Set in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Troy, the great trilogy of Aeschylus (525–c.456 BC) opens with The Choephori, in which Clytemnestra’s crime is repaid when her outraged son Orestes kills both her and her lover. The cycle begins, however, with Agamemnon, which follows the returning hero’s discovery that his family has been destroyed by his wife’s infidelity — a revelation that ends with his death at her callous hand. In The Eumenides, Orestes is hounded to Athens by the Furies’ law of vengeance, and it is there that Athene replaces the bloody cycle of revenge with a system of civil justice. Written in the years following the Battle of Marathon, The Oresteian Trilogy affirmed the deliverance of democratic Athens not only from Persian conquest, but from its own barbaric past as well.
ISBN 13: 9780140440676
Author: Aeschylus
