The Great Athenian Tragedians

Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BCE), the earliest of the three great Athenian tragedians whose work survives, fought at the Battle of Marathon against the Persians in 490 BCE, an experience that shaped the martial gravity of much of his surviving work, including The Persians (472 BCE), the only extant Greek tragedy on a historical rather than mythological subject. His masterpiece is the Oresteia, the only complete trilogy to survive from Greek tragedy, produced in 458 BCE and comprising Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides. The trilogy traces a chain of blood vengeance within the house of Atreus: Agamemnon, returning victorious from Troy, is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia; their son Orestes, commanded by the oracle at Delphi, then kills his mother to avenge his father; and in the final play the ancient Furies who pursue Orestes for matricide are placated by the goddess Athena, who establishes the Areopagus court at Athens to try the case by law rather than endless private retaliation. The trilogy's movement from the primitive cycle of vendetta to civic justice administered by a court is widely read as a mythic charter for Athenian legal and democratic institutions, and Aeschylus's grand, archaic diction and elaborate choral odes mark him as the most overtly religious and cosmically minded of the three tragedians.