Baby Aigisthos and the Bronze Age

Abstract

Greek poets and painters of all archaic and classical stages actively used the Bronze Age as their major medium of expression. Their plots are made of legends they attribute to Bronze Age places, their characters are heroes, often royal, who contest those places and thrones, and fight at home and overseas for small quantities of metals, horses, cattle, women. The heroic figures of the classical imagination, especially in tragedy, are isolated and highlighted before general backgrounds of palaces, battlefields, sacred shrines, altars and groves, or tombs. The characters often take on aspects that seem to emanate from these settings – kingly, quarrelsome, acquisitive, enemies or puppets of the gods, exposed to and angry at death. The heroes often seem like dead divinities, sentient watchers inside the earth, contemplating contemporary life, like Amphiaraos watching from some breathing cave near Harma in Boiotia, while an image of them is projected on the stage to walk and talk through their remembered, familiar pathea .