In "Agamemnon", the king had just returned from
Troy when he is murdered in his bath by his wife and lover. Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes, sought
revenge for his father, whom his brother, Atreus, killed two of his sons and fed him to Thyestes.
Aegisthus, the surviving son returned to Argos to marry the queen after Agamenon left for Troy. This
would make Aegisthus the ruler of Argos. Clytemnestra agreed to this because she hated her husband
for sacrificing their oldest daughter, Iphegenia, to appease Artemis.

After Agamenon's death
Orestes, only a child at the time, received a decree from the oracle to kill his mother to take
revenge on behalf of his father. This is the theme of the "Libation Bearers." But when Orestes kills
his mother it unleashes the Furies, primordial goddesses, who avenge Clytemnestra.

In the third
play, "The Eumenides" Orestes is put on trial by Athene and is acquitted of the murder of his mother
but the Furies are not satisfied. Only a peace-making offer from the goddess to the Furies ended the
endless avenging approaches to justice.

The Oresteia centered on the concept of justice. How
should a wrong be punished? What Aeschylus pointed out in his plays was that there were always two
sides to every story. But it seemed man's fate to only see one side. Neither Orestes nor his sister,
Electra, could see the anguish their mother experienced. They could not understand how she could
slay their father because they saw no justification for such a brutal act. It was the same argument
the Furies made to Athene when they concluded that the slaying of a mother by her son could not be
justified. Yet, each time justice was meted out a new need for justice was its outgrowth.

We are
faced today with issues much the same as the characters in Aeschylus' plays faced. Is an "eye for an
eye" really a valid form of justice. In our own look at terrorism today could Greek tragedy point
the way out of the endless cycles of violence?

Greek similies are often tortured in translation, but not in this edition: "the sin /
smoulders not, but burns to evil beauty. / As cheap bronze tortured / at the touchstone relapses /
to blackness and grime, so this man / tested shows vain..." The poetry is an achievement in itself.

Although written in the fifth century the play itself is set in the depths
of Mycenean history at the time of the Trojan War (probably c. 1220 BC - the traditional date of
1184 being unacceptable in the context of LH IIIB archaeology. Unlike in Homer's Iliad (written some
300 years earlier) Agamemnon's Court is in the city of Argos. The play fits the traditional spark
for the Trojan War in the affairs of Helen whereas in reality it may have had more to do with
competitive markets in the weaving industry or disputed fishing rights. Lattimore uses some
unconventional spellings and I have stuck with these.

The play recounts the curse of the House of
Atreus which fell when Atreus slaughtered two of Thyestes' sons and fed them to him. The wife of
Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus - Helen of Troy - is with Paris and Agamemnon plans to take an army to
Ilium to recapture her. Before departing he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia (Iphigeneia) and then
sets sail. Aeschylus now dissolves the next 7-10 years to the point of Agamemnon's return with
Cassandra, the captive princess and prophetess of Troy - a reminder logic is almost constantly the
subject rather than the master of divination. But Clytaemestra (Clytemnestra) now has Thyestes'
only surviving son, Aegisthus as her lover and King and she bludgeons the victorious Agamemnon to
death in the bath beneath a cloak which envelops him in the same way as the sustained conceits of
entrapment and the coiled viper constrain the metaphysical dimension of the first two thirds of the
trilogy. Electra, Agamemnon's surviving daughter has to hide her loyalty to her father "in a dark
corner, as you would kennel a vicious dog" until Orestes (her brother) returns (in Clyteamestra's
words) to "this swamp of death" disguised as a native of Phocis to announce his own death.

In
`The Libation Bearers' (Choephoroe) Orestes slays both Clytaemestra and Aegisthus and the genetic
interlinkages metamorphose a revenge drama into a tragedy as in `Hamlet'. The final play, the Furies
(Eumenides) is the reconciliation of revenge and justice seen in the rise of Athens, civilisation,
balanced thought, dissolution of irrational hatred and the Aeropagus Court. In this we also have
to see the kairos of the triumph of the Olympians over the Titans but within a context of divine
compromise as the Olympian gods are unable to completely bury the barbarism of their own genesis. In
effect, the underlying motif here is the same as in `Prometheus Bound' with the violent dynamic
being reflected in the gradual change in Greece towards a more settled social organisation.

But
the beauty of the trilogy is not merely in its recital of this piece of legend. Rather it is in its
unique lyric quality and the power of its extended conceits. The play is riddled with images of
animal entrapment and coiled vipers. Even Clyteamestra sees the vision in a dream in which she gives
birth to a viper - an image in which Orestes clearly sees himself ("No void dream this, it is the
vision of a man").

The first two plays are driven by `philos-aphilos' and by a quest for justice
or right against right. Helen acts as a substrate for all the evils committed in the trilogy - the
sacrifice of Iphigenia to Artemis (no war but for Helen) - although Vellacott raises the issue of
divine will here - Clyteamestra's `godless' slaughter of her husband and rightful King, and Orestes'
vengeance for his father's murder in the Eumenides. I feel the legendary context in which
Clytemnestra's former husband is killed by Agamemnon in battle and Cassandra's hints at the King's
brutality should be brought into play here. But the devoured ghosts of Thyestes's offspring also
hang over the drama raising issues (alongside Iphigenia) regarding the sacrifice of youth. Offspring
sacrifice was unheard of in the Mediterranean basin of the fifth century with the exception of
Punic-Phoenician settlements. But this had not always been the case and again we see the birth of
`classical' Greece from its less than ideal parenthood, always slightly ashamed of its past - there
is now plenty of evidence that the early worship of Artemis involved human sacrifice in some places.
Delphi was also originally sacred to Artemis before being taken over by Apollo in the eighth
century. And the sacrifice image also acts as something rather radical for Aeschylus - an almost
revolutionary denunciation of the destruction of Achaean (by implication, also Attican) youth
through unnecessary warfare. Goldhill has pointed out, there are also gender specific elements
within the pattern of slaughter first noted in the text by Cassandra.

The Eumenides provides
something completely new - an end to the ethos of attempting to ensure public welfare through
private blood feud. As Lattimore puts it, by the Eumenides we are not merely to see, we are to
understand. The role of Athens is emphasised by Athena's negotiated compromise between Apollo /
Orestes on the one hand and the Furies - she becomes the symbol of Hellenism against the barbarity
of the nation's roots. Even the Furies are converted from something hideous to something beautiful
by this new, sanitised version of Athena. And we have to put the whole `Athens section' in the
context that the `polis' was more than merely `city'; it was the complete framework for everyday
life.

In his day Aeschylus was known for adventurous stage set designs from which we have drawn
the phrase `deus ex machina' but it was Aristophanes who was wise enough to see that the playwright
has also created "towering structures out of majestic words".