What Aeschylus has done is to present a squalid and bloody killing, quite unacceptable in principle to Greek
feelings about women, in such a way that one is awestruck rather than horrified by the character of Clytemnestra.
Everything in the play, even Agamemnon's power and magnificence, is tailored to her appalling greatness. For her
lover Aegisthus Aeschylus has nothing but scorn. The Agamemnon belongs to the theatre, though not alas in the
hands of most modern directors. It is simple, bare, and forceful, and its pace is slow, its gestures slower than most
dancing.
In the second play we have implicit compassion, ruthless action, and a long anguish with formal prayers. The
queen and her lover are killed at last by Orestes, Agamemnon's son. Orestes is pursued by the Furies which rise
from a mother's spilt blood. This is not really what Elizabethan scholars call a revenge tragedy; it is cumulative,
but in its slow balance it says something dreadful about the justice of Zeus and the nature of the gods. The third
play, which, most unusually, has a change of scene to accommodate Apollo at Delphi in a story which Aeschylus
firmly transfers for its conclusion to Athens, brings good out of evil. The most venerable Athenian law court is
instituted by Athena and, by the reversal of what we know as a traditional cursing formula of great antiquity, the
Furies become the guardian spirits of Athens - Eumenides, the kindly ones. There are some lines that indicate a
political message, not very clear to us, but the chief point that Aeschylus is making is a blessing on Athens that has
the weight of the Oresteia behind it.
The Persians (472 B.C.) is based on an interesting device. The tragic hero has to be the Persian King, because there
is no other way of showing the Athenian victory in the sea-battle at Salamis in a tragic form. Only losers can be
heroes. Homer demands our sympathy for Troy partly because he has to make the Trojans talk like Greeks, but the
lamentation for Hector is convincing because epic poetry was very closely bound up with lamentation. Aeschylus
makes us feel, as Homer does, that war is terrible, and in his description of the battle of Salamis, of which he was
very likely an eyewitness, nothing is spared. He sees it certainly as a great and inspiring Greek victory, but the
battle is described by a loser; it is terrible, and the massacre in which it ends appalling. The whole action of this
play is fascinating, but the battle scene stands alone. It does in verse what prose would take a long time to learn to
do half as well. That is not only a technical device of tragedy. One must add that Aeschylus wrote his own epitaph,
from which it appears he wanted to be remembered only as one who had fought in the infantry at Marathon.