Agamemnon Must Die

To sail against Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his virgin daughter Iphigenia. Ten years later, he returns victorious, hoping that Queen Clytemnestra has forgiven him. He is so wrong. The royal family of Mycenae has a bloody, monstrous history. Agamemnon returns with his war trophy, the Trojan Princess Cassandra whom he unthinkingly flaunts before his queen. After an epic sword fight in his own banquet hall, Agamemnon is killed. Cassandra has her nightmares/visions of the gory and unspeakable deeds of the House of Atreus; she is led away to be executed. Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus have their respective reasons, but this regicide must be avenged. Or so say the voices in Orestes' head. He must avenge his father. He must kill the regicides. He must kill his own mother. But killing one's own mother would break the greatest of ancient taboos and would result in even more voices in his head. Are they just voices? Can they be placated?

Hock G. Tjoa was born in Singapore to Chinese parents. He studied history at Brandeis and Harvard and taught European history and Asian political thought at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He has published George Henry Lewes, a Victorian Mind, "The social and political ideas of Tan Cheng Lock" and various articles in the Newsletter of the China History Forum. He is married and lives with his family in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. In the last decade he has turned his attention to Chinese history, literature, and genealogy,working on translating and adapting selected works of Chinese history and literature so these might reach and inform a wider audience. The Battle of Chibi is the first of these projects to be published (2010) although he translated what became Heaven is High and the Emperor, a Play (published shortly thereafter) before that in his study of Mandarin. In 2013, Hock published the first volume of The Chinese Spymaster and The Ingenious Judge Dee. Agamemnon Must Die, a retelling of Aeschylus" Oresteia and dedicated to students of the humanities interested in Greek myth and drama.