User:Polykarpiris/Cassandra

Agamemnon by Aeschylus
The play Agamemnon from Aeschylus's trilogy Oresteia depicts the king treading the scarlet cloth laid down for him, and walking offstage to his death. After the chorus's ode of foreboding, time is suspended in Cassandra's "mad scene". She has been onstage, silent and ignored. Her madness that is unleashed now is not the physical torment of other characters in Greek tragedy, such as in Euripides' Heracles or Sophocles' Ajax.

According to author Seth Schein, two further familiar descriptions of her madness are that of Heracles in The Women of Trachis or Io in Prometheus Bound. He specifies that her madness is not the type that uses language to descriptive physical agony or other physical symptoms. Instead, she speaks, disconnectedly and transcendent, in the grip of her psychic possession by Apollo, witnessing past and future events. Schein says, "She evokes the same awe, horror and pity as do schizophrenics". Cassandra is one of those "who often combine deep, true insight with utter helplessness, and who retreat into madness."

Eduard Fraenkel remarked on the powerful contrasts between declaimed and sung dialogue in this scene. The frightened and respectful chorus are unable to comprehend her. She goes to her inevitable offstage murder by Clytemnestra with full knowledge of what is to befall her.