The Oresteia trilogy was created by Aeschylus to be performed in the open air before his fellow citizens in Athens on a spring day in 458 B.C.E. Although it comes from so early in the record of world literature, it retains an extraordinary power to grip and to provoke to this day. In fact, it is probably more widely known and widely performed now than at any other time in the last twenty-two hundred years. It remains a challenging yet accessible work which embodies conflicts about family, gender, and justice in ways that still arouse disturbing thoughts and strong emotions.
The Oresteia was not—and is not—just a text: Aeschylus was the director, composer, and choreographer as well as the playwright and poet. The text in this volume is the verbal record, the libretto, of a work of art that interwove action, costume, objects, dance, music, poetry, and voice. Furthermore, it did not come into being for an exclusive or elite public—and there is no good reason why it should be regarded like that today, either. It was produced, on the contrary, for an audience of at least six thousand, quite possibly many more, gathered in the theatron, the “viewing place” dedicated to honor the god Dionysus, beneath the walls of the Athenian Acropolis. It was a huge event, the popular entertainment of its time.
This is all a far cry from most modern theatrical experiences, which are constrained within enclosed, darkened spaces where actors move naturalistically and speak colloquial prose. Also, as well as the actors, there was the chorus, which provided an essential layer in Greek drama. Many modern productions have found that, far from being a problem, this group of witnesses, with their searching attempts to make some sense of the tragedy through their poetry and music, supply an extra, vivid dimension. This is especially true of Aeschylus’ plays, where the choral songs (or “odes”) are so strong and full. It makes sense that Richard Wagner, with his ideas of a “total artwork” (Gesamtkunstwerk), said that his impressions of the Oresteia molded his ideas “about the whole significance of the drama and of theater.”
More recently, many of the leading stage directors have seized the opportunity to put on Agamemnon or the whole trilogy in order to push the boundaries of routine theater. A roll call of names gives some idea of their variety: Max Reinhardt, Jean-Louis Barrault, Tyrone Guthrie, Vittorio Gassman, Karolos Koun, Peter Stein, Peter Hall, Ariane Mnouchkine, Katie Mitchell, Michael Thalheimer. These productions have not been acts of antiquarian piety to make passive audiences feel complacent; they have been innovative explorations to provoke those who want to have their ears and eyes and emotions freshly opened.
So where did this story of theatrical revolution begin? Aeschylus was born in about 525 b.c.e., and the Oresteia, put on in 458, just two years before his death, was recognized as his masterpiece. The art form of tragedy had developed with amazing rapidity, given that theater, in the core sense of the word, had most probably been invented within Aeschylus’ lifetime. For theater to happen, there had to be a fixed viewing place (theatron) and a fixed time for the audience to gather; and rehearsed players, both actors and chorus, had to be organized to enact a structured story. The evidence all suggests (though not beyond dispute) that these conditions coalesced not long before 500 b.c.e. It can hardly be coincidence that at just that same time, in 508, the Athenians radically changed their political constitution to transfer ultimate power to the people (demos)—in other words, they inaugurated the world’s first democracy. So the first performance of the Oresteia may well mark the fiftieth birthday both of democracy and of theater.
The Athenian theatron was inherently democratic, in that it was not select or exclusive: every citizen was admitted, and the seating was not segregated or privileged. Furthermore, tragedy calls for understanding and sympathetic fellow feeling toward the situations and sufferings of other, very different people; and a thoroughgoing democracy arguably calls for an enhanced sense of the variousness of humanity and of human suffering. Open-mindedness and a plurality of viewpoints are needed if true participation in any society is to become extended to all its citizens. This is epitomized in the third play of the Oresteia, where the vendetta vengeance of the old aristocratic society, structured around family bonds, as seen in the first two plays, is superseded by the jury made up of citizens. This civic institution hands adjudication over to society as a whole, subsuming all other affiliations.
The theater was open, then, to all citizens. But did that extend to women, who were citizens in only limited ways that did not include participation in political decision-making or legal proceedings? Scholars are divided on this question of whether there were women present in the audience or not—there seems to be good evidence both for and against. But if they were admitted, they were still very probably a marginal minority. In that case, it is fascinating that women are so central to so many ancient Greek tragedies, not least the Oresteia, where Clytemnestra and Cassandra are in many ways more powerful and intelligent figures that any of the male characters. Outside of the theater, women were restricted and suppressed, but inside that contained space the plays opened up a different perspective: the realization of their potential, their strengths and their articulacy. Clytemnestra and her tragic sisters may be portrayed as deviant and dangerous, and they ultimately come to grief, but the idea that women are far more interesting than society officially recognized is planted. This is central to the enduring appeal of the Oresteia and many other Greek tragedies.
Every year three playwrights each put on three tragedies at the dramatic festival. These were normally separate plays, but in the early days connected trilogies were more common, and the Oresteia seems to have been the culminating exemplar of that kind of dramatic construction. The three constituent plays have been traditionally given the titles Agamemnon, Choephoroi (Libation Bearers), and Eumenides (Kindly Ones). These may well not go back to Aeschylus, and they are rather deterrent, suggesting to modern readers and audiences that they need to have some esoteric knowledge of ancient Greek terms before they can embark on engaging with the plays. This is not at all the case, and that is why in this translation they have been retitled as Agamemnon, Women at the Graveside, and Orestes at Athens. The argument for these coinages is set out in more detail on pp. xxx–xxxi below.
A connected trilogy would offer the obvious opportunity to tell of three generations, especially if—as so often in myth!—it was a dynasty mired in a chain of vengeance. But, instead of doing that, Aeschylus dramatizes two generations of the royal house of Argos, and then in the third play turns to an external civic context to reach for some sort of way out of the vicious cycle of vendetta. The setting breaks away from the claustrophobic family house and brings in the social dimensions of the law and politics and, by association, democracy.
Agamemnon tells how the mighty king Agamemnon comes home triumphant from the ten-year siege of Troy, undertaken to recover Helen, who had been seduced by the Trojan prince Paris. He returns, though, only to be humiliated and slaughtered by his waiting wife, Clytemnestra. He has killed his daughter and sent many soldiers to their deaths, all for the sake of recovering the promiscuous wife who cuckolded Menelaus. Clytemnestra punishes him for that, but also because she wants her own power over her own life.
The second play, Women at the Graveside, has Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, now a young man, return from his upbringing abroad to kill his mother along with her usurping lover, Aegisthus. He kills them to avenge his father and to reclaim his heritage; but to achieve that he has to plunge his sword into the maternal breast where he once suckled as a baby. The following scene, where Orestes stands over the two dead bodies, clearly and ominously replicates that in the first play where Clytemnestra stood over the slaughtered Agamemnon and his captive Trojan sex slave Cassandra.
The Oresteia draws, like nearly all ancient Greek tragedies, on the inherited treasury of stories and legends about the great dynasties of a long-past “heroic” age. While these myths were fixed in some outlines, it was crucial that they were not canonical, but were open to invention and variation in detail. The common assertion that the plots were all known to the audiences in advance is simply false—the “fixed-story fallacy,” so to speak. Both of the bloody episodes of the first two plays were, indeed, old stories, already familiar in Homer’s epic Odyssey (a good two hundred years earlier), but Aeschylus has made a crucial change from all earlier versions. By having Clytemnestra single-handedly kill her husband, without the help of Aegisthus, and by making Orestes’ revenge on her central rather than that against Aegisthus, he creates the first great female role in the history of theater.
While the first two plays are set on the crucial days of dynastic murder at Argos, it is part of the skillful complexity of Aeschylus’ storytelling that Agamemnon—by far the longest of the three plays—vividly evokes and incorporates other times and places. Furthest back in time, the internecine conflict of the previous generation is reconstructed. Atreus, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, was challenged for the throne of Argos by his brother Thyestes, who had also seduced Atreus’ wife, Aerope. In revenge, Atreus butchered Thyestes’ children, except for the baby Aegisthus, and served them cooked to their father at a feast. This macabre tale is evoked in hallucinatory visions by Cassandra.
Another crucial “backstory,” that of Helen and her elopement with Paris, is primarily supplied by the chorus of old men in Agamemnon. Too old to go to Troy, they still have vigorous memories. In their second great song they dwell on both the entrancing appeal of Helen and on her dangerousness. Her delicate beauty grows into a curse that will destroy many soldiers and the whole city of Troy—she turns their wedding songs into laments.
But the fullest and most vivid reenvisioning of a past event is the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis ten years earlier, recalled by the chorus in their very first song. When the expedition was ready to set off for Troy, the fleet was held up from crossing the Aegean Sea by adverse winds. Following prophetic advice that this was the only way to solve the problem, Agamemnon cut the throat of his own daughter Iphigeneia. Not a good start—a start that leaves Iphigeneia’s mother, at home in Argos, brooding on revenge.
After all this, the third play, Orestes at Athens, is quite different: no blood is shed, and the drive to revenge is restrained by the establishment of a court of law. Before she was killed, Clytemnestra warned Orestes of the curse of “a mother’s rabid hunting dogs.” These materialize in the form of a whole chorus pack of Erinyes, ghoulish old goddesses who relentlessly pursue for revenge (on the Erinyes, conventionally known as “Furies,” see p. xxx). They arrive eventually in Athena’s city of Athens, and she sets up a trial for Orestes before human jurors under oath to deliver honest judgment. The votes turn out equally divided between mother and son, and Orestes is acquitted only with Athena’s casting vote. In the final scene of the trilogy, she manages to restrain the Erinyes from poisoning Athens as a further transferred stage of revenge: they are to be housed and honored there, and in return to give the city peace and prosperity. This benefit is, however, conditional on the citizens’ learning to respect them: the threat of the Erinyes is contained, but not extinguished.
The Oresteia is political through and through, in the sense that it multifariously explores the relationship between individuals and families within the city (polis in Greek) and within human society as a whole. Yet it is far from a sermon or a morality tale. It is essential that the theatrical and aesthetic experience be fully realized in its own right. Aeschylus had devoted his energies to developing the new art form of tragedy, and an awareness of the relationship between life and art is built into the work itself. The whole trilogy is thus pervaded with language and ideas about ugliness and beauty, discord and harmony, shapelessness and form, randomness and pattern. Among these, the themes of music and song recur most insistently, stretching all the way from the Watchman at the very start, who is unable to summon the comfort of song, to the call for communal music making in the closing lines of the final play. This motif enlists the poetry and visual presentation, combined with the dance and song, to draw attention to the potential place of art in human life. What is the point, the work itself asks, of crafting words and movements and sounds into a highly skilled and rehearsed presentation like this? Aeschylus, the first great tragedian, is already asking: Why tragedy?
There have been—and are—many answers to that question of “Why tragedy?” But a central one must be that tragedy faces full-on the fact that we humans suffer, and explores whether any understanding of this suffering is to be found: can any sense or vision can be salvaged from it? This central concern inevitably raises issues of guilt and innocence, blame and responsibility. The notion has become widespread that in Greek tragedy everything and everyone is somehow fated, doomed; that human creatures have no power over their destinies, and that they simply carry out what has been determined for them by some overruling force. This is in most ways a false, or at best misleading, perspective—“the fate fallacy,” we might call it. While it is true that there are powers at work which are beyond the human—gods, oracles, curses, even cosmic checks and balances—Greek tragedies hardly ever show humans as in any way taken over or controlled from outside, or behaving as puppets or proxies. On the contrary, they struggle with their decisions, dilemmas, and justifications.
Clytemnestra is a striking example of this concern with the motivation and explanation of human behavior. While she does recognize belatedly in Agamemnon that her actions have coincided with what the family curse (the “Daimon”) also determines, she proudly proclaims her deeds as her own. Her driving motives are revenge for her daughter, love for Aegisthus, resentment of Agamemnon’s presumption and sexual infidelity, and protest at being treated as a subservient woman. She acts as she does precisely to show that she has the power to do so. The family curse concurs, but it does not make her do it.
Similarly, Orestes in Women at the Graveside has been told by Apollo’s oracle that, under pain of horrific threats, he must kill his own mother. Yet, as he himself explains, he would do it anyway: he wants to be true to his father, to reclaim his ancestral wealth, and to liberate the Argive people. His motives are political and economic and impelled by family honor. He is then fully determined on the killing until the moment when Clytemnestra appeals to her motherhood. He has to be reminded of Apollo’s instruction, and has to reassert his choice. But that is not the end of his psychic story: he still has to justify killing the woman whose womb had brought him to birth. It is not hard to see why Eugene O’Neill, in his trilogy adaptation of the Oresteia transplanted to 1860s New England, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), explores Orestes and his sister Electra as studies in the Freudian subconscious. And Colm Tóibín’s novel House of Names (2017) is also a study in the tortured psyches of family violence and hate-love, portraying Orestes as a cowed figure swept along by stronger personalities, particularly Electra.
It is crucial for the resilience of these questions of free will, determinism, responsibility, credit, and blame that for the Greeks, unlike for peoples of many other cultures, there was no clearly laid down doctrine of ultimate explanation or determinism. There is no holy book, no supreme leader, no final authority to be appealed to: any person’s assessments are open to dispute and to persuasion. There are, instead, both a divine level of explanation through the gods’ will, on the one hand, and, on the other, the human level of choice, decision, and deliberation. The two levels of accountability and motivation so deeply coexist that it is impossible to pull them apart: human and divine will are both variously at work in every action.
The Greeks were polytheist, and their many gods were by no means uniform or unanimous. There were many other kinds of divinity as well as the canonical Olympian gods—Zeus, Athena, and the rest. And in the Oresteia, there is a particularly important set of non-Olympian divine powers: the Erinyes (“Furies”), along with the Moirai and the power of the angry dead (for more on these see p. xxx). Yet, at the same time, tragedy fully makes room for a wide range of human volitions and drives, including rational thought, passion, inherited character, loyalty, deceitfulness, instinct, and resentment. Aeschylus draws all of these and more into the range of the possible explanations for his characters’ behavior, as there emerges no firm explanation that is key to these portrayals of human causation. Nor is there any rationale of how these coexist with the superhuman powers, except that Zeus is in some transcendent—yet unfathomable—sense at the root of the way things are.
In a world where the higher powers are so inscrutable and uncertain, the sanctions of authority among humans are bound to be even more open to dispute. The tragedies are set in a world that is a fluid blend of a heroic, mythological society, derived from early epic, along with the contemporary culture and values of the fifth century b.c.e. This makes the conflicting human contexts even more difficult for the characters to assess for themselves. There is a constant tug between the various forces of inherited privilege, wealth, custom, military might, and personal authority, as well as the affiliations of family, city, and race. These are all assessed, contested, and challenged in different contexts during the course of the Oresteia. So, for example, the inherited wealth of the royal house is at stake in the family conflicts, yet it is not taken to be an unquestioned blessing. Great wealth can bring dangers with it and is liable to corrupt, as is seen in the story of Troy as well as in the power struggles at Argos.
The issues explored in the Oresteia extend beyond the individual and the family to the broader society, and even to humanity as a whole. Some of the leading ways the trilogy retains its accessible complexity—and its modernity—reside in the larger questioning of the social, political, and juridical issues that are implicated in the storytelling. This kind of complex of live issues, conveyed through plotting, betrayals, and dilemmas, can still inform powerful modern retellings. These include, for example, Theo Angelopoulos’ extraordinarily evocative film The Travelling Players (1975), set in war-torn Greece from the 1930s to the 1950s, and Robert Icke’s gripping contemporary re-creation, still called Oresteia (2015).
The two issues that stand out most prominently are probably those of gender and of vengeance. Women were, generally speaking, subordinated and disenfranchised in ancient Greek society; they were not empowered to participate in their own right in political and legal procedures; they were expected to keep quiet and to stay out of sight. Yet the important place they have in many tragedies stands in tension with this external hierarchy. The plays betray a fascination with women’s forcefulness and intelligence and with their potential challenge to men. In the Oresteia, Clytemnestra stands as the prototype for the figure of the wronged woman who fights back with all her powers of expression, guile, and force. She has a mesmerizing control over language and over practical planning, as well as a strong arm and a ruthless determination to kill—and she is proud of it. This is the Clytemnestra who inspired Martha Graham’s dance drama of 1958 and the assertive, openly sexual woman who dominates the first part of Seamus Heaney’s compelling poem Mycenae Lookout (1996) with her “love-shout” that is like the yell of attacking troops.
Clytemnestra’s marital involvement in the revenge chain also brings to the fore the two basic kinds of familial bond and sets them in discord: the parent-child bond of continuity through seed and blood is pitched against the conjugal bond through marriage and procreation. This antithesis is built up by Aeschylus into a full-scale conflict of gender. Again and again the personal confrontations are generalized into terms of “men” and “women,” “male” and “female.” These plays, made and performed by men for men, nonetheless give the female a seriousness and strength that cannot be dismissed or lightly patronized.
The gender conflict culminates in the trial scene in the third play. The issue of Orestes’ liability for murder could be definitively settled if only it were agreed that one sex is less significant or less essential that the other. And this is what Apollo attempts to argue on Orestes’ behalf: that the mother is not a true parent but merely an incubator for the father’s seed. It is crucially important that this side of the case gains only half of the jurors’ votes: half the votes go to the Erinyes and Clytemnestra. Apollo’s argument from obstetrics is not, then, endorsed by the play—and it rings as even more objectionable today, of course. At the same time, its provocativeness taps into a deep and widespread anxiety about the hierarchy of blood relations, and about the split loyalties of children caught between estranged parents.
The other notably prominent sociopolitical concerns cluster around the nexus of retaliation, revenge, and justice. Arguably, the first response to pay violence back with violence is hardwired in animals, not excluding humans. And the history of the royal house at Argos exemplifies how blood that is unnaturally shed cries out for more blood. The first two plays of the trilogy show the addition of two new generations to the saga of vendetta in a way that sets up the question of whether this chain of consequence can ever be broken. In Orestes at Athens, the goddess Athena, in combination with her citizens, inaugurates a court to try cases of homicide in order to deliver a reasoned and concluding verdict one way or the other. The closing scene then goes on to face the further truth that a legal verdict does not make the desire for revenge simply evaporate; this persistence is conveyed through the continuing fury of the Erinyes, leading to their threat to blight the whole future of the city of Athens. What society has to do, the play suggests, is not to deny the urge to revenge but, somehow, to contain it and keep it in reserve. Yaël Farber powerfully recast the Oresteia to explore these very live issues in post-apartheid South Africa in her play Molora (2007).
The final scene of the trilogy might also be interpreted as bringing out an analogy between how vengeance is to be contained within civic bounds and how, if it is to have a beneficial effect within society, tragedy needs to be experienced and assimilated within the time and place of the theater. The terrifying Erinyes are placated by Athena: instead of being rejected, they are given an underground home and cult, incorporated into the very foundations of the city. But they are not finally disarmed or disempowered. As long as the city remains stable and its individuals live good lives, they will confer blessings; but if things go wrong, they will again exert their deadly threats. In live performance, this presents the integration of a beautiful terror into social life. Yet this containment is conditional, so that it holds in place a potential either for song or for misery, either for gracefulness or for ugliness. Tragedy itself, like the Erinyes in the end, has the potential to be at the same time both horrifying and enthralling, distressing and wonderful.
This concern with ideas and issues should not suggest that the Oresteia is static and abstract—far from it. Everything is conveyed though vivid and constantly surprising theatricality—all the more astonishing when we remember that until fifty years earlier, there was no such thing as theater: no staging, props, or costumes, no enactment. We are not in a position to reconstruct Aeschylus’ original performance, of course, and there is much that we simply cannot know about how it was done, but the words and the shaping of the plays do still indicate quite a few theatrical scenes and features. These start with the Watchman on the roof at the beginning of Agamemnon looking out for the distant beacon fire—an anticipation of the first scene of Hamlet!—and they end with a spectacular torchlight procession.
There is, once we begin looking, a wealth of visual material: flaming torches, trails of blood, snake-entwined Erinyes, bodies tangled in nets. For such early theater, the Oresteia makes extraordinarily inventive use of costumes, portable objects, background buildings, tableaux, rapid movements, handing over, running away, and more. These supply many opportunities for modern productions to set them in their own aesthetic staging in one form or another.
Two great scenes demonstrate this theatrical inventiveness. First the “path of purple cloth.” Agamemnon has returned in triumph on a wheeled carriage of some sort; but before he can step down from it, Clytemnestra has a path of precious purple-dyed cloths spread out in front of him and persuades him to tread over these. The scene sets a kind of enigma: Why is this action so ominous? It suggests that he walks a pathway of blood; he tramples on the wealth of his house; he submits to Clytemnestra’s power, against his better judgment. And does he offend the gods by this questionably presumptuous act? Is it, perhaps, a kind of reenactment of his killing of Iphigeneia? Agamemnon fails to make direct contact with the earth of his own land, and is instead caught up in the beguilement of wealth, tangled in Clytemnestra’s wrappings of words. This surely still stands as a fascinating, inexhaustible coup de théâtre, one of the greatest of all time.
Secondly, Orestes at Athens provides the archetypal theatrical stage trial. It is set up with a presiding judge (Athena), jurors, a defendant, a counsel for the defense (Apollo), and the strangest of prosecutors—the whole chorus of Erinyes, determined to exact punishment. While there are details that we cannot work out, the original action of the voting seems fairly clear: there are two urns, one for guilty, one for not guilty, and one by one the jurors hide their hands inside each of the urns and secretly drop their vote, probably a pebble, into one or the other. Once everyone has cast their vote, Athena tells an official to tip out the urns and count the pebbles. The votes in each are equal! All of this turns the judicial arguments and issues into thrilling theater.
When it comes to the sound of the plays, there is, compared with the visual, much less obvious direction arising from within the plays themselves, and we find much more disparity among modern productions. How like or unlike everyday, naturalistic speech is the delivery of the spoken parts to be? How much or how little music? Whether the chorus is small or large, do they speak, or sing, or do something in between? Conventions and fashions in the soundscapes of the theater are, in any case, less liable than the visual design to take much account of the original style and tone.
Still, we do have some idea, although limited, of how Aeschylus’ own performance will have sounded, especially the partitions into the spoken sections and sung sections, and the relative style and diction of each kind of delivery. Most of the scenes of the plays’ action were spoken, albeit in verse: a regular line that is actually to some degree comparable with iambic blank verse in English (as in Shakespeare). This meter was, we are told by Aristotle, “especially speakable.” The mode of delivery for the alternating “lyric” parts, which are very substantial in Aeschylus, was quite different. These are set in complex and highly varied meters, and were mostly delivered by the chorus, although there are also passages of “lyric dialogue” involving actors. All of these lyric passages were sung with musical accompaniment, mostly played on a double pipe with reeds called the aulos, which combined one pipe as a drone with the other that made a piercing sound like that of a clarinet or a shawm. It is likely that, as a rule, the chorus sang in a collective unison and with one note to each syllable. The poetic diction of these parts of the play was much more highly wrought than the relatively plainspoken sections, even at times high-flown. Although they were elaborate, there is, however, no good reason to suppose that they were incomprehensible to their public. They were put there not to baffle the audience but to lead them toward a more intuitive response approached through poetry and music rather than through reason.
Modern drama does not, on the whole, embrace poetry and musicality—though there are exceptions, of course. But the Oresteia provides a powerful reminder of how far theater can depart from naturalistic realism, and yet still be dramatic, arguably even more highly dramatic in some ways. This translation does not try to water down Aeschylus’ rich palette of phrases and images, but tries to bring out how we, the audience, are being challenged by poetry and music and color, and how that is all part of its enduring theatrical power. If it succeeds, this text may open up sights and sounds to astonish the open-minded reader, and to inspire potential performers.