Agamemnon 4⭐️ - god the memories I have of being a young kid whilst my dad was directing this at our local theatre ❤️

Libation Bearers 5⭐️

Eumenides 4⭐️

This is pretty fantastic. I'm surprised. I think I like this old Greek trilogy of plays better than all the others that I've read. That's including Oedipus. :P

The translation is pretty awesome, the tragedy is beautiful, and the underlying theme of justice and the balance of power between men and women is stark and heavy.

But isn't it about murder and eye-for-an-eye taken to extremes? Yeah, but it's still more than that.

It's mainly about honoring your children and honoring your parents. It's not as twisted as some of the other Greek plays, but it is pretty horrific. Agamemnon kills his daughter, his wife kills him. Her son kills her. But wait! Apollo sanctions his killing. Alas, the Furies do not. So now we have the older gods versus the new. Parents and children at each other's throats again.

Totally beautiful.

And here we all thought that Zeus only caused chaos, too! To think that he'd welcome the Furies into his court as honored equals.

(Personally, I think it was just a political move. I'm pretty sure that the Furies scared him shitless, too. :)

Great stuff!

AGAMEMNON is a chilling revenge play, the first play of a trilogy of plays written by Aeschylus, one of the few Ancient Greek dramatists whose work has survived from antiquity. The trilogy was first produced in the spring of 458 BCE in the city of Athens.

Agamemnon, in the works of Homer, is the brutal king of the Achaeans during the Trojan War, and this play is about his return home after Troy has been defeated and utterly destroyed. This play, however, is not directly related to the Iliad or his rivalry with Achilles, but about the outcome of his past actions and to the myth of the House of Atreus.

The House of Atreus is cursed. The story is gruesome and this might not be the right place to deal with it in detail: it involves murders, adultery, incest, infanticide and cannibalism. Agamemnon is the fourth generation of this cursed House. The myth tells of wrongs done to avenge old wrongs which lead to newer wrongs, a veritable chain of evil and derangement.

So Agamemnon returns home victorious from the Trojan War and has to face a new war, a domestic war. He has to face his wife Clytemnestra, who is very, very, very angry. You see, Agamemnon found himself in trouble when he wanted to launch his fleet at Aulis. Adverse winds prevented the huge fleet of Achaeans from sailing to Troy. A seer tells Agamemnon that only one thing would stop the bad winds. He had to slaughter his own daughter, young Iphigeneia, to appease Artemis, and all would be well. Agamemnon accepts without resistance.

Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigeneia. The Achaeans took young Iphigenia out to the ocean, and forced her over an altar there. They gagged and murdered her, so that the winds would take them to Troy, so that the war in Troy could start in earnest. After the horrendous sacrifice, the Achaeans were able to sail off to Troy in order to exact their vengeance and bring Helen back.

Clytemnestra has not forgotten or forgiven this evil deed and for ten years she has been waiting to exact her own vengeance. She has taken a lover, Aegisthus, who will help her out. Clytemnestra rejoices when Agamemnon returns home safely, but not because she loves him. She wants to kill him herself, and she does.

AGAMEMNON is about the violent death of a returning conqueror. He has murdered his daughter, sailed off to Troy, proved a nightmare to the city for a decade, pissed off Achilles -the real hero of the Iliad- and then, after defeating Troy, destroyed it, killed its inhabitants, and made Cassandra, its princess, into a personal sex slave. But we all know that the story doesn't end with the toppling of a cruel tyrant. The next two plays will deal with the aftermath.

As I finish the Aesquylos trilogy, I also finish reading every known drama about the fall of the House of Atreus, which I have committed to these last months. I never thought it would end this way, but the curiosity of comparing the three authors through the same myth really caught my attention (besides the story being fascinating to me).

Having said that, the A. trilogy has the most poetic and introspective feel of the three, with long dialogues, many of them recalling past events such as the Trojan War. It delves into the themes of justice and the inescapable violence that is looming on the horizon for this family.

I enjoyed this study of themes and expected the culmination of it in the final work, The Euminides. However, this third tragedy was the culmination of something else, and that was the misogyny of the story, which came with the greatest force. It is a courtroom drama in which the expected themes (which are perfectly suitable for discussion, and indeed they are talked about at first) are interrupted by Apollo's defence, and everything turns to the said conversation. With this review, I'm not condemning centuries-old works of misogyny (I think that has already been said and is obvious), but the radical turn of themes of the trilogy, which could lead to the fact that I'm not giving it 5 stars.

Having said that, if you're interested in this tragedy, give it a try anyway, it's beautifully written and well worth the time (although of the plays I've read, Euripides ones are still my favourite).

My favorite Greek classic so far. It’s absolutely mesmerizing and the third play, which explains the mythical foundations of the court system in Athens, ties up with Aeschylus’ life experiences brilliantly.

I really enjoyed the poetry in this. It was my first experience with Greek plays since high school. I found the format to be quite stilted and odd. Every time I pictured what a scene would look like on stage, I lost my emotional connection to the characters. That caught me off guard, but I did really like this translation. It had a modern enough vocabulary to make it easy to read, but the way the words worked together felt ancient and powerful. I quite enjoyed this and will be trying some more Greek plays soon!

ძალიან მაინტერესებს ერთი როდის მორჩებით ყველა თავის მოკატუნებას,თითქოს ძველბერძნული ლიტერატურა მართლა გიტაცებთ დაართლა გასწავლით რამეს.

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.

Overall, The Oresteia was a brutal work, savage and eloquent. I highly recommend you listen to Norwegian black metal while reading this, as it really adds to the experience. Then again, I find that listening to Norwegian black metal adds to the experience of such activities as driving to the grocery store, so I may be a tad bit biased there.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

“…we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
there comes a violent love.”

“But Justice turns the balance scales,
sees that we suffer
and we suffer and we learn.”

“Hope’s hand, hovering over the urn of mercy, left it empty.”

“…the house that hates god,
an echoing womb of guilt, kinsmen
torturing kinsmen, severed heads,
slaughterhouse of heroes, soil streaming blood…”

“Raging mother of death, storming deathless war against the ones she loves!”

“Rushed from the house we come
escorting cups for the dead,
in step with the hands’ hard beat, our cheeks glistening,
flushed where the nails have raked new furrows running blood;
and life beats on, and
we nurse our lives with tears,
to the sound of ripping linen beat our robes in sorrow,
close to the breast the beats throb
and laughter’s gone and fortune throbs and throbs.”

Aeschylus' prose certainly deserves five stars, so dense and moving. Even though his primary focus in Oresteia was ethics, justice, crime/punishment, and changes in social order, the subjective emotions and psychologies of characters are conveyed powerfully. Orestes is not really "heroic" in a Homeric sense, but he presents a less egoistic and more god-fearing type of man in a tormenting pursuit of righteousness. The Oresteia combines both tragic and comic elements, and presents both optimism and pessimism towards justice and morality. I give it four stars only because the ending is a bit too quick and not completely satisfying, especially considering how amazing the opening of the watchman scene is.

Una de las grandes piezas maestras del Teatro Griego, que muestra un panorama muy oscuro e ineludible a los personajes que se involucran en esta historia. Es patético, a pesar de todo lo que representa Agamenón, en cuanto a defectos, cómo un héroe griego recién llegado puede tener semejante destino. Pero luego le toca el turno a los hijos de éste Orestes y Electra para tomar protagonismo. Orestes es un gran personaje y vaya qué antiguo puede haber sido esta obra y cómo puede ser modelo, si no estructuralmente, sí en el argumento y en la humanidad del propio Orestes, sus miedos, sus recelos, su gran culpa. Claro que la humanización con Esquilo no alcanza su máximo punto, pero eso no le quita para nada lo trágico y legendario.

“an unholy act
gives birth to more in their turn,
and they have the look of their lineage.”
—agamemnon, sarah ruden translation

i don’t think greek theater is ever going to do it for me like shakespearean theater. i (somewhat) understand the choral odes, but i get tangled in them anyway, and while i know theater is mostly speech, a lot of greek plays feel to my uncultured heart like a lot of people standing around talking and then sometimes there is a dead body. that said, i’ve been intending to read the oresteia for years and i’m so glad i finally got around to it, because whatever my feelings about the constraints of greek theater, these plays FUCK. they have it all. family dynamics toxic enough to kill. the law of revenge and the ancestral curses of hubris. axe murder. milves, even.

AGAMEMNON (5 stars)
—> this is definitely my favorite play of the cycle; the imagery in it is impeccable. it’s a greek tragedy, but it's also a horror story, and having read christa wolf’s cassandra first made me hypersensitive to the themes of the sun & cassandra’s role & the way she serves as a foil of sorts to clytemnestra. whom i love so much. cassandra is my dearest but clytemnestra… sexy. anyway this play is an absolute banger all the way through; every character is compelling in their own way (even agamemnon, whose actions i can't commend, is a horribly tragic and often-sympathetic character) and this play is iconic. the fucking red carpet? you WISH you had what the oresteia has

notable lines:
“some godsend burning through the dark—“ (Robert Fagles translation, line 24)
“the generations wrestle, knees grinding the dust… the spear snaps in the first blood rites that marry Greece and Troy” (Fagles, lines 69-72)
“he tore Troy from the root with Zeus’s harrow of justice” (Ruden, lines 525-6)
“Hope’s hand, hovering over the urn of mercy, left it empty” (Fagles, lines 801-2)
CASSANDRA: “no cure for the doom that took the city after all, and I, her last ember, I go down with her” (Fagles, lines 1172-4)
“Helen the grief that never heals” (Fagles, line 1495)
and perhaps the summation of the trilogy:
“You can’t dislodge these Furies, who are family” (Ruden, line 1190)