Agamemnon

Aeschylus

Aeschylus, Volume 2. Smyth, Herbert Weir, translator. London; New York: William Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1926.

  1. Reproach thus meets reproach in turn—hard is the struggle to decide. The spoiler is despoiled, the slayer pays penalty. Yet, while Zeus remains on his throne, it remains true that to him who does it shall be done; for it is law.
  2. Who can cast from out the house the seed of the curse? The race is bound fast in calamity.
Clytaemestra
  1. Upon this divine deliverance have you rightly touched. As for me, however, I am willing to make a sworn compact with the Fiend of the house of Pleisthenes[*](The Pleisthenidae, here apparently a synonym of Atreidae, take their name from Pleisthenes, of whom Porphyry in his Questions says that he was the son of Atreus and the real father of Agamemnon and Menelaus; and that, as he died young, without having achieved any distinction, his sons were brought up by their grandfather and hence called Atreidae.)