Reading Order
The Oresteia Reading Order
The Oresteia (458 BCE) by Aeschylus is the only complete surviving trilogy of Greek tragedy — three plays (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) that trace the fate of the House of Atreus from the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, through the revenge killing of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes, to Orestes's trial at Athens by the court of the Areopagus. The trilogy is simultaneously a family tragedy, a political argument about the transition from blood-vengeance to law, and a theological account of how the Olympian gods and the older Furies came to a settlement that established justice as a civic rather than a personal institution. The Oresteia was Aeschylus's last work, performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BCE, two years before his death. The first play, Agamemnon, is widely considered the greatest single Greek tragedy: the watchman on the palace roof waiting for the beacon signals that will announce the fall of Troy, the chorus of Argive elders who see disaster coming but cannot prevent it, Cassandra's prophecies which no one believes, the long carpet scene in which Clytemnestra brings Agamemnon to his death. The Eumenides, the trilogy's third play, is remarkable for its formal innovation — the trial scene in Athens, with Athena presiding, Apollo arguing for Orestes, and the Furies (transformed at the end into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones) accepting their new role in the civic order. Aeschylus invented what we now call tragedy: the concept of hamartia, the tragic flaw; the use of a second actor (allowing genuine dramatic confrontation rather than a single speaker with a chorus); the idea of a trilogy that develops a single argument across three plays.
Where to start
The Oresteia — read Agamemnon first; it is the masterpiece and the rest of the trilogy follows from it. The Richmond Lattimore translation in the University of Chicago Press series is the scholarly standard.
Complete The Oresteia Book List
- 1Buy
The Oresteia (trans. Richmond Lattimore)
Aeschylus·1953·Lattimore's scholarly translation — Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides; the standard for decades. - 2Buy
Agamemnon
Aeschylus·-458·The first play — Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon and Cassandra; the greatest single Greek tragedy. - 3Buy
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles·-429·Sophocles's masterpiece — the investigation into Oedipus's identity that destroys him; Aristotle's paradigm of perfect tragedy. - 4Buy
Antigone
Sophocles·-441·Sophocles's political tragedy — Antigone's defiance of Creon's law in the name of divine law. - 5Buy
Medea
Euripides·-431·Euripides's most disturbing tragedy — a woman who kills her own children to punish her husband's betrayal. - 6Buy
The Persians
Aeschylus·-472·Aeschylus's earlier surviving play — a tragedy about the defeat at Salamis, told from the Persian side; the only extant Greek tragedy about recent history. - 7Buy
The House of Bernarda Alba
Federico García Lorca·1936·Lorca's Spanish tragedy — the closest modern parallel to the Oresteia's sense of fate and house doom; female characters, closed house, inevitable destruction. - 8Buy
Mourning Becomes Electra
Eugene O'Neill·1931·O'Neill's New England trilogy — a conscious modern parallel to the Oresteia, set after the Civil War.
The Oresteia — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Oresteia about?
The Oresteia follows the consequences of Agamemnon's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia (before the Trojan War) and the chain of violence it sets in motion. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra murders her husband Agamemnon on his return from Troy, partly in revenge for Iphigenia and partly because she has taken Aegisthus as a lover. In The Libation Bearers, Orestes returns from exile and, urged by Apollo, kills Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to avenge his father. In The Eumenides, Orestes is pursued by the Furies (who punish matricide) to Athens, where Athena establishes a jury trial. The jury deadlocks; Athena casts the deciding vote for acquittal; the Furies are appeased and transformed into the Eumenides (the Kindly Ones) who will protect Athens.
Why is Agamemnon considered the greatest Greek tragedy?
Agamemnon's greatness is usually attributed to several qualities: the breadth and density of its imagery (the carpet, the beacon fires, the nets, the blood-stained bath); the character of Clytemnestra, who is the most fully realized human being in surviving Greek tragedy (her manipulation of Agamemnon into walking on the purple carpet, her welcome home to him, her description of his murder are all extraordinary); the Cassandra scene, in which a prophet whose foreknowledge cannot save her or anyone else delivers a vision of the past and future that the chorus cannot hear; and the play's profound engagement with justice, necessity, and the burden of the past.
What is the significance of the transition from blood-vengeance to law in The Oresteia?
The Oresteia's central argument is that the cycle of blood-vengeance — in which every killing demands another killing in return — must be replaced by civic justice, in which a community decides guilt and punishment through a formal process. This transition is the subject of the third play, The Eumenides: the Furies (who represent the old system of automatic, archaic blood-revenge) must be persuaded to accept the new system of trial by jury. Athena and Apollo's arguments at the trial, and the persuasion of the Furies at the end, represent Aeschylus's vision of how Athenian democracy and its legal institutions came into being. The Oresteia is both a family tragedy and a founding myth of civic justice.
What is the Chorus's role in The Oresteia?
The Chorus in The Oresteia is not merely a commentary device — it is one of the play's main characters, representing the community's collective knowledge, memory, and moral reasoning. In Agamemnon, the Chorus of old Argive men sees disaster coming (they know what Clytemnestra intends, they know what the sacrifice of Iphigenia cost, they know what the house of Atreus has been) but is helpless to prevent it; their odes weave together the history of the family, the theology of Zeus, and the experience of the Trojan War in ways that enrich the play's meaning at every turn. In The Eumenides, the Chorus of Furies is the play's antagonist — the force that must be transformed before the trilogy can end.
What should I read after The Oresteia?
After The Oresteia, readers typically move to Sophocles's Theban plays — Oedipus Rex and Antigone are the most important — and then to Euripides's Medea, The Bacchae, and Electra. Aeschylus's other surviving plays (The Persians, Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants) provide further context for his work. For modern responses to the Oresteia, Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) is a New England retelling, and Tony Harrison's translation Oresteia (1981) is a major modern version. Aristotle's Poetics, which uses Greek tragedy to develop its theory of dramatic form, is essential background reading.
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