The Oresteia: Agamemnon's Murder, Orestes' Revenge and the Furies

The Oresteia is Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies, staged in Athens in 458 BC, about the last generation of the curse on the house of Atreus. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon on the day he comes home from Troy. In Libation Bearers, their son Orestes returns from exile and, on Apollo’s orders, kills his mother. In Eumenides, hunted by the Furies, he stands trial in Athens before the first court of the Areopagus and is acquitted with the help of Athena. It is the only Greek trilogy that survives complete, and the founding story of how private revenge gives way to the justice of the city.

A house cursed for three generations

The murder of Agamemnon does not start with him. His great-grandfather Tantalus served his own son Pelops to the gods. Pelops’ sons, Atreus and Thyestes, then fought over the throne of Mycenae. Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife Aerope, and Atreus took revenge with a monstrous banquet: he fed his brother the flesh of his own children. Thyestes cursed Atreus’ entire line. One son of his survived, or was born later: Aegisthus, whom late tradition (Hyginus, Fabulae 87-88) makes the child of Thyestes and his own daughter Pelopia.

The next generation adds a crime of its own. At Aulis, to win a fair wind for Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis. Through the ten years of the Trojan War, Clytemnestra ruled Argos and took Aegisthus as her lover. Two revenges now converge on the king: a mother’s for her daughter and a son of Thyestes’ for his murdered brothers.

Agamemnon: the homecoming and the murder in the bath

The first play opens with a watchman lying on the palace roof at Argos. He has waited a full year for a fire signal. At last the flame appears. Clytemnestra has set up a beacon chain that relays the news of Troy’s fall from peak to peak, from Mount Ida to Lemnos, to Athos and on to Mount Arachnaeus above Argos. She describes the relay in detail no one else knows: she has been preparing for this homecoming for a long time.

Agamemnon arrives in his chariot with Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess he has brought back as a captive. Clytemnestra has purple cloths spread before him and invites him to walk on them. The king refuses at first, since trampling such costly fabrics is an honor fit only for gods, then gives in after a tense exchange. Treading on his own house’s wealth is already the act of hubris that dooms him.

Cassandra is left outside. In a long scene of visions she sees Thyestes’ feast, the murder about to happen and her own death, while the chorus of old men fails to grasp what she is saying. She goes in knowing she will die. Then Agamemnon’s cries ring out. The doors open on Clytemnestra standing over both bodies. She caught the king as he left the bath in a robe with no way out, “like a net for fish”, and struck him three times. She claims the deed in Iphigenia’s name. Aegisthus enters with an armed guard and recalls the feast of Thyestes. The play ends with power seized and a warning: the chorus foretells that Orestes will return.

Libation Bearers: Orestes comes home

Orestes was sent away as a child to Strophius, king of Phocis. He returns grown, with his friend Pylades, Strophius’ son, and lays a lock of his hair on his father’s tomb. Electra, who has stayed in the palace and is treated like a servant, comes to pour offerings with a chorus of captive women, the “libation bearers” of the title. She recognizes her brother by the lock of hair, his footprints and a piece of weaving she once made for him.

At the heart of the play, a long sung lament (the kommos) unites Orestes, Electra and the chorus at the tomb as they call on the dead man’s spirit. Clytemnestra has dreamed that she gave birth to a snake that drew blood along with milk when she nursed it. Orestes recognizes himself in that snake.

Disguised as a traveler from Phocis, he brings news of his own death. His old nurse, Cilissa, weeps for the baby she raised, one of the few humble figures in Greek tragedy. Aegisthus is lured in alone and killed. Clytemnestra understands and calls for an axe. Facing her son, she bares the breast that fed him. Orestes falters and turns to Pylades, who speaks only three lines in the whole play: what then becomes of Apollo’s oracles? Orestes kills his mother. The moment it is done he sees the Furies rising, though the chorus cannot see them, and he flees.

Eumenides: the trial of Orestes

The last play opens at Delphi. The Pythia finds a blood-stained suppliant in the shrine and, around him, the sleeping Furies, black and loathsome. Apollo purifies Orestes and sends him to Athens. Clytemnestra’s ghost wakes the Furies, and the hunt resumes.

In Athens, Orestes clasps the ancient image of Athena. The goddess refuses to judge so grave a case alone. She sets up a court of citizens on the hill of Ares, the Areopagus, and declares it permanent. The Furies prosecute: they pursue blood spilled within a family, and killing a mother is the worst crime of all. They did not pursue Clytemnestra, they explain, because her husband was not her blood relative. Apollo defends Orestes with a notorious argument: the mother is not the true parent, only the nurse of the seed the father plants, and the proof is Athena herself, born from Zeus without a mother.

The votes are equal. Athena votes for Orestes, having announced that a tie means acquittal. Orestes goes free and pledges Argos’ everlasting alliance with Athens. The Furies threaten to blight the land. Athena does not drive them out: she persuades them, offering a home beneath the Areopagus and a cult. They become guardians of the city’s prosperity, and the trilogy ends with a torchlit procession.

The turning point: from blood feud to law court

The Oresteia is built as a series of killings that answer one another. Atreus kills Thyestes’ children, Agamemnon kills his daughter, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, Orestes kills Clytemnestra. Each killer is both avenger and criminal, and the chorus keeps repeating the same law: “the doer must suffer”. Nothing in the logic of blood can stop the chain.

Aeschylus breaks it with a political invention. The trial in Eumenides does not declare who was right, since the votes are equal; it replaces revenge with a verdict, handed down once and for all. The Athenian context matters. In 462 BC, four years earlier, the reforms of Ephialtes had stripped the Areopagus of most of its powers and left it chiefly with homicide trials. By making the court a foundation of Athena, the trilogy gives it a divine origin at the very moment its role was in dispute.

How the ancient versions differ

• Homer knows the story and cites it several times in the Odyssey as the opposite of Odysseus’ homecoming. The chief killer there is Aegisthus, with Clytemnestra as his accomplice: he cuts Agamemnon down at a feast “as one slaughters an ox at the manger” (11.411). Orestes is praised for killing Aegisthus; Clytemnestra’s death is mentioned only in passing, at the funeral meal he gives for his “hateful mother” (3.309-310). No Furies, and no matricide on stage.
• Stesichorus, in the sixth century BC, composed a lyric Oresteia that survives in fragments. It already had the snake dream and the Furies, against whom Apollo gives Orestes a bow. He set the palace in Lacedaemon.
• Pindar (Pythian 11) has the young Orestes rescued by his nurse Arsinoe and wonders about Clytemnestra’s motive: was it Iphigenia’s death, or her affair?
• Aeschylus sets the action in Argos rather than Mycenae, makes Clytemnestra the killer in her own right and, in all likelihood, invents the trial before the Areopagus.
• Sophocles (Electra) shifts the focus to the sister, nearly removes Orestes’ guilt and has him kill his mother before Aegisthus.
• Euripides treats the same deed with deep unease. In his Electra, the princess is married to a farmer and lures her mother with a fake childbirth; in Orestes, the hero, sick and haunted, is sentenced to death by the Argive assembly before Apollo intervenes, with no Areopagus at all; in Iphigenia among the Taurians, some of the Furies reject the verdict, and Orestes must still bring back Artemis’ statue from the Crimea.

Legacy of the Oresteia

The Oresteia and the myth it fixed are among the most reworked stories in Western theater. Eugene O’Neill moved the trilogy to New England after the Civil War in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies (1943) turns Orestes’ act into a claim of freedom against Jupiter and swarms of flies that stand in for the Furies. Richard Strauss set Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1909), drawn from Sophocles rather than Aeschylus, and in the late 1960s Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed scouting notes in Africa for an “African Oresteia” he never made. Lawyers quote it too: the trial of Orestes remains the classic image of a justice system born to end revenge.

Further reading

The character entries go deeper into each figure in the drama: Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra. The sacrifice that sets everything in motion is told in the entry on Iphigenia, and the prophetess killed at the palace door in the one on Cassandra. For the war the king has just won, read the Trojan War and the story of the Trojan Horse; for a homecoming that ends well, the Odyssey, where Agamemnon’s murder serves as the counter-example. For another family curse that ends between brothers, see Seven Against Thebes.