To understand Aeschylus’s originality and achievement in the Oresteia, it is necessary to place the trilogy in the context of the origins and development of drama in ancient Greece. Aeschylus points the way by which a domestic tragedy can serve in the hand of a great poet and stage craftsman as a profound enactment of the human condition and human destiny on a truly colossal dramatic scale.

Aeschylus presents the archetypal family tragedy, the influences of which can be felt in subsequent theatrical depictions of the houses of Oedipus, Tyrone, Loman, Corleone, and Soprano and other uses of the family as the locus for dramatic conflict. Bowra, “laid the true foundations of tragedy and established the forms and spirit which marked it out from other kinds of poetry.” The Oresteia, the only surviving Attic tragic trilogy, dramatizes the working out of the curse on the house of Atreus from Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy and his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, through her subsequent death at the hands of her son, Orestes, and the consequences for human justice and cosmic order. Considered by the Greeks the “father of tragedy,” Aeschylus, “more than anyone,” according to classical scholar C.

Richard Lattimore, “Introduction to the Oresteia” in The Complete Greek TragediesĬalled by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “the masterpiece of masterpieces” and by Algernon Charles Swinburne “the greatest achievement of the human mind,” Aeschylus’s Oresteia is the monumental accomplishment of drama’s greatest early visionary and progenitor. Trilogy whose special greatness lies in the fact that it transcends the limitations of dramatic enactment on a scale never achieved before or since.

The oresteia of aeschylus agamemnon