The Oresteian Trilogy
by Aeschylus, Philip Vellacott (Translator, Introduction by, Notes by)
ISBN-10: 0140440674
ISBN-13: 9780140440676
$13.00
Book Specs
Binding
UK-B Format Paperback
Publisher
Penguin Classics
Published on
Dec 30, 1956
Edition
1st Edition
Dimensions
5.10x0.47x7.75 Inches
Weight
0.35 Pounds
About the Book
Aeschylus (525-c.456 bc) set his great trilogy in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Troy, when King Agamemnon returns to Argos, a victor in war. Agamemnon depicts the hero's discovery that his family has been destroyed by his wife's infidelity and ends with his death at her callous hand. Clytemnestra's crime is repaid in The Choephori when her outraged son Orestes kills both her and her lover. The Eumenides then follows Orestes as he is hounded to Athens by the Furies' law of vengeance and depicts Athene replacing the bloody cycle of revenge with a system of civil justice. Written in the years after the Battle of Marathon, The Oresteian Trilogy affirmed the deliverance of democratic Athens not only from Persian conquest, but also from its own barbaric past.