The subject of this verb is all the remaining words of the passage. What remains is, first, phobera, ‘fearsome’. We have seen how terror is a pervasive mood haunting the Oresteia. Here, what remains is immediately frightening – this passage looks forward to all those future fears for which the omen and the curse play such a part. What remains is also palinortos. Unlike the first three words of the line, this is an extremely uncommon poetic adjective (that, in fact, occurs only here in surviving Greek texts). It suggests ‘rising up back again’.
Palin, the first part of what is a compound adjective, implies precisely the logic of reversal and repetition (‘back again’) central to revenge; and the verb stem from which -ortos comes suggests ‘rising’, ‘rushing’, ‘incited’ – that is, what remains is also active and activated, hence Fagles’ ‘back and back in the future’, a bold attempt to capture the force of the adjective.
What remains is also oikonomos. Here is the first noun of the sentence. Oikonomos means ‘household manager’ (the term from which ‘economics’ is derived). The noun directs attention to the oikos as the focus of the narrative. Although Agamemnon is with the army, the sacrifice is caused by something that directs the household. It is this term, primarily, that provides the sense of a specifically familial horror. It is also a surprising term that suggests both the household manager Clytemnestra (whom we have heard of ordering – managing – the watchman) and the idea of a more general force directing the household members (the overlap suggests how Clytemnestra fulfils a role in the family history and how the family history finds an instrument in Clytemnestra).
The other noun in the sentence, however, is me¯nis, ‘wrath’, ‘violent anger’. This is the first word of the Iliad and one of its key themes – the violent, destructive anger of the hero Achilles. In that work, it is used only of Achilles and the gods and stresses a particular force of rage. With these two nouns, however, we must note the difficulty of the syntax, and in two ways. First, it is quite unclear which of the two nouns is subject of the sentence, which in apposition. That is, does it mean ‘violent anger remains, a fearful rising back up again household manager’; or does it mean ‘the fearful rising back up again household manager remains, violent anger’?
