The penguin classics version is to be particularly recommended - The translation works very well and the 90 page introduction is just brilliant.

As for the plays, well...they are essential reading obviously. And like all great works in translation, one should really read 2 or 3 different versions in order to get as close as possible to the “original”. The Fagles translation should certainly be one of those versions.

Robert Fagles' translation is excellent.

The Oresteia was written as a trilogy, and according to the scholars is the only Greek drama that survives as such. I would definitely recommend reading all 3 parts together, as they build one after the other. This trilogy is deceptively simple, in some ways, but the excellent introductory essay by W.B. Stanford, titled "The Serpent and the Eagle", helped me to see the much deeper issues that are explored in the play. I don't want to put any spoilers in this review, but let's say that after completing the trilogy, I feel like I have a deeper feeling for gender politics, parent/child bonds, and the transition from tribal law to Athenian concepts of democracy.

This is definitely a work that I will read again and refer to over the years.

EDIT: I re-read The Eumenides today. Much food for thought about transforming the bloodlust of primitive tribal vendetta into the more civilized concepts of justice found in a complex society based on laws, courts, and judges.

i read now no. 2. the main conflict between son and mother. the erotic freedom of the women - the mother is destructive for the son, as he is suppose to get the heritage. "you killed my father, how can i live with you?"
amazing conflict. great writing. still.
a lot of build up for me as i write a new thriller.

2014 Version

Yet another version of ‘The Oresteia’, this time produced by BBC3 and broadcast in 2014. I love Greek myths and especially the stories surrounding the House of Atreus and this was a fairly good modernization with a short introduction to each of the three plays. Agamemnon, the first play, was excellent, ‘The Libation Bearers’, the second one, was good, while ‘the Furies’, the final play, was a little disappointing. Despite the drop off, it was well worth the time spent listening. If you have never had to suffer a classical education, it might be worth reading a wiki or summary of the House of Atreus to get the best out of the experience. This is not a spoiler as the original audiences were already well versed in the myths and were more interested in what Aeschylus did with those myths.

Net zoals de meeste mensen - vermoed ik - ben ik van de drie Atheense tragici het minst vertrouwd met het werk van Aischylos. Dus las ik nu zijn Oresteia, de trilogie rond de moord op Agalemnon door Klytaimnestra en later die op Klytaimnestra door Orestes en de nasleep hiervan.

Ik heb het huis van de Atriden (waartoe ook Tantalos, Pelops, Thyestes, etc behoren) altijd al de meest interessante stof van de klassieke tragedie gevonden - ja zelfs meer dan de Oedipous-stof - en nu ik Aischylos versie las nog meer!

Het is absurd te denken dat deze drie stukken meer dan 2500 jaar oud zijn, ze blijven ons - mij toch - nog steeds raken. Tegelijk zijn ze dus in zekere zin nog steeds actueel (thematieken van de wraak, oorlog, familiemoord, vrije wil etc), maar ook erg gegrond in de eigen context. Zo wist ik bijvoorbeeld niet dat het laatste stuk van de trilogie - Goede geesten - toch vrij expliciet verwijst naar de politieke situatie van het Athene van Aischylos’ tijd. Dat maakt deze stukken zo aantrekkelijk: de lezing ervan is gelaagd en er vallen vele interpretaties te vormen.

Straf werk.

Or is revenge not the way to go after all? Many an Athenian must have asked just this sort of question after watching a performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, from the time when this trilogy of plays was first performed at the Theatre of Dionysus, on the Acropolis in Athens, in 458 B.C. The Oresteian trilogy of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides may be 2500 years old, but these plays are downright modern in the way they encourage the modern reader or viewer to meditate on revenge, its causes, and its consequences.

In our modern world, we are used to being told that it is wrong to seek revenge. At the same time, however, every human being knows the feeling of being wronged, and the strength of that immediate, atavistic wish to repay wrong for wrong. The ancient Greek attitude toward revenge was just as contradictory. On the one hand, Greek civilization had its beginnings in the warrior culture that had won the Trojan War – an honor culture in which one always had to be ready to defend with violence one’s own good name and that of one’s family. On the other hand, Athens in 458 B.C. was just a few years into its experiment in democracy. No doubt the Athenians knew that vengeance and democracy are incompatible – that “an eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind.

That seemingly contradictory attitude toward revenge makes its way into The Oresteia -- a trilogy of plays that wastes no time moving from spousal murder and coup d’état to matricide. The first play in the trilogy, Agamemnon, chronicles the Mycenaean king’s return from Troy after the Greek victory in the Trojan War. Little does Agamemnon know that he is a marked man; his wife Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegisthus, and the two plan to murder Agamemnon. Clytemnestra seeks revenge against her husband because, to secure a favorable wind when the ships were first sailing for Troy, Agamemnon ordered the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia (a story told in Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis). For this reason, there is a decided double edge to lines like the one in which Clytemnestra tells a herald bringing the news of the Greek victory, “Now for the best way to welcome home/my lord, my good lord….” (p. 125).

The Agamemnon of this play seems somewhat more sympathetic than the antagonistic king of Homer’s Iliad; when Clytemnestra invites him to walk upon crimson tapestries like a barbarian potentate, Agamemnon demurs, saying, with a humility that an Athenian audience would have found appropriate, that “only the gods deserve the pomps of honour/and the stiff brocades of fame. To walk on them…/I am human, and it makes my pulses stir/with dread” (p. 137). Nonetheless, his pious humility notwithstanding, Agamemnon is doomed to die at the hands of his wife and her lover.

Likewise doomed is Cassandra, the Trojan princess brought home as a slave by Agamemnon (another act of Agamemnon’s that is unlikely to improve Clytemnestra’s mood). Cassandra is blessed with the gift of prophecy, but cursed with the knowledge that no one will believe her prophecies. Knowing that she and Agamemnon are about to die at the hands of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Cassandra looks ahead – accurately, as always – to future events when she remarks that “We will die,/but not without some honour from the gods./There will come another to avenge us,/born to kill his mother, born/His father’s champion” (p. 155). That promise of retribution aside, the play Agamemnon ends on a grim note, with the chorus of old Argive men indignant at the murder of their king, but helpless to do anything against the new tyranny of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.

The man alluded to in Cassandra’s anguished speech – the man fated to avenge his father by killing his own mother – is, of course, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; and as The Libation Bearers begins, Orestes has come home to Argos, accompanied by his friend Pylades. Once Orestes and his sister Electra have found each other, they plan their revenge. Orestes learns that Clytemnestra, plagued by evil dreams and fearful that she will face divine vengeance for her crime of husband-murder, has ordered that a group of enslaved women serve as libation bearers, offering sacrifices to the gods in an attempt to expiate Clytemnestra’s crime. Scornfully, Orestes asks of his mother’s after-the-fact repentance, “Why did she send libations? What possessed her,/so late, to salve a wound past healing?/To the unforgiving dead she sends this sop,/this…who am I to appreciate her gifts?/They fall so short of all her failings” (p. 200). No show of remorse on Clytemnestra’s part – no set of pious prayers mouthed by enslaved libation bearers forced to pray for a murderess whom they despise – is going to sway Orestes from his path of vengeance.

What does, momentarily, shake Orestes from his vengeful path is simple, human emotion - his natural feelings of filial affection toward his mother. The killing of Aegisthus, the original evil stepfather, is an easy enough thing; but then Clytemnestra opens her robe to reveal the breasts with which, many years before, as a young mother, she suckled the baby Orestes. “Wait, my son – no respect for this, my child?/The breast you held, drowsing away the hours,/soft gums tugging the milk that made you grow?” (p. 216) Orestes is momentarily paralyzed by coming face-to-face with the paradoxical reality that he can only avenge his father by killing his mother: “What will I do, Pylades? – I dread to kill my mother!” (p. 217) It is left to Pylades to speak as the voice of god-ordained revenge: “What of the future? What of the Prophet God Apollo,/the Delphic voice, the faith and oaths we swear?/Make all mankind your enemy, not the gods” (p. 217). Thus steeled by Pylades’ invocation of divine will, Orestes proceeds with his own fateful act of matricide.

I call it “fateful” because, divine will or no, Orestes still faces consequences for killing his mother. The mere fact that he acted in response to divine command does not exempt Orestes from a terrible, elemental punishment – to be forever pursued and driven mad by the Furies, hideous snake-haired monsters whose entire purpose, in the Olympian worldview, is to punish certain particularly heinous crimes such as matricide.

It matters not that, as the leader of the chorus of formerly enslaved women states, Orestes has “set us free, the whole city of Argos,/lopped the heads of these two serpents once for all” (p. 224). For Orestes, there is only the ultimate, fundamental horror of seeing, everywhere he turns, “Women – look – like Gorgons,/shrouded in black, their heads wreathed,/swarming serpents!” (p. 225). Orestes’ fate, barring some sort of divine intervention, is to be forever driven mad by the Furies, constantly running from them – “they drive me on! I must move” (p. 225) – in a vain search for shelter or relief. The Libation Bearers ends on this grim note, with only the vague hope expressed by the choral leader that “One thing will purge you. Apollo’s touch will set you free from all your…torments” (p. 225).

“Eumenides” means “kindly ones,” and therefore it seems counterintuitive that the concluding play in this trilogy, a play about the snake-haired, avenging Furies, should be titled The Eumenides (The Kindly Ones). Yet the manner in which Aeschylus resolves this seemingly unresolvable dilemma reveals much regarding the playwright’s beliefs regarding both justice and the relationship between divinity and humankind.

At Apollo’s behest, Orestes, pursued by the Furies, has made his way to the Acropolis of Athens, where he throws himself upon the mercy of Athena, the city’s patron goddess. The Furies meanwhile vow to pursue Orestes unto death, prompted in part by the urgings of the ghost of Clytemnestra, who calls upon the Furies to avenge her murder: “Never forget my anguish./Let my charges hurt you, they are just” (p. 236).

Reluctantly, the Furies agree to let Athena serve as judge between them and Orestes, and the goddess of wisdom lectures the Furies on their narrow and harsh conception of justice, telling them that “you are set on the name of justice rather than the act”, and adding that “Injustice…should never triumph thanks to oaths” (p. 250). The Furies’ defense of their code of vengeance comes to seem legalistic, pettifogging – when Orestes asks why the Furies did not hound Clytemnestra for killing her husband Agamemnon, the leader of the Furies responds, “The blood of the man she killed was not her own” (p. 258). Apollo himself witnesses on behalf of Orestes, and in a traditional Athenian-style trial, Orestes is acquitted by a tie vote.

Yet in response to the Furies’ rage at being denied the victim of their vengeance, Athena offers them a new mission – to become protectors, with her, of the city of Athens: “Look,/it is all yours, a royal share of our land –/justly entitled, glorified forever” (p. 270). The Furies, albeit somewhat reluctantly, accept Athena’s offer; and in the process of forswearing revenge, they cease to be hideous monsters, and become benevolent deities – Eumenides, “kindly ones.” The anti-vengeance message in this resolution of the trilogy seems clear. Additionally, an Athenian spectator of Aeschylus’ time might have thought of the way Athens’ legal system moved from the cruelty of Draco – a man whose laws were so harsh that he gave the world the word “draconian” – to the more enlightened code of the lawgiver Solon.

In the resolution of The Oresteia, we also learn a great deal regarding Aeschylus’ religious sensibilities. I had always heard Aeschylus described as being, of Athens’ three great playwrights, the most conventionally reverent, with his later successors Sophocles and Euripides being more willing to challenge convention – as if Aeschylus was driving around Athens in a chariot with a bumper sticker on the back saying ZEUS SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT. The truth, unsurprisingly, is more complex. Both in The Oresteia and in Aeschylus’ other surviving plays, there is indeed a suggestion that human beings must learn how to serve the gods more reverently – but there is also a corollary suggestion that the gods must likewise learn how to rule over humankind more justly. The divine and the human must find a way to reach out toward each other.

And, as mentioned above, this trilogy’s reflections upon the subject of vengeance are quite modern. Teaching The Oresteia for a “What Is Literature?” class at Penn State University, I found myself pairing the trilogy with Steven Spielberg’s film Munich (2005). The film, which details the Israeli government’s efforts to kill the Palestinian “Black September” terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics, provides, like The Oresteia, a thoughtful look at revenge and its ramifications.

At first, the film’s main character, Mossad agent Avner Kaufman (played by Eric Bana), accepts without too much question the decision by Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government that the blood of the murdered Israeli athletes must be repaid with the blood of their Palestinian killers. Yet as Avner sees the Palestinians with their families, hears from them tales of oppression and dislocation similar to the experience of many Israelis, faces the prospect that the taking of revenge may involve the unintended sacrifice of innocent lives, he begins to question the mission in which he is engaged. Few things could be more modern, or more enduringly relevant, than a story of whether or not to take revenge.

This Penguin Books edition of The Oresteia, rendered into English by the great translator Robert Fagles, includes a helpful introductory essay, informative notes, and a useful glossary. It is a great way to get to know the first complete, surviving trilogy of tragic plays from classical Greece.

মহৎ সাহিত্য করতে হেন করতে হবে তেন করতে হবে এইটা মনে হয় খুব বেশি সত্য না, এখন, বা অ্যাস্কাইলাসের আমলেও। মানে, এই লোক আর কী করছে, নিজেদের চারদিকে ছড়ানো কাহিনীরে ইচ্ছামত পাল্টাইছেন, নিজের সময়ের সমস্যাগুলি ধরে রাখতে, ব্যস, হয়ে গেলো -

আমি খুবই অবাক হইলাম বইয়ের শেষের উচ্চারণের লিষ্টি থেকে জানতে পেরে যে অ্যাস্কাইলাসের নাম নাকী অ্যাস্কাইলাস না, ঈস্কিলাস বা আয়স্কিলাস। এদ্দিন ধরে ভুলভাল ডেকে আসছি এই লোকেরে - অবশ্য নামসংহারে কীই বা উল্টে যায়। গল্পে আসি -
প্রথম নাটক আগে একবার পড়া ছিলো, গেলো বছর সম্ভবত। এই তিনের সেরাটা প্রথমটাই আমার কাছে, যেখানে ক্লাইমেনেস্ত্রার মত অসাধারণ চরিত্র আছে, আছে স্বল্প পরিসরে অ্যাগিস্থাস, কোরাসের সাথে ক্লাইমেনেস্ত্রার ঠাণ্ডা যুদ্ধও দেখার মত, আবার ঐদিকে কোরাসের সাথে কাসান্দ্রার গড়মিল। আগামেম্ননের চরিত্রও বেশ গোছানো, প্রচণ্ড কড়া নাটক, ভেলাকটের অনুবাদও নিশ্চয়ই ভালো, মূল ত পড়ি নাই। গ্রীক নাটকের ঐ বিশ মাইল সংলাপ ত থাকবেই, কিন্তু সেই সংলাপ অয়দিপাঊষের মত অবশ্যম্ভাবীর জন্য বসায়ে বসায়ে ক্লান্ত করে না, বরং অবশ্যম্ভাবীর দিকে এগিয়ে যাওয়ার পথটাই মুগ্ধ করে বারবার। পাঠকরে খুব বেশি না ভোগাইলেও, না ভাবাইলেও, নাড়া দেয় নির্ভেজাল।
ভাবায় বরং দ্বিতীয়টা। এইখানে আয়স্কিলাস তার সময়ের ত বটেই, যেহেতু মানব সভ্যতায় আসলে আহামরি পরিবর্তন ঘটে নাই, একটা বেশ কালাতীত সমস্যা দাঁড় করান, প্রথম নাটকের সূত্র ধরে। সেই সমস্যার সমাধান, আমরা জানি, দৈব হতে হয় না, নিশ্চয়ই আমরা জানি, কিন্তু খুঁজে পাওয়ার জো নাই। তৃতীয়টা কথা বলে সেই সমাধান নিয়ে - এই নাটক দুইটা প্রথমটার চেয়ে অনেক নিষ্প্রভ, শেষ পর্যন্ত যে আপাত সমাধানটা দেয়া হয়, সেটা কোথাও কাজ করে না, না আমার ভেতর আর না বাস্তবে, সে কারণে অবশ্য নিষ্প্রভ না, নিষ্প্রভ কারণ একদিকে ইলেক্ত্রা, অরেস্তেস, ফীবাস বা অ্যাথেন কেউ চরিত্র হিসেবে প্রথম নাটকের কারো সাথে পাল্লা দিতে পারে না - আর আরেকদিকে এই নাটক দুইটা, গল্পটা বলার চেয়ে বেশি মনোযোগী ধারণার কথা বলতে, যুক্তি কুযুক্তি ইত্যাদির কথা বলতে। তবে, সেইদিকে মনোযোগ দিয়েও একেবারে পড়ে যায় না এরা, টিকে, টিকে যায় বরং -

কিন্তু এই তিনটার মাঝে আগামেম্নেনই সবচেয়ে শক্তিশালী হয়ে খাড়ায়ে থাকে দণ্ডায়মান। ট্রাজেডি বটে এই তিনটা, বিশেষ করে প্রথম দুই, বিশেষ করে পয়লা নম্বর, যেখানে অভিশাপ আছে জেনেও সে আর তারা প্রয়োজনের ভার নিজেদের কাঁধে তুলে নিচ্ছে, যেখানে ভাগ্য গুণতি-ওলার উপর মানুষের অবিশ্বাসও দুঃখের জন্ম দেয়, অয়দিপাঊষের মত গতিসীমা না জেনে কেউ খাঁদে পড়ে না, খাঁদে পড়ে সামনের গাড়িতে বসা কেউকেটা কাউরে বাঁচাতে গিয়ে, মাঝ দিয়ে একগাদা মানুষের মৃত্যুর কারণ হয় সে, অবিশ্বাসও তেইরেসিয়াসের গোস্বা জন্ম দেয়াতে আটকে থাকে না। সফোক্লিসের চেয়ে আয়স্কিলাসরে আমি বহুদূর আগায়ে রাখবো, কোরাসে কে কম আর কে বেশি সময় দিলো, সেই জিনিসের নিকুচি করি আমি।

এই সময়ের আয়স্কিলাস কারা? কে জানে, কে জানে, আড়াই হাজার, কিন্তু ইতিহাস ত কখনো ফিরে আসবে না, এই আড়াই হাজার বছর নিশ্চয়ই হবে ভিন্নতর আড়াই হাজার।

Really liked this one! I love Ted Hughes a great deal as a poet and as a translator as well, although you should see his translations more like interpretations or very (very, very) loose translations. I loved his translation of Alcestis even more than this one, but this was great as well. It was especially the Agamemnon that really drew me in (that part gets 5 stars from me, the other two both 4).
Instead of arguing why or how, I'm going to quote a little bit so you can see for yourself:

"War is a pawnbroker - not of your treasures
But of the lives of your Men. Not of gold but of corpses.
Give your man to the war-god and you get ashes.
Your hearo's exact worth - in the coinage of war."

For me this was a great read and I recommend it to anyone who's interested in the Classics, Ted Hughes or just a great play in general!

لذت نبردم. دیگه وقتشه دور آیسخولوس(آشیل) و سوفوکل رو خط بکشم -_-
فقط اوریپید♡

This trilogy is absolutely brilliant and a must read because it marks the origins of Western democracy and its patriarchal and patrilineal aspects and it is ever relevant. Especially today. Also, the prof who did this with us is also absolutely brilliant and attending her lectures on this text felt like receiving revelation, I'm not even exaggerating.

Let good prevail ! So be it ! Yet what is good ? And who is God?


As many deeply conservative societies have discovered time and time again - societies in which there is only one right order and this order is warranted by the highest authorities recognized by the society - when change comes, and come it always must,(*) not only do those in power tumble, but the authority of the gods/priests, ancestors, laws, whatever the highest authorities happen to be in that society, comes into question. New myths, new gods/priests, new stories must be told to justify and establish, reassure and mollify the people whose ideological or religious supports have been pulled out from beneath them. In the city of Athens during the Golden Age, this was done in the agora - the marketplace - and in the theaters.

In his lifetime Aeschylus (ca. 525 - 456 BCE) witnessed the invasion of Attica by huge Persian armies, the bold abandonment of the fortified city of Athens and withdrawal, twice, of the Athenian people behind the wooden walls of the Athenian navy, and the multiple defeats of the Persians and their allies (including other Greeks) by the hugely outnumbered Athenians and their Greek allies.(**) He also witnessed the political transition from tyranny to isonomy to democracy in Athens and the concurrent growth of Athens from just another small, unimportant Greek city-state to major power. He himself contributed greatly to the transition of Greek tragedy from a religiously inspired performance/rite involving a chorus and a single actor to something we his distant descendants can recognize as powerful theater.

During the transition from tyranny to democracy, when first the middle class (essentially landowning farmers and artisans) and then the lower class (the thetes) acquired a direct voice in Athenian politics, political activity was carried out not only in the agora, the popular assembly and the Council of Five Hundred, but it was also performed on stage.




Remains of the Theater of Dionysus Eleuthereus, where Aeschylus' dramas were performed


Indeed, the theater was so important in Athenian public life that plays were produced at all the most important public festivals and addressed conflicts troubling the Athenian policy makers; the populace flocked to see them and talk about them. In 461 BCE the last step to democracy in Athens was initiated with the stripping of all but ritual responsibilities from the Aeropagus, a body of men drawn essentially from the city's aristocracy. The lower and middle classes formed the overwhelming majority on the remaining decision making organs of the state and were therefore in power, for a while.

Curiously enough, while all this innovation was going on, in Athens one of the most damaging epithets was "innovator." So the men who willed the demotion of the Aeropagus, led by Ephialtes (who was later murdered for his trouble), had to argue that the Aeropagus had usurped its powers (quite false) and thus the removal of the aristocrats from the center of power was a return to the status quo ante (even more false - but we all know that democratic decision-making has precious little to do with the truth). The Athenians needed a more efficacious justification for this change. They also needed a soothing of the many riled spirits brought about in the populace by all these changes. In the Oresteia,(***) first performed in 458, Aeschylus did all of this and much, much more.

During this Golden Age playwrights wrote trilogies, which were intended, performed and perceived by audiences as coherent wholes. The Oresteia is the only one which has come down to us intact. The three plays are structured together with both dramatic and ideological intent.

At the end of the Trojan War, Agamemnon returns victorious to his palace. But ten years earlier, in order to thwart the will of Artemis and still the fierce winds keeping the fleet on the Greek shore, he had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, and his wife, Clytemnestra, has neither forgotten nor forgiven. She slays him horrifically, and now it is their son, Orestes, who is obliged by the received morality to revenge his father by killing his mother. High drama and madness ensues, but behind all that excitement is the structure of Aeschylus' purpose - justify the new order, the new morality.

At the very outset of the trilogy the chorus recalls that even the gods have changed and changed again, from the rule of Ouranos through that of Kronos to Zeus with son killing father before the father could do the same to the son. And one cannot be sure of doing the right thing by obeying a god, since the gods themselves disagree about right and wrong. Uncertainty has been established: perhaps the received ways are mutable.

I'm not going to try to summarize the complicated plot and recall the many striking characters. From this beautiful, moving and complex masterpiece I just want to draw out here the one theme I've been working on in this review. When Orestes kills Clytemnestra at Apollo's urging, the Erinyes, the Furies - representing the old order, the old morality - hasten to avenge the matricide by tearing Orestes apart. But Apollo and Athena, representing the new order and morality, intervene. The passages involving the Furies are particularly haunting, both dramatically and poetically. The new order is confirmed with a trial in which Athena casts the deciding vote - Orestes is acquitted. Athena convinces the Furies to accept the verdict, and they are then given a place of honor (though not power) and agree to ensure the city's prosperity. The old is replaced by the new, honored and bound into the polis; all's well that ends well (except for the house of Atreus). Despite Aeschylus' efforts, Athens' new democracy did not last long, but that is another story...



(*) As Sophocles has Ajax say in the eponymous play:

Long, immeasurable time brings everything hidden to light and hides what is apparent. Nothing is not to be expected. Change is the law of the world.

(**) Aeschylus was in the battle at Marathon and most probably also at Salamis. In fact, the epitaph on his gravestone, possibly written by himself, mentions Marathon and not his plays:

This tomb the dust of Aeschylus doth hide,
Euphorion's son and fruitful Gela's pride
How tried his valour, Marathon may tell
And long-haired Medes, who knew it all too well.

(***) Read in the translations of Robert Fagles and of Philip Vellacott; Fagles' is more terse and colloquial, while Vellacott's is more "literary," more redolent of older, elevated diction. Both are very readable, but I do prefer Vellacott's.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/118...

And the blood that Mother Earth consumes
clots hard, it won’t seep through, it breeds revenge
and frenzy goes through the guilty,
seething like infection, swarming through the brain.

I’d give this ten stars. The trilogy creates an arc, a link from blood sacrifice and burnt offerings to the nascent construct of something resembling jurisprudence. Superstition giving way begrudgingly to law. While the final trial isn’t exactly one by peers, it is amazing to contemplate. This trilogy is simply wicked in all senses of the term. The sacrifices made for good fortune in the Trojan War are a bit too close to home and an eloquent vengeance awaits the conquering hero when he returns from the trenches to rebuke accolades and be greeted instead with just desserts.

I was astonished. As I noted I’ve felt my entire life like Cassandra.