Aeschylus
Author of The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, Orestes in Athens
About the Author
Aeschylus was born at Eleusis of a noble family. He fought at the Battle of Marathon (490 b.c.), where a small Greek band heroically defeated the invading Persians. At the time of his death in Sicily, Athens was in its golden age. In all of his extant works, his intense love of Greece and Athens show more finds expression. Of the nearly 90 plays attributed to him, only 7 survive. These are The Persians (produced in 472 b.c.), Seven against Thebes (467 b.c.), The Oresteia (458 b.c.)---which includes Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides (or Furies) --- Suppliants (463 b.c.), and Prometheus Bound (c.460 b.c.). Six of the seven present mythological stories. The ornate language creates a mood of tragedy and reinforces the already stylized character of the Greek theater. Aeschylus called his prodigious output "dry scraps from Homer's banquet," because his plots and solemn language are derived from the epic poet. But a more accurate summation of Aeschylus would emphasize his grandeur of mind and spirit and the tragic dignity of his language. Because of his patriotism and belief in divine providence, there is a profound moral order to his plays. Characters such as Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Prometheus personify a great passion or principle. As individuals they conflict with divine will, but, ultimately, justice prevails. Aeschylus's introduction of the second actor made real theater possible, because the two could address each other and act several roles. His successors imitated his costumes, dances, spectacular effects, long descriptions, choral refrains, invocations, and dialogue. Swinburne's (see Vol. 1) enthusiasm for The Oresteia sums up all praises of Aeschylus; he called it simply "the greatest achievement of the human mind." Because of his great achievements, Aeschylus might be considered the "father of tragedy." (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Herma of Aeschylus (Aischylos). Roman bust from the time around 30 BC after Greek bronze herma from the years 340-320 BC. Naples National Archaeological Museum. Photo from the exhibition Klassik 2002 in Berlin. Photo by Zde. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Zde
Series
Works by Aeschylus
The Persians; Prometheus Bound; Seven Against Thebes; The Suppliants (0458) — Author — 2,870 copies, 16 reviews
The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics) (2016) 410 copies, 3 reviews
Nine Greek Dramas by Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes (2004) — Contributor — 352 copies
Aeschylus II: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, Fragments (Loeb Classical Library #146) (1957) 211 copies, 3 reviews
The Oresteia Trilogy (Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides) [and] Prometheus Bound (0458) — Author — 165 copies, 1 review
Prometheus Bound(Aeschylus) and Prometheus Unbound(Shelley) (in Slipcase) (2011) 94 copies, 3 reviews
Tragédies (7): Les suppliantes - Les Perses - Les sept contre Thèbes - Prométhée enchainé - L'Agamemnon. Les Choephores. Les Eumenides (1999) 73 copies, 4 reviews
Persians, Seven against Thebes, and Suppliants (Johns Hopkins New Translations from Antiquity) (1987) 72 copies
Three Greek tragedies in translation (Prometheus Bound : Oedipus the King : Hippolytus) (1946) 24 copies
Drie Griekse tragedies 6 copies
Greek Tragedies II: Tbe Libation Bearers • Electra • Iphigenia in Tauris, Electra, The Trojan Women (2013) 6 copies
The Greek Plays: 33 Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics) (2019) 5 copies
Aeschylus 5 copies
Teatro Grego 4 copies
The suppliants (Volume 1) 3 copies
Orestien 1 2 Agamemnon. Orestes 3 copies
Sengrieķu traģēdijas — Author — 3 copies
The Tragedies of Aeschylus vol. II 3 copies
The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Vol. 2 3 copies
The Tragedies of Aeschylus vol. I 3 copies
Agamemnon och Medea 2 copies
The suppliants (Volume 2) 2 copies
Aeschyli Fabulae 2 copies
Scènes choisies, Tome 2 2 copies
Aeschylus: Tragoediae 2 copies
Les Sept contre Thèbes - Les Suppliantes - Prépas scientifiques 2024 2025 (French Edition) (2024) 2 copies
Tutti i frammenti con la prima traduzione degli scolii antichi. Testo greco a fronte (2009) 2 copies
Aeschyli Cantica 2 copies
The Oresteia - A trilogy by Aeschylus in a version by Tony Harrison by Aeschylus (1981-11-01) 2 copies
Ἃπαντα Αἰσχύλου 2 copies
Χοηφόροι-Ευμενίδες 2 copies
The Ultimate Anthology of Philosophy 2 copies
Prometeu Agrilhoado e Agaménnon 2 copies
Oréstia 2 copies
Esquilo: Tragedias, II, Los siete contra Tebas, Las suplicantes; texto revisado y traducido por Mercedes Vílchez (1997) 2 copies
Aeschylus 2 copies
Eschyle. Tome 2 2 copies
Tragèdies. III 1 copy
Aeschylus 1 copy
Aeschylus 1 copy
Tragedias (Spanish Edition) 1 copy
Sentencias de Esquilo 1 copy
Les Danas 1 copy
Oréstia 1 copy
ΑΠΟΣΠΑΣΜΑΤΑ 1 copy
Άπαντα Αισχύλου (Β) - Μεγάλοι Αρχαίοι Συγγραφείς - Αγαμέμνων - Χοηφόροι - Ευμενίδες - Επτά επί Θήβας 1 copy
Αισχύλος: Πέρσαι, Επτά επί Θήβας, Ικέτιδες, Προμηθεύς Δεσμώτης, Αγαμέμνων, Χοηφόροι, Ευμενίδες (2005) 1 copy
Aeschylus 1 copy
Χοηφόροι - Ευμενίδες 1 copy
ΑΙΣΧΥΛΟΥ ΤΡΑΓΩΔΙΕΣ 1 copy
Αἰσχύλος: Ἱκέτιδες 1 copy
Aeschylos' Werke Griechisch mit metrischer Uebersetzung und prüfenden und erklärenden Anmerkungen 1 copy
Αἰσχύλου Τραγωδίαι: Ἑπτὰ ἐπὶ Θήβας, Πέρσαι, Ἀγαμέμνων, Προμηθεύς Δεσμώτης, Χοηφόροι, Εὐμενίδες… 1 copy
Édipo Antigo Livro 1 1 copy
Teatro Grego 1 copy
Teatro Completo Livro 1 1 copy
Orestien. 2, Orestes 1 copy
Die Perser . Die Orestie 1 copy
The Oresteia (video) 1 copy
The Persians & Other Plays 1 copy
Aeschykus 1 copy
Prometheus Bound; The Suppliants; Seven Against Thebes; The Persians, Philip Vellacott, trans. 1 copy
Aeschylus 1 copy
Tragici greci 1 copy
The Discoveries of Epictetus 1 copy
Prometheus, Nebst Den Bruchstücken Des Prometheus Luomenos: Für Den Schulgebrauch Erklärt Von N. Wecklein (German Edition) (2010) 1 copy
Scènes choisies, Tome 1 1 copy
A világirodalom legszebb drámái az ókortól a XIX. század végéig [Aiszkhülosz et al. művei] (1974) 1 copy
Doodenoffer Eumeniden 1 copy
Antické tragédie 1 copy
The Oresteian Trilogy 1 copy
Die Orestie - Drei Tragödien 1 copy
Die Eumeniden. Orestie III. 1 copy
Le supplici e altri drammi 1 copy
Aeschylus: Agamemnon: Volume I (Prologomena, Text, Translation), Volume II (Commentary on 1-1055) (1962) 1 copy
I tragici greci 1 copy
Associated Works
World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998) — Contributor — 499 copies, 2 reviews
Three Greek Plays: Prometheus Bound / Agamemnon / The Trojan Women (1958) — some editions — 147 copies, 1 review
The Graphic Canon of Crime & Mystery, Vol. 1: From Sherlock Holmes to A Clockwork Orange to Jo Nesbø (2017) — Contributor — 39 copies, 2 reviews
Nine Great Plays: From Aeschylus to Eliot (Revised Edition) (1956) — Contributor; Contributor — 28 copies
Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Oedipus, Jason and the Argonauts and Much More - ULTIMATE MYTHOLOGY COLLECTION 50 BOOKS - Complete Works of Homer, ALL Plays by Sophocles, Euripides and… (2011) — Author, some editions — 23 copies
Oogst Der Tijden. keur uit de werken van schrijvers en dichters aller volken en eeuwen (1940) — Contributor — 12 copies
The Delphian Course : Part Three : Greek Drama, Philiosopy and Literature, the Story of Rome (1913) — Contributor — 8 copies
Het Griekse treurspel Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides : een keuze uit vertalingen van hun werken (1952) — Contributor — 5 copies
Grieksche lyriek in Nederlandsche verzen — Contributor — 3 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Aeschylus
- Legal name
- Αἰσχύλος
- Other names
- Esquilo
- Birthdate
- c. 525 BCE
- Date of death
- c. 456 BCE
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- tragedian
soldier - Awards and honors
- 13 victories at the Athens Dionysia
- Short biography
- Aeschylus was an ancient Greek playwright. He is credited with an estimated 92 plays, though only seven have survived into modern times. He is known to have fought at the Battle of Marathon (490 BCE), which influenced his Persians (the only surviving Greek tragedy based on contemporary events) and probably at the Battle of Salamis (480).
Born at Eleusis in 525 BCE, he started producing tragedies at Athens in 499, and had his first victory in 484. He visited Sicily at least twice, and died there at Gela in 456. - Cause of death
- animal incident (Hit in head with tortoise dropped by a passing eagle)
- Nationality
- Greece
- Birthplace
- Eleusis, Attica, Greece
- Places of residence
- Athens, Greece
Eleusis, Greece
Syracuse, Sicily
Gela, Sicily - Place of death
- Gela, Sicily
- Burial location
- Gela, Sicily
- Map Location
- Greece
Members
Discussions
Prometheus Bound/Unbound-LEC or Heritage in George Macy devotees (November 2023)
Reviews
I like this solid anthology of and introduction to Athenian tragedy. I know that the literary qualities were much reduced in translation, but I could tell how beautiful the originals might be from the English versions. I welcomed the deep ideas suggested by the plays but appreciated the authors of the translations and closing essays pointing out what the deep ideas were not present, i.e., Antigone is not a proto-libertarian, Medea was not jealous of a younger woman but furious at Jason’s show more breaking of his word. I like that the plays were still great entertainment: the suspense in Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Medea; the happy endings in Alcestis and Helen; the shocking, liberating blasphemy of Prometheus; the strong women; the gory violence; the angry speeches. show less
Prometheus Bound and Other Plays: Prometheus Bound, The Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, The Persians by Aeschylus
Aeschylus has only seven surviving plays to his name. One of those (Prometheus Unbound) is now heavily disputed to be his. Vellacott's translation is of the four that are not the only full surviving trilogy - the Oresteia - which has entered deep into Western culture in its own right.
Self-evidently the survival of these plays, preceding the work of Sophocles and Euripides, testifies to the regard in which he was held but the lack of his other plays (which may have amounted to 90) and the show more non-survival of those of his rivals suggests that we are seeing only the tip of an iceberg.
Aeschylus was not the only playwright of his time, his audience would have been demanding under conditions that were semi-sacred as well as popular and the dispute over 'Prometheus Unbound' indicates that others could probably reach high levels of attainment.
Still, Aeschylus was clearly regarded as an innovator who reached heights of rhetoric and drama not achieved before, above all (it is said) introducing characters who related to each other and not just singly with the Chorus.
These four non-Oresteian plays still stand up to scrutiny even if we need guidance in order to think our way into what it must have been like to be presented with performances that were as much a type of free form religious and political experience as theatre, at least as we understand it.
Contemporary fashion tends to favour 'The Persians' both because of its unique references to contemporary events and because the modern mind favours what appears to be a transfer of empathy towards the defeated (the Persians) although I think this has been exaggerated.
My favourite - the one that still moves me - is the heroic war poem-drama 'Seven Against Thebes' which seems to capture the barbarism of city-state conflict prior to the Athenian discovery of 'reason' in all its raw energy just as it introduces us to the civic morality of tragedy.
Its masculinity is overt - there is a remarkable scene where King Eteocles upbraids the Theban women for destabilising the war effort through their inability to restrain their sentiments and their excess of religiosity. it is patriarchal but Eteocles has a strong point here.
This heroic rawness is perhaps what Nietzsche had in mind in condemning what Socratic reasoning was to do to the ability of Greeks to maintain their ability to prosper as 'peak humans'. It is less comfortable for our culture to read than faux-empathy in the propaganda against the Persians.
The other two plays read well in Vellacott's translation but they suffer more from being detached from the other plays in their trilogies. The Oresteia works for us today because it 'unfolds' with a form of thesis and antithesis resulting in a synthesis of more civic moral worth based on reason.
The meaning of Greek tragic drama is too complex an issue to deal with in a brief GoodReads review but the religio-political aspects lie in 'squaring' our nature with social obligation especially when various obligations start to clash. Which is to win out?
In 'Seven Against Thebes' King Eteocles is primarily honour bound to defend his City against raiders brought against it by his estranged brother Polyneices (whose lack of proper burial later will be the cause of another great tragedy by Sophocles in 'Antigone').
However, he is also bound not to spill the blood of his brother. Yet fate has decreed that he must fight him to the death at the seventh gate. The fate is written as part of a set of individual crimes with origins in breaching past taboo afflicting blood lines - the Oresteia is another such example.
In this case, the taboos breached are all those surrounding Oedipus, father of both Eteocles and Polyneices by his own mother Jocasta and compounded by Oedipus' curse on his sons because of their rejection of him. Antigone is going to be just the next stage in a succession of horrors.
Eteocles is actually given a choice by his own advisers, to send another hero against his brother or perhaps switch gates which a King could choose to do but Eteocles will not do this. The heroic lies in not avoiding an impossible moral choice with no good end if it is 'fated'.
Once it has happened that the allocation of the seventh gate is to him and that the raider on that gate is his brother, the tragedy unfolds as inevitable ... not as a choice or a matter of rational calculation but as an 'ill-fated' moral necessity to do an evil thing less evil than another evil thing.
Of course, the audience is seeing him put his City first but the avoidance of choice cannot have gone unnoticed nor its association with the legendary world's heroic barbarism. Tragedy is here truly cathartic, filled with a vicarious death instinct in which life is truly lived.
The fourteen heroes, raiders and Thebans, are all totally disregarding of death, placing honour and glory ahead of a quiet life, much as we have come to expect from Homer. Perhaps the dramatists want all Athenians to be heroes when necessary ... but only when rationally necessary.
In our own day, this brings us back to the legacy of Nietzsche but also to an awareness that just because God is dead does not mean civilisation is dead. Our general cultural incomprehension of Eteocles' decision-making possibly defines the full victory of 'reason' over 'life'.
This play, set alongside the defiance of 'God' in 'Prometheus Unbound' and the brilliant exposition of girlish terror of quasi-incestuous rape and of social obligation in 'The Suppliants', shows a society living in a state of reason performatively exploring questions of sentiment and honour.
We cannot honestly know what a Greek citizen thought of all this but the fact that such plays were far from unusual and highly regarded suggests that an entire society needed 'drama' in some way to 'square' the conflicts within itself and get debate going about right action.
The gods too are 'real' although it is hard to get a fix on how an ancient actually felt about these capricious and often cruel creations. The overwhelming sense is of the gods, under all-father Zeus, maintaining right order in the world where right order was not always that of reason.
If the city was based on reason among men, nature and society or rather natural social relations in family and tribe and in war were not. The gods, who spoke for right order outside men's rules, ruled this world of natural social relations, right behaviour and right ritual.
'Squaring' civil order with the natural order (including the justified sentiments of society and culture prior to the laws) must have been a constant process of civil and personal negotiation. Greek tragedy helped worked out the limits of the game and educate a populace about them.
In 'The Suppliants'. Pelasgus King of Argos explores every 'reasonable' argument why he should not plunge his people into war to save the 'virtue' of 50 distant relatives threatened with rape by their Egyptian cousins.
In the end, he accepts, having realised that a higher law answerable to the Gods requires that he protect the girls, that he must challenge the Egyptians despite the inevitable grim result. His people agree with him. This is community heroism and truly absurd in the existential sense.
The sense we get is of the very real belief in a 'higher law' provided by the Gods (although this means within a framework laid out with strict justice and order by Zeus) whose breach must lead to tragedy often generations later and that reasoning is there to endorse this law not thwart it.
None of this higher law is systematised as in the religions of the book. It is customary and oral - things everybody knows are right but which have to be policed with frequent reminders directed as much at the forgetful as at the young. Community survival is at stake.
Doing the right thing (which is very different from the Judaeo-Christian faith-based 'being good') is not easy. The lesson of the tragedies is that not doing the right thing creates imbalances in the natural order that will be corrected in time - at the expense of your own blood line.
Drama appears later to move more strongly not so much towards expressing the crisis of heroic sentiments and the tragic results of breaching taboo but more heavily towards civic society as the resolution of the crises created by the old way of doing things - but our evidence remains sparse.
Greek Tragedy is complex and multi-layered, not easily analysed or summarised in secular terms, highly suggestive even while laying out its grim facts with crystal clarity. This is a shame and not a guilt culture. One should be shamed for soiling one's own blood line and 'fating' one's children.
Vellacott is an old translation (1961) but highly readable and directed at credible performance. With minimal academic infrastructure, he points out corrupt texts where they matter and provides indications of the sort of metaphor and references relevant to understanding the plays. show less
Self-evidently the survival of these plays, preceding the work of Sophocles and Euripides, testifies to the regard in which he was held but the lack of his other plays (which may have amounted to 90) and the show more non-survival of those of his rivals suggests that we are seeing only the tip of an iceberg.
Aeschylus was not the only playwright of his time, his audience would have been demanding under conditions that were semi-sacred as well as popular and the dispute over 'Prometheus Unbound' indicates that others could probably reach high levels of attainment.
Still, Aeschylus was clearly regarded as an innovator who reached heights of rhetoric and drama not achieved before, above all (it is said) introducing characters who related to each other and not just singly with the Chorus.
These four non-Oresteian plays still stand up to scrutiny even if we need guidance in order to think our way into what it must have been like to be presented with performances that were as much a type of free form religious and political experience as theatre, at least as we understand it.
Contemporary fashion tends to favour 'The Persians' both because of its unique references to contemporary events and because the modern mind favours what appears to be a transfer of empathy towards the defeated (the Persians) although I think this has been exaggerated.
My favourite - the one that still moves me - is the heroic war poem-drama 'Seven Against Thebes' which seems to capture the barbarism of city-state conflict prior to the Athenian discovery of 'reason' in all its raw energy just as it introduces us to the civic morality of tragedy.
Its masculinity is overt - there is a remarkable scene where King Eteocles upbraids the Theban women for destabilising the war effort through their inability to restrain their sentiments and their excess of religiosity. it is patriarchal but Eteocles has a strong point here.
This heroic rawness is perhaps what Nietzsche had in mind in condemning what Socratic reasoning was to do to the ability of Greeks to maintain their ability to prosper as 'peak humans'. It is less comfortable for our culture to read than faux-empathy in the propaganda against the Persians.
The other two plays read well in Vellacott's translation but they suffer more from being detached from the other plays in their trilogies. The Oresteia works for us today because it 'unfolds' with a form of thesis and antithesis resulting in a synthesis of more civic moral worth based on reason.
The meaning of Greek tragic drama is too complex an issue to deal with in a brief GoodReads review but the religio-political aspects lie in 'squaring' our nature with social obligation especially when various obligations start to clash. Which is to win out?
In 'Seven Against Thebes' King Eteocles is primarily honour bound to defend his City against raiders brought against it by his estranged brother Polyneices (whose lack of proper burial later will be the cause of another great tragedy by Sophocles in 'Antigone').
However, he is also bound not to spill the blood of his brother. Yet fate has decreed that he must fight him to the death at the seventh gate. The fate is written as part of a set of individual crimes with origins in breaching past taboo afflicting blood lines - the Oresteia is another such example.
In this case, the taboos breached are all those surrounding Oedipus, father of both Eteocles and Polyneices by his own mother Jocasta and compounded by Oedipus' curse on his sons because of their rejection of him. Antigone is going to be just the next stage in a succession of horrors.
Eteocles is actually given a choice by his own advisers, to send another hero against his brother or perhaps switch gates which a King could choose to do but Eteocles will not do this. The heroic lies in not avoiding an impossible moral choice with no good end if it is 'fated'.
Once it has happened that the allocation of the seventh gate is to him and that the raider on that gate is his brother, the tragedy unfolds as inevitable ... not as a choice or a matter of rational calculation but as an 'ill-fated' moral necessity to do an evil thing less evil than another evil thing.
Of course, the audience is seeing him put his City first but the avoidance of choice cannot have gone unnoticed nor its association with the legendary world's heroic barbarism. Tragedy is here truly cathartic, filled with a vicarious death instinct in which life is truly lived.
The fourteen heroes, raiders and Thebans, are all totally disregarding of death, placing honour and glory ahead of a quiet life, much as we have come to expect from Homer. Perhaps the dramatists want all Athenians to be heroes when necessary ... but only when rationally necessary.
In our own day, this brings us back to the legacy of Nietzsche but also to an awareness that just because God is dead does not mean civilisation is dead. Our general cultural incomprehension of Eteocles' decision-making possibly defines the full victory of 'reason' over 'life'.
This play, set alongside the defiance of 'God' in 'Prometheus Unbound' and the brilliant exposition of girlish terror of quasi-incestuous rape and of social obligation in 'The Suppliants', shows a society living in a state of reason performatively exploring questions of sentiment and honour.
We cannot honestly know what a Greek citizen thought of all this but the fact that such plays were far from unusual and highly regarded suggests that an entire society needed 'drama' in some way to 'square' the conflicts within itself and get debate going about right action.
The gods too are 'real' although it is hard to get a fix on how an ancient actually felt about these capricious and often cruel creations. The overwhelming sense is of the gods, under all-father Zeus, maintaining right order in the world where right order was not always that of reason.
If the city was based on reason among men, nature and society or rather natural social relations in family and tribe and in war were not. The gods, who spoke for right order outside men's rules, ruled this world of natural social relations, right behaviour and right ritual.
'Squaring' civil order with the natural order (including the justified sentiments of society and culture prior to the laws) must have been a constant process of civil and personal negotiation. Greek tragedy helped worked out the limits of the game and educate a populace about them.
In 'The Suppliants'. Pelasgus King of Argos explores every 'reasonable' argument why he should not plunge his people into war to save the 'virtue' of 50 distant relatives threatened with rape by their Egyptian cousins.
In the end, he accepts, having realised that a higher law answerable to the Gods requires that he protect the girls, that he must challenge the Egyptians despite the inevitable grim result. His people agree with him. This is community heroism and truly absurd in the existential sense.
The sense we get is of the very real belief in a 'higher law' provided by the Gods (although this means within a framework laid out with strict justice and order by Zeus) whose breach must lead to tragedy often generations later and that reasoning is there to endorse this law not thwart it.
None of this higher law is systematised as in the religions of the book. It is customary and oral - things everybody knows are right but which have to be policed with frequent reminders directed as much at the forgetful as at the young. Community survival is at stake.
Doing the right thing (which is very different from the Judaeo-Christian faith-based 'being good') is not easy. The lesson of the tragedies is that not doing the right thing creates imbalances in the natural order that will be corrected in time - at the expense of your own blood line.
Drama appears later to move more strongly not so much towards expressing the crisis of heroic sentiments and the tragic results of breaching taboo but more heavily towards civic society as the resolution of the crises created by the old way of doing things - but our evidence remains sparse.
Greek Tragedy is complex and multi-layered, not easily analysed or summarised in secular terms, highly suggestive even while laying out its grim facts with crystal clarity. This is a shame and not a guilt culture. One should be shamed for soiling one's own blood line and 'fating' one's children.
Vellacott is an old translation (1961) but highly readable and directed at credible performance. With minimal academic infrastructure, he points out corrupt texts where they matter and provides indications of the sort of metaphor and references relevant to understanding the plays. show less
"In war, the first casualty is truth."
Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy examines revenge, retribution, and fate in the house of Atreus. Agamemnon, the trilogy's first play, depicts the murder of the King and his trophy slave Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, on his return to Mycenae from the Trojan War.
Ten years earlier, before setting out for war, Agamemnon offended the goddess Artemis, and she stopped the winds, keeping his fleet of 100 ships from sailing to battle. He learned from the show more prophet, Calchas, that the only way to appease Artemis was to sacrifice his oldest daughter Iphigenia. He had to decide between his duties to his family or his city-state. He chose his polis and lured Iphigenia and his wife Clytemnestra by promising his daughter's marriage to Achilles. The play begins ten years later with Agamemnon's homecoming as Clytemnestra enacts her revenge with her lover Aegisthus's help.
Agamemnon is a powerful poetic play filled with fear and rage. I listened to Audible's outstanding performance, which brought it to life. I highly recommend this production to anyone interested in the classical world or theater. show less
Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy examines revenge, retribution, and fate in the house of Atreus. Agamemnon, the trilogy's first play, depicts the murder of the King and his trophy slave Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, on his return to Mycenae from the Trojan War.
Ten years earlier, before setting out for war, Agamemnon offended the goddess Artemis, and she stopped the winds, keeping his fleet of 100 ships from sailing to battle. He learned from the show more prophet, Calchas, that the only way to appease Artemis was to sacrifice his oldest daughter Iphigenia. He had to decide between his duties to his family or his city-state. He chose his polis and lured Iphigenia and his wife Clytemnestra by promising his daughter's marriage to Achilles. The play begins ten years later with Agamemnon's homecoming as Clytemnestra enacts her revenge with her lover Aegisthus's help.
Agamemnon is a powerful poetic play filled with fear and rage. I listened to Audible's outstanding performance, which brought it to life. I highly recommend this production to anyone interested in the classical world or theater. show less
I enjoyed reading these plays, and imagining how they would be staged. The theme of revenge vs. justice is still a timely one today, and I thought the layers of old gods vs. new gods, and to a lesser extent, gender politics, added psychological depth to the story.
I can imagine the characters as actual people, with their messy motivations and emotions. Clytemnestra, left alone for over a decade as her husband is off at Troy, her oldest daughter killed by this same man. I honestly can't really show more blame her for wanting to kill Agamemnon herself, especially since he tricked both of them by saying he had found a husband for Iphigenia in order to get his daughter to come to where he was. To then turn a celebration into a murder is really evil. But "an eye for an eye" really does just cause an endless trail of tragedy.
It's fascinating to see the Furies turned into some kind of auxiliary for the Fates. I wonder why Aeschylus did that, or if that was already an accepted mythology that he capitalized on. It contains aspects of karma for me, the idea that these beings who demand payment for crimes should morph into beings who deal out destiny. So interesting. show less
I can imagine the characters as actual people, with their messy motivations and emotions. Clytemnestra, left alone for over a decade as her husband is off at Troy, her oldest daughter killed by this same man. I honestly can't really show more blame her for wanting to kill Agamemnon herself, especially since he tricked both of them by saying he had found a husband for Iphigenia in order to get his daughter to come to where he was. To then turn a celebration into a murder is really evil. But "an eye for an eye" really does just cause an endless trail of tragedy.
It's fascinating to see the Furies turned into some kind of auxiliary for the Fates. I wonder why Aeschylus did that, or if that was already an accepted mythology that he capitalized on. It contains aspects of karma for me, the idea that these beings who demand payment for crimes should morph into beings who deal out destiny. So interesting. show less
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