Aeschylus (525 BC-456 BC) was an ancient Greek playwright. He is often recognized as the father or the founder of tragedy, and is the earliest of the three Greek tragedians whose plays survive, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. Many of Aeschylusâ works were influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece, which took place during his lifetime. His play The Persians remains a quintessential primary source of information about this period in Greek history. He wrote some 70 to 90 plays, but only seven tragedies have survived intact: The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, the trilogy known as The Orestia, consisting of the three tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, and Prometheus Bound (whose authorship is disputed).
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One of the founding documents of Western culture and the only surviving ancient Greek trilogy, the "Oresteia of Aeschylus is one of the great tragedies of all time.
The three plays of the "Oresteia portray the bloody events that follow the victorious return of King Agamemnon from the Trojan War, at the start of which he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to secure divine favor. After Iphigeneia's mother, Clytemnestra, kills her husband in revenge, she in turn is murdered by their son Orestes with his sister Electra's encouragement. Orestes is pursued by the Furies and put on trial, his fate decided by the goddess Athena. Far more than the story of murder and vengeance in the royal house of Atreus, the "Oresteia serves as a dramatic parable of the evolution of justice and civilization that is still powerful after 2,500 years.
The trilogy is presented here in George Thomson's classic translation renowned for its fidelity to the rhythms and multilayered richness of the original Greek.
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