The Oresteian Trilogy

‘Anger still unreconciled/Poisoning a house’s life/With darkness, treachery and strife’.

Aeschylus (525–c.456 BC) set his trilogy in the immediate aftermath of Troy’s defeat, when King Agamemnon returns victorious to Argos. Agamemnon depicts the hero’s discovery that his family has been destroyed by his wife’s infidelity & ends with his death at her callous hand. Clytemnestra’s crime is repaid in The Choephori when her outraged son Orestes kills her & her lover. The Eumenides then follows Orestes as he is hounded to Athens by the Furies’ law of vengeance & depicts Athene replacing the bloody cycle of revenge with a system of civil justice. Written in the years after the Battle of Marathon, The Trilogy affirmed the deliverance of democratic Athens not only from Persian conquest, but also from its own barbaric past.

Philip Vellacott’s verse translation makes this eternal dramatic masterpiece accessible for the modern reader. In his introduction, he examines the historical context and the literary style of the plays.