The Oresteia for Seekers

Dear reader — it's a slog if you read it as three plays. It reads fast as one long argument. The Oresteia is a trilogy by Aeschylus, first staged in Athens in 458 BCE. Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, and The Eumenides follow one family across two generations of murder. A king comes home from Troy and is killed by his wife. Their son kills his mother to avenge him. Then the son is put on trial. And the question the whole thing asks is how a community gets from blood-feud to law.

The Guy And The Setup

Aeschylus was born around 525 BCE at Eleusis, near Athens, and died around 456 BCE in Sicily. Ancient tradition says he fought at Marathon and at Salamis, and his reported grave inscription mentioned Marathon and not his plays. Earliest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Of the seventy or eighty plays he's said to have written, only seven survive.

Each play answers the one before. The first ends with Clytemnestra triumphant and the chorus predicting a reckoning. The second delivers it, with Orestes killing his mother, and ends with him already pursued by the Furies. The third ends with a trial that, for the first time in the story, doesn't answer blood with blood.

The back-story is ugly. The line goes back to Tantalus, who offended the gods, and his son Pelops. Pelops' sons Atreus and Thyestes fought over the throne of Argos. Atreus took revenge by killing Thyestes' children and serving them to their father at a banquet, and Thyestes cursed the house. His surviving son Aegisthus grew up to take his revenge on Atreus's line.

When the Greek fleet gathered at Aulis to sail for Troy, the winds died. The seer Calchas said Artemis was angry and required the death of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon agreed. The chorus's account of the choice: "Ill lot were mine, to disobey! / And ill, to smite my child, my household's love and pride!" The war lasted ten years. In that time Clytemnestra ruled Argos in her husband's name and took Aegisthus as her lover.

Play One: Agamemnon

It starts with a watchman who's lain on the palace roof for a year waiting for the signal fire that will announce Troy's fall. When it comes he's joyful, then his tone changes: the house isn't as it should be. "Home — but I say no more: upon my tongue / Treads hard the ox o' the adage." The news is good and something is wrong at home. That sets the tone.

The old men of Argos, too old to fight, sing a long first song, recalling the omen of the eagles tearing a pregnant hare and the sacrifice at Aulis. In the middle they address Zeus with a principle that runs through the whole trilogy: "Men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled."

Agamemnon arrives in a chariot with Cassandra. Clytemnestra greets him with a speech of devotion and has her maids spread purple cloth from the chariot to the door. He refuses at first: "Strew not this purple that shall make each step / An arrogance; such pomp beseems the gods, / Not me." She presses him in a short, tight exchange and he gives way: "Now, since in this my will bows down to thine, / I will pass in on purples to my home."

Cassandra, a Trojan princess given to Agamemnon as a war-prize, stands silent while Clytemnestra talks to her, then breaks into a cry to Apollo: "Apollo, Apollo! / God of all ways, but only Death's to me." In a long scene she sees the old crimes of the house, the murdered children of Thyestes, and then the coming murder. The chorus can't understand her. She's the one person who sees the truth and is believed by no one. She goes in anyway.

Agamemnon's cries come from inside, and the chorus argues about what to do while he's killed. The doors open on Clytemnestra standing over him. She describes how she tangled him in a great robe: "Even as the trammel hems the scaly shoal, / I trapped him with inextricable toils." She doesn't hide or apologize. When the chorus recoils, she turns it around: where were you when he sacrificed her child? "Ye had no voice of old to launch such doom / On him, my husband, when he held as light / My daughter's life as that of sheep or goat." The killing was justice, she says. The chorus names a "fiend of the race" that has come down on the house, and she agrees. The play ends in an uneasy standoff, with the line "New blood comes welling forth again."

Play Two: The Libation-Bearers

Years later Orestes comes back to Argos in secret with his friend Pylades. At his father's grave he lays a lock of his hair and prays for help. A procession of women in black approaches, led by his sister Electra, bringing offerings from Clytemnestra. He hides to watch.

Electra finds a lock of hair on the tomb that matches her own, and then footprints that match hers. She daren't hope. "Ah well-a-day, that this dumb hair had voice / To glad mine ears, as might a messenger." Orestes steps out. She asks if it's a trick, and he points to the hair and a robe she wove for him as a child.

The chorus tells him why Clytemnestra is sending offerings: she dreamed she gave birth to a snake, wrapped it in swaddling clothes, and put it to her breast, and it drew blood with the milk. Orestes takes the dream as a sign. He's the snake: "The death of blood she dies; and I, 'tis I, / In semblance of a serpent, that must slay her."

He kills Aegisthus offstage and then confronts his mother. She bares her breast and begs. Orestes turns to Pylades, silent until now: can I spare my mother? Pylades speaks his only lines in the play and reminds him of Apollo's command: "Choose thou the hate of all men, not of gods." Orestes drives her inside.

Afterward he defends himself, and the chorus tells him he's freed Argos. Then he begins to see figures nobody else sees: women in black robes, snakes in their hair, blood dripping from their eyes. His mother's avengers, the Furies. "Look, look, alas! / Handmaidens, see — what Gorgon shapes throng up." He runs, bound for Apollo's shrine at Delphi.

Play Three: The Eumenides

The pursuit goes to Delphi, then Athens, and the question of blood-guilt goes to trial. The play opens at Apollo's temple, where the priestess comes out screaming in terror. Inside she's seen Orestes at the altar and the sleeping Furies around him. Apollo promises to protect Orestes but can't end the pursuit, and sends him to Athens to seek Athena's judgment.

In Athens Orestes clasps the statue of Athena. She listens to both sides and sees the case is too hard to decide alone: neither side can be sent away without harm. "Too mighty is this matter, whatsoe'er / Of mortals claims to judge hereof aright." She appoints a jury of Athenian citizens, to hear the case under oath.

While the jury's chosen, the Furies sing about what will happen if he's acquitted. If a killer can go free by pleading that a god commanded him, no parent will be safe and no one will fear wrongdoing. Fear and reverence hold a society together. "Wisdom is child of pain, and born with many a tear."

The trial. The Furies argue a mother's blood is the worst bloodshed, and Orestes shed it. Apollo appears as his witness and says Zeus ordered it, then offers a new argument: "Not the true parent is the woman's womb / That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed / New-sown: the male is parent." Hold that thought, because readers have a lot to say about it.

Before the vote, Athena addresses the first jury of Athens. She names the hill where they sit, the Areopagus, and says what the court is for: to keep citizens from doing wrong not by terror but by a shared sense of awe. A city should have neither anarchy nor tyranny. "Let no man live / Uncurbed by law nor curbed by tyranny." She'll cast the deciding vote if it's split, and she'll vote for Orestes, because she has no mother: "In heart, as birth, a father's child alone."

The count is even. By the rule she set, a tie goes to the accused. "Behold, this man is free from guilt of blood, / For half the votes condemn him, half set free!"

The Furies are enraged and threaten to poison the land. Athena doesn't fight them. She tells them they haven't been dishonored, the vote was fair, and offers them a place of honor in Athens, a shrine, sacrifices, and the first fruits of the land. After a long struggle they accept. They bless the city with fertility, free from blight, drought and famine. Athena commands the people to lead them in procession to their new home with torches, and the trilogy ends with the escort's chant: "With loyalty we lead you; proudly go, / Night's childless children, to your home below!" The Furies become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones.

What's Going On

Vengeance and justice: in the first two plays justice is revenge, one killing answering another, each done as a duty and each making a new duty. The third shows a different method: a jury, a vote, a verdict. Is that a real answer or a way of stopping the cycle? The play leaves room for both.

Persuasion over force: in the first two plays people get what they want by tricks, nets and swords. In the third, Athena gets what she wants by argument. The goddess of persuasion, Peitho, is named near the end as the power behind the settlement. Civilized means a society that has chosen to talk.

Blood and cleansing: in Greek belief, bloodshed left a stain that could infect a person, a house and a land, and only ritual removed it. Orestes has been purified by Apollo with the blood of a piglet and says he's clean. The Furies say a stain like this can't be washed away so easily.

Women and authority: Clytemnestra holds the house for ten years and kills its king. Cassandra is a prophet nobody believes. The Furies are female powers who get overruled. Athena, who ends the cycle, says she's entirely on the father's side. Readers have taken that several ways, and it's one of the reasons the trilogy is still argued over.

Clytemnestra deserves a note. She's the most debated figure. She defends the killing as justice for her daughter and is also shown as an adulteress allied with Aegisthus. Aeschylus gives her the best lines in the first play, and I won't tell you what to do with that.

How Readers Take It

The political reading: a few years before the Oresteia, Athenian reformers led by Ephialtes took most of the powers of the old council, the Areopagus, and gave them to the democratic assembly and courts. The council kept homicide cases. The trilogy was staged in the middle of that change, and many hear it as a comment on it, a celebration of the court or a plea for moderation. The gender reading: the overthrow of an older, female-centered order by a male-centered one, with Apollo's claim that a mother isn't a parent as the central insult. And the theological reading: in the Agamemnon, the hymn to Zeus is a god of grim justice; by the Eumenides, Zeus supports a court, persuasion, and mercy. Some read that as divine justice itself growing, others as just a human story told about the gods.

To read it: the passages quoted here are E. D. A. Morshead's 1881 translation, free, Victorian, a bit stiff. Most people do better with a recent one, especially for the chorus. The Agamemnon is the longest, the Libation-Bearers the shortest and tightest, and the Eumenides has the most action. Read all three in order. They only work as one.