffy (how smoky
were Athenian skies after the all-night charcoal fires?) Even in sunny
Greece, as Aeschylus himself acknowledges at (Pr., 457), the settings of
stars are difficult to discern (duskritous duseis).)
With this introduction, it may be possible to understand the
significance of the language Aeschylus puts in the mouth of his watchman.
In the gloaming, the “army of the night” (astrôn . . . nukterôn homêgurin)
fade away (hotan phthinôsin) as night herself fades with the approach of the
sun (8) leaving visible in the twilight only “the blazing kings” standing out
in the brightening sky (lamprous dunastas emprepontas aitheri), “There in
the lead” (kai tous)(9) “those bringing winter and summer to
mortals” (pherontas cheima kai theros brotois), “sign stars whensoever they
are fading and in their risings (asteras hotan phinôsi antolais te tôn)”. (10)
(The demonstrative use of tôn parallels the demonstrative use in tous, line
4)
I have scrambled Aeschylus’s ordering of these phrases in order to
deliver their clear sense. The seventh line of the text has been vexed ever
since a critic of the text athetized it, first on the basis that asteras is
redundant with astrôn of the fourth line.(11) In M.L. West’s words “One
would like to save this line, then the most economical way to do so will be
to replace asteras which is both redundant to the sense and painful to the

8. metre . . .”
This criticism is ill founded. Chantraine had noted nearly fifty years
before West’s note that astron and astêr are not synonymous, although our
chief Greek-English lexicon does not mark the distinction adequately,
defining astêr with ‘a star, cf. astron.’ (12) The former, astron, is a
collective noun which almost always appears in the plural; aster is the
marked member of the pair of words. (13) Casual inspection of Homeric
and dramatic texts will affirm Chantraine. In the Iliad astêr is used nine
times, always in the singular and marked as significant: it casts sparks
(4.75); it is Opôrinos (Arcturus?) 5.5; a tapestry gleams like such a star
(6.290); fair Astyanax is like such a star (6.401); Hector appears like a
banestar (11.62); Achilles’ helmet crest is like a star (19.381). In two cases
such a star is most significant among the other astêres: Achilles’ makes an
epiphany before Priam like the aster Sirius, i.e., the “Dog of
Orion” (22.25), and the evening astêr Hesperos (Venus not Mercury here) is
most beautiful in the sky (22.317-18): “hoios d’ astêr eisi met’ astrási
nuktos amolgôi/ hesperos, hos kallistos en ouranôi histatai astêr . . . . ”
Indeed these are the two brightest objects in the heavens (except when
Jupiter outshines Sirius) and they are often—Sirius always—located in a
field of other bright stars. Sirius, Rigel, Procyon, and Betelgeuse make the
northern winter sky splendid in their shining. By contrast, the word astra
rarely appears in Homer, always in the plural and refers to stars en masse
none of which is especially noteworthy: stars shining clear about the moon
portend clear weather (Il. 8.555); stars move onward, telling the time

9. (10.252); compare Odyssey 12.312.
In tragedy astêr is seldom used. In fact I find only two appearances:
In Heracleidae (850) the messenger describes the intervention in a chariot
action of a pair of stars (aster’); in the Ion (795) Creusa expresses the topos
“better never to have been born” in a novel way: “Would that far from the
land of Hellas I might fly up into the aithêr and take my place among the
hesperous asteras.” Here we see an affirmation that the aithêr is a place
where asteres might appear, i.e., a twilight in which dim stars would not be
apparent. [See note 23]
In comedy with its freer metrical rules, astêr in its various forms
appears more frequently and with the semantic load it should bear:
Dionysus as Iacchos is the light-bringing astêr for the chorus’s ritual (Frogs
340); Meton’s city plan for the city in the clouds is a central agora from
which the streets diverge in like the rays of an asteros (Birds 1000); The
hero of the city in this same piece (1706) is described, somewhat
facetiously, as more brilliant than the brightest star (pamphaês astêr);
Trygaios in Peace (830) learns from a slave that after death men become
asteres; he espies an astêr yonder and asks who it is (834) and is told that it
is Ion of Chios, who, after writing an ode to Dawn, is now called astera by
everyone; a few lines later, we learn that shooting stars are simply asteres.
By contrast, at Agamemnon 360 the bolt of Zeus will not fall short
nor fly beyond the stars (astra). Ion’s chore of sweeping the temple grounds
takes place as the rising sun scatters the stars (astra) back into sacred Night.
(Ion 82). Praxagora urges her sister conspirators to get on with their

10. business while the stars (astra) are still shining, since the assembly will
begin at dawn (Eccleziazusae 80). There are a number of other examples as
well. My argument against West’s “redundancy” rests its case.
Once Fraenkel was suspicious of line seven owing to the apparent
redundancy, he introduced a further negative, a metrical issue. The problem
lies in the dactylic shape of its opening word, asteras (a resolution, wherein
two short syllables of the dactyl replace the second long of an iamb).
Though this metrical freedom is indulged by other dramatists, nowhere else
in Aeschylus does such a word begin an iambic trimeter line, except with
the “proper name” hêlios at Cho. 986. This exception is excused because
“proper names that are prosodically awkward must be treated
separately.”(14) Another exception, fr. 138 [1Nauk] begins Antiloch’
apoimôxon, which is excused as both a proper name and in elision, which
Fraenkel avers makes all the difference. Thus there are three examples in a
corpus of seven plays and some fragments; if we could examine the other
ninety or so other plays by Aeschylus, perhaps the statistics would change.
West, however, puts credence in Fraenkel’s argument, for in his edition of
the play he puts daggers around asteras, and we find his argument for doing
so in the note quoted above from his Studies. Bollack, however, though he
has a long note to lines 4-7, does not mention a metrical anomaly, a fact
which I take to mean that he finds no issue with what is in the text. D-P feel
that this abnormality should weigh lightly in the scales when considering
whether the line is genuine or not: ‘ . . . Cho. 986 begins hêlios, and it
seems very special pleading to urge there that hêlios is a proper name, and

11. that proper names might have special treatment.’(15)
The suggestion I make here that the syntax of the subordinate clause
that is line seven “hotan phthinôsi antolas te tôn” depends not on pherontas
in line five, as most scholars take it, but upon the participle emprepontas in
line six, which better suits the word order. Many contortions have been
struck to try to make dependency on pherontas or on katoida work out.
None is convincing. Fraenkel, following Hartung, Karsten and Lawson,
correctly rejects the idea that the hotan clause can depend upon katoida.
Other attempts distort the meaning of katoida (not “I recognize”) or do
violence to the odd parallelism of hotan phthinôsi and antolas te tôn, which,
as Pasquali demonstrated, is quite Aeschylean.(16)
Abandoning construction with katoida, the only seemingly possible
way for one to construe is after pherontas, which involves the difficulty of a
participle governing the subordinate phrase, separated from it by a line-and-
a-half of text that contain another participle in the same case and some
appositives. D-P characterize this as “abnormal and displeasing,” but they
balk at excising line 7 and emend with only antolas to antolais .(17)
Bollack calls it “une aporie.”(18) Others (West, Studies, 173, following A.
Y. Campbell) emend asteras with a participle, têrôn, which does three
things: 1) provides a verb besides pherontas for the hotan clause, 2) gives a
reason for the accusative antolas, 3) appears to some as plausible, given that
the papyrus has [a]ster[as]. (19)
That next to nobody has anticipated the solution given here is owing
to sense alone. (20) “Indeed, “. . . standing out in the sky whenever they are

12. fading and at their risings:” does not seem to make sense without some
explication. Misunderstanding of this phrase is further generated by
commentators who mistakenly restrict the meaning of phthinô to “set.” We
have noted that “fade” better suits both the lexical definition and the
phenomena. As was pointed out above, the encroaching sun, nearing its
rising, lightens the sky so that night fades, and with night’s giving way to
day, the fainter stars fade and become invisible. (21) This dawning leaves
only the asteres to continue shining, though they, too, are fading and must
disappear, once the sun has fully risen. (22) And, of course, the bright
asteres are quite striking at their risings (antolais) whether into the darkling
skies, where they are so much brighter than anything else, or in lightening
skies, as we noted for the last visible apparition of Spica, where they are
striking not only because they alone are visible, but in that the event may
have been anticipated for the establishing of an important season (when to
plow, sow, reap, go sailing, etc.). The saying in folklore “starlight, star
bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I
wish tonight,” is apropos here. The first visible star is by nature a bright one
that can shine out in the still light sky (emprepontas aitheri) ; dim stars
don’t appear until it is quite dark. Bright stars evidently have the power in
folklore to grant wishes (lamprous dynastas), and most likely a sign star like
Spica will be noticed in the western horizon by evening and in the eastern
by morning (hotan phthinosi, antolas de ton).
Why, though, does the watchman refer to these heavenly bodies as
lamprous dunastas? A few of the asteres, the brightest star in Leo called

13. Regulus (Basilikos astêr), Kastôr, Polydeukês, have some connection with
royalty or with dynasty. The Agamemnon is, of course, about dynasties of
royalty at Mycenae, Argos and Sparta, and “dynasty” foreshadows future
concerns.
Something else, some persons else, deities, were present in the sky
for the watchman to ponder and for the audience to contemplate as they
walked to the theater of Dionysus and took their seats early that morning.
Other asteres were in the sky. Not fixed stars, but planets--three planets.
Remember that in the Iliad (22.317-18) Hesperos, Venus, was referred to as
an astêr, whose semantics, therefore, must be expanded to “sign-star-
planet.” Jupiter (Zeus) risen some 90 minutes before the sun, Mars (Ares),
and Saturn (Kronos), already well up in the sky at dawn. Jupiter was low
on the eastern horizon, Mars was halfway to the zenith in the southeast,
while Saturn was in the southwest and on its way to setting in late April.
It is standard dogma that these planets were in no way connected with
their divine counterparts Zeus, Ares, and Kronos prior to the tract Epinomis
found in the Platonic corpus, but written by Philip of Opus sometime in the
mid fourth century, wherein the associations are explicitly made for the first
time in extant Greek literature. There is little basis for accepting this dogma
as reflecting the whole story. Much Greek literature from the time has
disappeared into oblivion; the association of the planets with the gods may
well have found expression in some of it. The publication of such a piece
in which the first formal mention of an association is made, does not
indicate that such an association did not antedate that publication. Such a

14. mention is not an unique historical fact whose mention establishes a post-
quem and ante-quem relationship.
Kronos and Zeus, are a dynasty, and with them in the sky (or, more
exactly as the colored sky) was Ouranos himself as the father of them all.
(23) They are the divine factors in the thrice-old tale (trigerôn muthos,
Choe. 314) that is the Oresteia. These four gods are almost dramatis
personae in the Agamemnon. Ares is the subject of an horrible ode, the
chorus wonder who Zeus is and Kronos and Ouranos dismissed as passé.
After all, the first word of the play is “gods” (theous). These are the gods
invoked unwittingly by the watchman, and though he may forget to revisit
them once his prayer seems to be answered, the audience, who knew well
their celestial facts, did not forget what and whom they had seen that
morning and their traces through the sky they had been watching day by
day.

15. MODERN WORKS CITED
Allen, Richard Hinckley 1963. Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, Dover
Bollack, J (ed.) 1981. Agamemnon I. Lille
Denniston and Page (eds.) 1960. Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Oxford.
Evans, James. 1998. The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy.
Oxford
Fagles, Robert (trs.) 1966. Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Penguin Books
Fraenkel, E. (ed.) 1950. Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Oxford.
Page, D. (ed.) 1972. Aeschyli, Septem quae Supersunt Tragoidiae. Oxford.
West, M. L. (ed.) 1990. Aeschylus. Tragoidiae. Teubner.
West, M. L. 1990. Studies in Aeschylus. Teubner.
Worthen, T. D. 1988. “The Idea of ‘Sky’ in Archaic Greek Poetry.” Glotta
66/1-2: 1-19
NOTES
1.Compare the first words of Ion’s parodos in the Ion ἅρματα μὲν τάδε λαμπρὰ
τεθρίππων Ἥλιος ἤδη λάμπει κατὰ γῆν, ἄστρα δὲ φεύγει πυρὶ τῷδ᾽ αἰθέρος
ἐς νύχθ᾽ ἱεράν: and of Jocasta’s prologue in Phoenissae: ὦ τὴν ἐν ἄστροις οὐρανοῦ
τέμνων ὁδὸν καὶ χρυσοκολλήτοισιν ἐμβεβὼς δίφροις Ἥλιε,].

16. 2. Owing to the fact that the Dionysia happened just before mid-month, there
was never a morning moon in the sky; dark skies were ever present before dawn
during the festival, year after year, with the same panorama of stars. However he
vagaries of intercalation done to bring the lunar calendar into keeping with the
solar seasons might cause some variation of this seasonally determined
panorama of constellations.
3. Denniston and Page’s (hereafter D-P) translation for homêgurin; note ad 4:
66.
4. Fagles’ splendid version of astrôn . . . nukterôn homêgurin.
5. Fagles’ translation.
6. From northern Aegean latitudes, its constellation is unremarkable and
Fomalhaut itself rises and sets in a small arc on the southern horizon.
7. Aratus 1.1 says that the bright stars have been scattered across the sky by
Zeus so that man can tell the seasons.
8. The computerized planetaria use the Julian calendar, uncorrected by
Gregorian nuances.
9. phthinô means “fade”, not “set”, for which the appropriate verb is dunô, duô.
10. Fagles alone among commentators and translators, so far as I can determine,
sees that tous is demonstrative]
11. Margoliouth’s suggested emendation to the dative-locative-instrumental
from the accusative plural of the text is a tempting way out of explaining the
use of the accusative. See D-P, note ad 4ff: 66-7
12. [E. Fraenkel, note ad 7: 9, following C. F. Müller, De Pedibus Solutis (Diss.
Berlin, 1866) and followed by West in Studies, 173.
13. Chantraine Dict. Etym., 128, sv. astêr]
14. Many I.E. languages preserve a distinction, cf. Latin stella (for *sterula)
beside sidus, and German Stern beside Gestirn.
15. Fraenkel, note ad 7: 8
16. D-P, note to 7: 66
17. Reported by Fraenkel 7: 6
18. See note 7 above.
19. Note to 4-7: 14].
20. P. Oxy. 2178, as examined by Page, preserves the whole line except for the
completion of the first word.
Nobody except perhaps Ahrens, who then emended line 7 to accommodate the
simple sense he tried to force on the passage: emprepontas aitheri/ aistoi th’
hotan phthinôsi, while construing antolas te tôn as a continuation after katoida:
translating his German “. . . when they are resplendent in the Aithêr and when

17. they fade into invisibility. . .”
21. Description of this circumstance occurs several times in the opening scenes
of drama: the pedagogue’s prologue in Soph. El., Ion’s first speech, and, I think
as a parody of the topos, Praxagora addressing her lamp in the opening lines of
Thes.
22. Except for Venus, which, when not right near the sun, is visible to the naked
eye if one occludes peripheral vision with a tube of some kind, provided of
course that one knows about where to look.
23. For the pre-classical semantic content of the words Ouranos, Olympos, and
aithêr, along with the suggestion that one of the avatars of the Olympian gods
was as a planets see Worthen, especially 15-19 (who bids pace to Franz
Cumont’s “Les noms des planetes et l’astrolatrie chez les Grecs,” L’ antiquité
classique 4: 5-43, which was instrumental in setting the just-mentioned dogma
in the first place.)]