OresteiaAeschylus
About Oresteia
Aeschylus' , produced in 458 BC, is the only complete trilogy that survives from the Athenian tragic theater. Agamemnon brings the king home from Troy to be killed in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra, in vengeance for the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. The Libation Bearers drives Orestes to kill his mother in vengeance for his father. The Eumenides sets the matricide between the avenging Furies who demand his blood and the god Apollo who commanded the deed, and resolves the conflict by instituting the Athenian court of the Areopagus and the trial by jury.
The trilogy is an argument about how justice becomes possible. In the first two plays, retribution is private and hereditary. Each act of vengeance is justified, each creates the next crime, and the cycle has no endpoint inside itself. The third play breaks the cycle by founding an institution. Athena casts the deciding vote, persuades the Furies to become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, and gives them an honored place beneath the city. The older powers are not abolished. They are brought into the public order of the polis.
No earlier work in the tradition presents the transition from blood-feud to law so clearly, and no later work on justice, family, or punishment can avoid the questions Aeschylus raises here. The trilogy is the Syntopicon's foundational text on punishment considered as a public rather than a private act, and on the Furies as the image of what law must absorb rather than repudiate if it is to bind.