You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The following discussion is based on Gilbert Murray's famous translation of the Oresteia. The main angle from which I intend to consider this trilogy is the variety of symbolic rôles in which the characters appear.
Let me first give a brief outline of the three plays. In the first, Agamemnon, the hero returns triumphant after the sack of Troy. He is received by Clytemnestra, his wife, with false praise and admiration, and she persuades him to walk into the house over a precious tapestry. There are some hints that she uses the same tapestry later to envelop Agamemnon in his bath and to make him helpless. She kills him with her battle-axe and appears before the Elders in a state of great triumph. She justifies her murder as a revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia. For Iphigenia had been killed on Agamemnon's command in order to make the winds favourable for the voyage to Troy.
Clytemnestra's revenge on Agamemnon, however, is not only caused by the grief for her child. She has, during his absence, taken his arch-enemy as her lover, and is therefore confronted with the fear of Agamemnon's revenge. It is clear that either Clytemnestra and her lover will be killed, or that she has to kill her husband. Over and above these motives, she gives the impression of deeply hating him, which appears clearly when she speaks to the Elders and voices her triumph about his death. These feelings are soon followed by depression. She restrains Aegisthus, who wants immediately to suppress the opposition among the Elders by violence, and begs him: ‘let us not stain ourselves with blood’.
The next part of the trilogy, the Cheophoroe, deals with Orestes who had been sent away by his mother when he was a young child. He meets Electra by the funeral mound of their father. Electra, who burns with hostility against her mother, has come with the slave women sent by Clytemnestra after a very frightening dream to bring libations to Agamemnon's tomb. It is the leader of these libation bearers who sugg