»A few words on the aroma of death

There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity...You can smell it. It smells like death.

— Tennessee Williams, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof

CASSANDRA This house . . . It’s horrific!

CHORUS
Why call out in horror? Is there some vision
in your mind?

CASSANDRA
It's this house—
it stinks of murder, blood slaughter . . .

CHORUS LEADER
No, no—that's the smell of sacrifice,
victims at the hearth.

CASSANDRA
That smell . . .
it's like an open grave . . .

CHORUS
Do you mean the splendid Syrian incense?
It's all through the house.

CASSANDRA [turning back to the palace doors]
No. But I must go.
I'll lament my death, and Agamemnon's, too,
inside the house. Enough of living!

— Aeschylus, Agamemnon

The powerful refrain of Mendacity! rings through the film adaptation Tennessee Williams's intense play, but for years I have conflated mendacity and complacency; only after breaking down the words did I better separate their usage. I think I have even gotten a few odd looks when using mendacity during conversation.

The section of Agamemnon has some stunning imagery in the original, with the vocabulary of sacrifice suddenly presented in the context of drama. I wanted to write a paper around this, but my knowledge of Greek vocabulary was never strong enough; I have been reading the Agamemnon from a copy available online, but without my annotated copy of Liddell and Scott (available online, but .... not quite the same) and lacking the unequalled references of Smythe's Greek Grammar and Denniston's Greek Particles, I am adrift. That Denniston edited the Oxford University Press text of the Agamemnon is not coincidence: the work is notorious for its complexity and sophisticated use of Attic Greek.