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Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon begins with the Watchman speaking of his year-long vigil on Clytaemestra’s roof. He has come to know ‘the assembly (homēgyrin) of the stars of the night’, those that bring winter and those that bring summer, ‘shining potentates, resplendent in heaven’. The scholiast explains the word ‘potentates’ (dynastas) that the word refers simply to what has just been mentioned, the stars’ bringing of the seasons. The stars are clearly represented here as divine beings, and the appearance of the term ‘assembly’ in the same context is significant. The ‘assembly of stars’ is well attested in the texts of the Near East, conceived as divine powers. A fragmentary Ugaritic text gives in successive lines the phrases ‘sons of El … assembly of the stars … celestial family’ (KTU 1 10.i.3-5); the words for ‘assembly’ and ‘family’ among those elsewhere used of the assembly of the gods. In Akkadian we have several prayers addressed to the Gods of the Night, who are the great stars and constellations, those of the south and north, and those of the east and west. They are summoned to come in through the great gate of heaven and take their places. The prayers seek the help of the Gods of the Night in averting evil from the person uttering them. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Watchman’s lines about the assembly of astral potentates stand in a prayer to the gods to deliver him from the toils that beset him.
Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1-39
KTU 1 10.i.3-5
Bibliography
| West 1997, 566-567 | West, Martin L. The East Face of Helicon. West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. |
Amar Annus
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