Aeschylus II
The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Proteus
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Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith. Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century. In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays. In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
Series
Featured Series
3 primary booksOresteia
Oresteia is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in -500 with contributions by Αισχύλος and Aeschylus.
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Aeschylus II: The Oresteia by Aeschylus
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I read the Orestes trilogy for the Online Great Books program The program had just had us read Homer's Odyssey, so the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and their boy Orestes fit seamlessly into one of the grooves found in that book.
I really recommend that any thinking person read the Oresteia. It actually makes for an interesting and gripping read. The story progresses through Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon on his return from victory over Troy, to Orestes taking vengeance on his mother for the murder of his father, to, finally, the trial before Athena as to whether Oreste's will be handed over to the Furies because of his kin-slaying.
The story is told in the form of prose poetry in a play. The reader has to acquaint himself with the forms of the Strophe, Antistrophe and the like, but that's not difficult. This test has a nice glossary that clues the reader into references to gods, myth figures and location, which is helpful for staying on track.
Coming from the Odyssey to this trilogy, I was impressed by what I think I saw in moral development. My sense from Homer is that Bronze Age Greeks were fairly hit or miss on the treatment of strangers and the universality of justice. Homer's world was largely a divine command world and the protection of strangers seems to have rested in the possibility that the stranger you were mishandling might be a god in disguise.
By the time we get Aeschylus, it seems that there may be some norms of justice with the Furies assigned to give teeth to those norms. However, these norms seem to be fairly conditional. Thus, Orestes slaying of his mother gets the attention of the Furies because that involved blood kin, but Clytemnestra's slaying of her husband is outside of their jurisdiction because they are not blood relations.
The gods do take an interest in Agamemnon's vengeance, but that was because he was fairly important. Further, while the gods do provide a way out for Orestes' dilemma, one doesn't get the sense that the Greeks were too concerned with universal forms of justice.
It's worth reading and pondering.
