Aeschylus' Oresteia

The Oresteia is a set of three tragedies by Aeschylus, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, produced at the City Dionysia in Athens in 458 BCE, where it won first prize. It is the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedy to survive. The three plays together tell of the house of Atreus after the Trojan War, and a lost satyr play, Proteus, followed them on stage.¹

In Agamemnon, the king returns from Troy and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, partly in revenge for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. In The Libation Bearers, his son Orestes, urged on by Apollo and his sister Electra, kills his mother and Aegisthus. In The Eumenides, the Furies, ancient spirits of vengeance, hunt Orestes until Athena establishes a jury of Athenian citizens to try him. The votes tie, Athena casts the deciding vote for acquittal, and the Furies are persuaded to become the Eumenides, the 'kindly ones', who protect the city.¹

Aeschylus had fought at Marathon and wrote only a few years after Athens' radical democratic reforms of 462 BCE, which curtailed the Areopagus council. The trilogy turns a chain of family vengeance into the founding of lawful justice, and Athenians saw their own court in it. Critics have admired its dense imagery, its use of the chorus and its moral ambition ever since. It has been adapted by authors from Sartre to Eugene O'Neill, whose Mourning Becomes Electra moves it to the American Civil War.