10 judges, one from each tribe, voted to decide the victor in the competition. The prize, apparently, was a
goat, as well as the honor of sacrificing the goat to Dionysus. (The Greek word tragodia means, in effect,
“goat-song.”)
We know the names of the two other tragedies and the satyr play that Aeschylus wrote to accompany The
Persians, but the plays themselves have not survived. The titles indicate that they dealt, like almost all the
other Attic tragedies and satyr plays that we know of, not with recent historical events (as in The
Persians) but with the distant mythical past. There was, then, no apparent connection among the four plays
that Aeschylus produced for the festival of 472 BC; they were, following the usual Athenian practice, four
separate and unrelated dramas. Aeschylus was, however, a bold and brilliant innovator, and he did not
always follow the usual Athenian practice. On a few occasions he treated the four plays as, rather, four
stages of the same action, enabling him to pursue one theme more expansively. One of those occasions
was in 458 BC. The satyr play that he produced in that year is lost, but the three tragedies survive. They
are Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, known collectively as The Oresteia because
they dramatize the story of the family of Orestes. The Oresteia, which was produced only two years
before Aeschylus’ death, also won first prize in the tragic competition. It begins in the darkness of the
mythical past and ends in the radiance of an Athens that is very much like that of Aeschylus’ own day.
Indeed, progression from darkness into the light, both literally and metaphorically, is one of the recurring
images that enriches the language and the drama of The Oresteia.
“I struck him once and twice, and twice he bellowed. Then his limbs gave way, and when he was
down I struck a bonus blow, dedicating the third stroke as payback to the redeemer, Zeus of the dead
below. So he fell and spewed out his life. And as he spurted forth a ready stream of gore he
spattered me with a Stygian spray of bloody rain. I welcomed it no less than the burgeoning seed
revels in the glistening gift of showers sent by Zeus to sprout new life.” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon
1384–92, Clytemestra speaking)Agamemnon opens at night, with a watchman hoping to catch sight of a beacon that will signal the
successful end of the Trojan War. He has been stationed by Clytemestra, the wife of the Greek commander
Agamemnon, who plans to murder her husband on his return to Argos. She has been nursing her hatred of
Agamemnon since he left for Troy 10 years previously because he had slaughtered their daughter
Iphigeneia as a sacrificial victim in order to secure favorable winds for his fleet. In contrast to Xerxes in
The Persians, whose arrival in disarray on stage is accompanied by lamentation, Agamemnon arrives in
triumph, but when he enters his palace he is killed in sordid fashion by Clytemestra and her lover. In an
outrageous parody of animal sacrifice, which is intended to secure prosperity and fertility, Clytemestra
describes the murder of her husband in terms appropriate to the ritual slaughter of a sacrificial beast. This
deed, in turn, requires retribution, which is effected in the second drama, The Libation Bearers. Orestes,
the son of Agamemnon and Clytemestra, has now grown to maturity and he returns to his home from exile
to avenge his father’s murder, having received encouragement from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.
Orestes and his sister Electra are reunited and they carry out the murder of their mother and her lover.
Justice, it would appear, has been served. But what kind of justice is it that requires matricide, itself a
hideous crime? This is the question that is explored in the final tragedy, The Eumenides, which is set not
in Agamemnon’s kingdom but, initially, in Delphi and, finally, in Athens.
Orestes has been pursued by the Furies, divine daughters of Night who ruthlessly punish those who shed
kindred blood. Aeschylus’ powerful language and imagery impress on us the seeming inevitability of
vengeance as something that is generated by violence as if by some natural process of procreation.