The Oresteian Trilogy

King Agamemnon comes home to Argos in the aftermath of the Fall of Troy, a victorious commander. He learns that his household has been wrecked by his wife's infidelity, and her hand brings about his death. That first play, Agamemnon, sets the whole trilogy moving.

The Choephori answers the killing. Clytemnestra's son Orestes, outraged at what she has done, kills both his mother and her lover. The act settles one debt and opens another.

In The Eumenides, Orestes is driven toward Athens by the Furies, who hold to a law of vengeance. There Athene replaces the bloody cycle of revenge with a system of civil justice.

This is Greek tragedy in three connected plays, and it is the only trilogy to survive from the ancient world. Aeschylus (525 to about 456 BC) wrote it in the years after the Battle of Marathon.

It presents democratic Athens as delivered from Persian conquest and from its own barbaric past. The subjects are murder, madness and the founding of justice, and the action moves from a private household to a public court.