The great plague of Athens that began in 430 BCE had an enormous effect on the imagination of its literary artists and on the social imagination of the city as a whole. In this 2007 book, Professor Mitchell-Boyask studies the impact of the plague on Athenian tragedy early in the 420s and argues for a significant relationship between drama and the development of the cult of the healing god Asclepius in the next decade, during a period of war and increasing civic strife. The Athenian decision to locate their temple for Asclepius adjacent to the Theater of Dionysus arose from deeper associations between drama, healing and the polis that were engaged actively by the crisis of the plague. The book also considers the representation of the plague in Thucydides' History as well as the metaphors generated by that representation which recur later in the same work.

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In this paper I seek, first, to re-examine the bridal imagery surrounding Cassandra in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, and, second, to suggest how iconography, and its relationship to performance, can connect this scene's concerns more thoroughly with the two successive dramas of the Oresteia. Cassandra's language casts her as the bride of Apollo, in contrast to the staging of her entrance as Agamemnon's bride. Other aspects of staging, moreover, cast Cassandra as a surrogate for Iphigenia. Attention to language and performance also suggests that Cassandra's cries to Apollo Agyiates are initiated by her perception not of an aniconic stone block, but of a statue of Apollo. My main concern throughout the argument will be the effect of Cassandra's relationship with Apollo on the action of the Oresteia as a whole.