Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, has set up a relay of torch fires to bring her news of her husband’s victory at Troy, and the image of the relay signal also connects to the play’s larger story: the way events from far away and long ago still haunt the house of Argos. In Agamemnon, the long first play, the mood is dark and the language is dense, metaphorical and hard to parse. All the plays’ intertwined elements are knotted into a central set of questions about how to suppress, silence or pacify female rage, and how to reconcile the close kinship of the household with responsibilities to the larger community or city-state. That ‘maturity’ turns out to involve the subordination of women and of the family, which is conceived as feminine, to enable the creation of a political community like real-life historical Athens, in which male citizens use the law courts and the institutions of democracy to legislate for structures of power that can contain, marginalise and silence other members of the community – women, immigrants, enslaved people.

The trilogy is about language and the mysterious will of the gods, about tyranny, freedom and political change, and about a slow path to maturity for one young man (Orestes) and an entire culture. But each centres on female anger and female grief at violent loss of life and the willingness of family members to kill one another. Each of the three plays is radically different in style, mood and action. The child was killed by her father, the woman’s husband, in order to enable a vast war. A eschylus’ Oresteia begins with the story of a grieving, righteously angry woman seeking justice for her daughter.

The oresteia trilogy aeschylus