Only read Agamemnon. The ending turned violent and gruesome. Was not expecting that. ( )

In addition to lively, clear translations of this trilogy, Roche includes appendices in which he describes his intention in translating, the ironic depiction of Clytemnestra, how the theology of Aeschylus in the three plays reflects evolving Greek understanding of God, and an informative overview of the theater in ancient Greece. I often referred to the glossary since I have a hard time keeping the Greek pantheon and heroes straight. (less) [edit] ( )

My edition had a 100 page introduction that was frankly a chore to get through. I feel bad because clearly Phillip Vellacott (the editor) was extremely passionate about the trilogy, but that was so much introduction.

The Orestia seeks to answer that time-honoured question: If your mum kills your dad, are you morally obligated to kill your mum?

In all seriousness, Orestes is in a no-win situation. He is honour-bound to avenge his father, but will be cursed forever if he kills his mother.

Aeschylus's answer to this is to illustrate the transition from an eternal vengeance-fuelled cycle of violence to a civilised justice system. At least one person I spoke to considered this a "cop-out" but I quite like it. It give the cycle a greater meaning and raises a mirror to our own ideas of justice and retribution.

My only prior experience with Aeschylus had been my study of Aristophanes' The Frogs in high school, in which Aeschylus is portrayed as an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy whose works nevertheless come out more worthy than later, more cynical playwrights.

I was surprised at the sophistication of the writing - all the characters have their own motives and perspectives. Although Clytaemnestra is portrayed as a villain, you can easily see how she ended up where she did.

Cassandra was my favourite character, perhaps because she was the only person involved who hadn't done anything wrong (unless you count offending Apollo!).

There are also very sophisticated layers of symbolism and intense, evocative imagery. I enjoyed the ominous imagery of the furies gathering on the roof, signifying the feminine fury soon to fill the house.

Here's some excerpts I particularly liked, this one because it's low key kinda hot:

Oh but a man's high daring spirit,
who can account for that? Or woman's
desperate passion daring past all bounds?
She couples with every form of ruin known to mortals.
Woman, frenzied, driven wild with lust,
twists the dark, warm harness
of wedded love - tortures man and beast!

An this one because I read it just as the 2024 US persedential election concluded:

But ancient Violence longs to breed,
new violence comes
when its fatal hour comes, the demon comes
to take her toll - no war, no force no prayer
can hinder the midnight Fury stamped
with parent Fury moving through the house.

But justice shines in sooty hovels,
loves the decent life.
From proud halls crusted with gilt by filthy hands
she turns her eyes to find the pure in spirit -
spurning the wealth stamped counterfeit with praise,
she steers all things towards their destined end.

Aristophanes concluded that it was Aeschylus Athens needed as its defeat loomed on the horizon. Perhaps it is Aeschylus we also need now, to remind us how we must suffer through violence and disaster and into true justice. ( )

A triology of Greek tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Concerns domestic tragedy and the eventual domestication of furies. Also includes an introduction on Aeschylus and commentary on the plays.

A triology of Greek tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. Concerns domestic tragedy and the eventual domestication of furies. Also includes an introduction on Aeschylus and commentary on the plays.

I read this in order to read The Libation Bearers, in a compare & contrast to the treatment of the same story by Euripides. I read the entire sequence, for completeness sake.
In general there is a great deal of information imparted by the Chorus. Whereas in Euripides, the Chorus is acting almost as an intermediary between the stage and the audience, commenting on the action, here their main function seems to be to impart information necessary to the play.
In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra is at least acknowledged as having a legitimate grievance relating to the killing of her daughter and the love affair is less pronounced. Thereafter, however, she is described solely as her husband's killer. Electra is entirely absent in the first play and plays only a fleeting role in the second, making her a very different presentation from that in Euripides.
I was rather put off by the concepts in the final play, that killing a spouse was a lesser crime as you hadn't shed your blood line, while killing a mother is a lesser crime that the father.
It's an interesting comparison, but I prefer Euripides. ( )

La mejor tragedia griega que haya leido.
Trata de culpa, de venganza, justicia, lazos de sangre, etc.
Aqui ocurren muchas cosas grandes y se tratan muchos de los grandes temas de la humanidad.
Todo contado en poesia de hace 2400 años.



( )

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 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. ( )

Compelling meditations on vengeance and justice, intermixed with visions of destiny and gender. Also highly lyrical. ( )

I read Robert Fagles translation; it is accessible while retaining the powerful and subtle language and imagery of Aeschylus’ work. This (Penguin Classics) edition includes a well-written and very useful introductory essay, The Serpent and the Eagle – A Reading of 'The Oresteia', written in collaboration with W. B. Stanford (as are the notes). The introduction, about 75 pages long, gives a wealth of background information to complement the reading experience of the dramatic trilogy itself – this particular reading employs a Hegelian approach, though not too obtrusively. – "The Oresteia is our rite of passage from savagery to civilization," as Fagles/Stanford aptly puts it in the introduction. It is also one of the most fascinating works of drama I have ever read; impressive both in its breadth of scope and depth of detail. I wouldn't hesitate to call it a work of genius, and to my mind, here Aeschylus in many ways dwarfs even a younger giant such as Shakespeare. The fact that this is the only trilogy that has survived since antiquity, makes me mournful for all that has been lost – including the satyr play that originally accompanied the performances of this trilogy, Proteus. From the introductory essay: "For all its optimism [in the final part of the Oresteia], the Proteus may have reminded the Athenians that their lives were based on conflict, indeed that Athena had prevailed over Poseidon for possession of their city. So in the trilogy we reach an accommodation with the earth, but the sea, like Poseidon in the Odyssey, may remain to be placated." It's an intriguing thought - and for sure, I can easily see the use of a bit of comedy, as well as the presence of the more uncultivated and rustic satyrs, after the intense and bloody rite of passage - from a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance to the rule of law - from chaos to order - of the Oresteia.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

I found this cycle of plays to be quite profound for what it has to say about breaking a cycle of violence and revenge. The exploration of what justice is can also be seen as the plays progress. I think this is a classic that I will be revisiting again. ( )

For class we were supposed to only read part 1, "Agamemnon", which leaves off at a weird cliffhanger, so I read the rest and the story made more sense. These plays, unlike other Greek trilogies, don't work as standalone pieces at all; reading all of them in quick succession at least resolved the story but it was so so boring. From my non-academic perspective the main reason to read Greek tragedy is because they're metal as hell (Medea!) and while the Oresteia had moments of being metal while the family's caught in a Godfather-like cycle of retribution, the resolution is just... a courtroom scene. I understand what the story is saying with this, but it was very anticlimactic after all that! On top of everything this was very misogynist (especially when compared to later plays like Medea) and I'm honestly getting sick of reading men writing about men.
I guess Meineck's translation was pretty good, it was pretty easy to read, but for whatever reason the footnotes at the bottom of each page didn't correspond with any in-text superscript or asterisk or other markers! This was a very stupid publishing decision! ( )

This tragedy takes place after the fall of Troy. The main characters are Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, queen and king of Argos, respectively. Orestes is their son. Agamemnon is killed by Clytemnestra and Clytemnestra by her son, Orestes. This play examines the difference between justice and revenge. Quite frankly, there were just more characters in this play than I wanted to process. Also at 208 pages, it is longer than most of this type of work. The chorus played a very major role in the advancement of this story. ( )

This will probably be my one and only book review regarding a Classical author. The 'Agamemnon' contains probably the finest first page in all literature (Shakespeare included). As the the rest of the trilogy - breathtaking stuff.

agamemnon: 4/5
libation bearers: 3/5
eumenides: 2/5 ( )

2016 (review can be found at the link - which is a LibraryThing page)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/220674#5633927 ( )

Easier to read than say epic poetry, shorter and less long winded, a tale of murder and revenge and blood, blood everywhere. ( )

I have suffered into truth.

Fantastic translation of a classic. ( )

This is pretty fantastic. I'm surprised. I think I like this old Greek trilogy of plays better than all the others that I've read. That's including Oedipus. :P

The translation is pretty awesome, the tragedy is beautiful, and the underlying theme of justice and the balance of power between men and women is stark and heavy.

But isn't it about murder and eye-for-an-eye taken to extremes? Yeah, but it's still more than that.

It's mainly about honoring your children and honoring your parents. It's not as twisted as some of the other Greek plays, but it is pretty horrific. Agamemnon kills his daughter, his wife kills him. Her son kills her. But wait! Apollo sanctions his killing. Alas, the Furies do not. So now we have the older gods versus the new. Parents and children at each other's throats again.

Totally beautiful.

And here we all thought that Zeus only caused chaos, too! To think that he'd welcome the Furies into his court as honored equals.

(Personally, I think it was just a political move. I'm pretty sure that the Furies scared him shitless, too. :)

Great stuff! ( )

The Oresteian Trilogy is the foundation of tragedy. You need to read it just like you need to read The Odyssey. This was my first time through even though I was familiar with the tropes and scenes through references from other works. The plays are a lot of things, but at its root it's a metaphor for the ascension of society's motivation for good from fear of reprisal as embodied in the Furies, to duty (and fear of its retribution) as embodied by Apollo, to a kind of holy rationality, as embodied by Athene and her counsel. It is ultimately a Whiggish work, convinced society moves ever forward in progress towards harmony.

The one thing that shook me as a modern reader coming to the book in 2017, and a reader who knows the connotations of "maleness" and masculinity in ancient Greek and Roman writing, was that in the climactic scene of The Eumenides, Athene says she sides with Orestes, saying that killing a man as his mother killed his father is a worse crime than killing a woman, as Orestes killed his mother, because of "male supremacy in all things". It's kind of a shit explanation, especially coming from a woman written by a man.

Anyway, read the book. It's embedded in many works of tragedy and worth knowing how the building was built these 2400 years later. ( )

Conformada por las obras: Agamenón, Las Coéforas, y Las Euménides

These are great to read - full of humanity, but also a bit confusing - translating thousands year old drama to a modern audience can always be hit or miss. These are the stories are the stories of the Agamemnon and his family - full of tragedy, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The first play that makes up "The Oresteia" starts when Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War. Clytaemnestra is still upset at the sacrifice of her daughter (understandable so). When Agamemnon returns with a captured Cassandra, it tips Clytaemnestra to murder her hustband.

The second play has Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, in a bind - he is charged with avenging his fathers killer, but matricide is one of the big sins in Ancient Greek Culture. The last book, "The Eumenides" is a tale of redemption, kind of. Orestes has been hounded by the Kind Ones for the crime of killing his mother. But Apollo takes pity on him, and purifies him. Orestes is put on trial, and at the end, everybody survives. ( )

A piece of advice. Always refuse an invitation to an Agamemnon family reunion. Just say no. They are people to leave your mouth agape, and not in the Greek and Biblical senses of the word either. You needn’t take only my advice on this. Ask Aeschylus. Oh, wait . . . he’s gone. You’ll have to read his Oresteia instead to understand. And you should. ( )

Ought to be required reading for what it says about wars, governments and leaders that destroy the lives of others on a whim-- all within the first few pages.
Classicists may gripe about Hughes' translation, but if you want the classics to survive, give us the funds for more editions like this in the public schools. The (cheap) excerpts provided in (cheap) school textbooks are guaranteed to be inoffensive, tone-deaf, bland, boring and off-putting. Give us Heaney's Beowulf, Hughes' Aeschylus and a decent Odyssey and you'll win more converts at a younger age. Penguin and Oxford editions are fine but it's almost impossible to get school leaders to choke up money for a classroom set. ( )

It started out a bit uninteresting, but it became better once Cassandra was introduced. ( )