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The passage which most pertains to the intriguing concept of personal freedom as put forth by Aeschylus occurs in Agamemnon lines 1025 to 1034, wherein Cassandra, a Trojan woman taken as a prisoner of war by Agamemnon, ponders her fate. Gifted with the ability to foresee the future by means of prophecies, she is unable to voice her visions due to a curse by the god Apollo. In this passage, she laments this curse and her own inability to vent her feelings:

And unless one fate ordained of the gods restrains another fate from winning the advantage, my heart would outstrip my tongue and pour forth its fears but, as it is, it mutters only in the dark, distressed and hopeless ever to unravel anything in time when my soul's aflame.5

Amidst external conflict (she is a prisoner of war in a foreign land), she still engages in internal conflict. Cassandra is unable to express her inner thoughts, to have "my heart outstrips my tongue," as her fate, "ordained of the gods," restrains her from speaking. The dilemma between what is felt in the heart versus what is expressed by the tongue, whether due to grief or a curse by a god, is one that Aeschylus addresses elsewhere in the Oresteia as well.

Extreme grief over the deaths of loved ones is a restraint on freedom that can only be dealt with internally:

flung upon the corpses of their husbands and their brothers, children upon the bodies of their aged fathers who gave them life, bewail from lips no longer free the death of their dearest ones6 (lines 326-329)


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