Oresteia Literary Elements

Greek tragic play cycle

Ancient Greek

Mythological Ancient Greece, after the victorious return of the Greek heroes from the Trojan War

Third-person limited point of view, like most plays, although with regular asides to the audience from the Chorus, who gives something of an omniscient perspective on the play's broader context.

Frantic, hurried, dramatic

Protagonist: Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who comes back to kill his mother in revenge for her brutal murder of his father. Antagonist: Clytemnestra, a villainous woman who murders her own husband when he returns home, victorious, from war.

Clytemnestra enacts her plan of vengeance against her husband, Agamemnon, who sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis in order to give his fleet favorable winds before the war. This act of revenge sets of a brutal cycle, the end of which is nowhere in sight.

After killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Orestes flees from the scene, hounded by Furies. In the climax of the trilogy, Athena holds an impromptu court session, in which she declares Orestes not guilty and gives the Furies new jobs as guardians of Athens.

When Clytemnestra insists that Agamemnon walk across the crimson carpet, she is foreshadowing the spilling of his blood at her own hand.

"Let the best win out, clear to see. A small desire but all that I could want." - Clytemnestra (Agamemnon, ln 352-53)

The plot of the first play, Agamemnon, alludes to the famous Greek myth of the Trojan War, in which valiant heroes from Greece sailed to Troy and defeated the cruel Trojans, who had stolen the beautiful Helen from the king Menelaus. Many Greek stories, including the Odyssey and the Iliad, also allude to this myth.

The imagery of a creature who has lost its young is used in several places throughout the trilogy, mostly to refer to Clytemnestra, whose daughter's life has been sacrificed by Agamemnon, setting Clytemnestra into a bitter, scheming fury. The image of a vulture who has lost its young, although nominally describing the Greek heroes of the war, fits her perfectly - she is frenzied and beyond all reason as a result of the loss of her daughter.

The enacting of vengeance by Clytemnestra on Agamemnon as recompense for the sacrifice of their daughter sets off a paradoxical cycle of violence: there will always be someone who wants to avenge the murder you just committed to "balance the scales of justice," making true reconciliation impossible. In the play, it relies on the old "deus ex machina" to put an end to the violence.

In "Agamemnon," the murder of Agamemnon at the hands of Clytemnestra, committed as revenge for the killing of Iphigenia, parallels the later murder of Clytemnestra at the hands of Orestes, committed as revenge for the killing of Agamemnon, in "The Libation Bearers."

"Why, why does it rock me, never stops,
this terror beating down my heart,
this seer that sees it all –
it beats its wings, uncalled unpaid
thrust on the lungs
the mercenary song beats on and on
singing a prophet's strain..."

- Clytemnestra (Agamemnon, ln 977-84)

The chorus has a major function in all three plays: in the first (Agamemnon), the chorus is composed of old men from the city, who give backstory to the audience and respond to the main characters in dialogue. The chorus in The Libation Bearers is similar, but in The Eumenides, the chorus comprises the Furies themselves, who rage against injustice and the cruel acts of Orestes.

The Eumenides also includes a notable instance of "deus ex machina," where Athena comes down from Mount Olympus to intervene and stop the endless cycle of violence, which she does by holding an impromptu court case in which she declares Orestes innocent of all charges.