The Oresteia

• The Odyssey by Homer. The Oresteia built on it. - The *Oresteia* dramatizes a myth the *Odyssey* can't stop retelling — the failed homecoming that haunts Odysseus's successful one - Aeschylus keeps Homer's frame but shifts the weight: in the *Odyssey* the killer is Aegisthus, here the murder belongs to Clytemnestra - Reading the *Odyssey* first shows you the version Aeschylus is answering — and how much darker he makes it
• The Iliad by Homer. The Oresteia built on it. - The *Oresteia* is draped in Homer — Aeschylus reached back to the *Iliad* for his characterization and his ethical seriousness - You'll hear it in the similes and the heroic register; the house of Atreus is folded into a tragic frame built from epic material - The plot derives from the Agamemnon myth, but the *Iliad* is the deep well Aeschylus is drawing from
• Electra by Sophocles. The Oresteia shaped it. - The matricide Sophocles couldn't leave alone - Aeschylus' middle play, the *Libation Bearers*, set the scene — Orestes and Electra meet at their father's tomb, the recognition, the killing of their mother — and *Electra* reworks it beat for beat - Where Aeschylus made it Orestes' story, Sophocles answers by handing the whole drama to Electra
• The Frogs by Aristophanes. The Oresteia shaped it. - Aristophanes loved the *Oresteia* enough to put Aeschylus himself onstage to defend it - In the underworld contest, Euripides picks apart an Aeschylean prologue line by line — the Hermes lines from the *Oresteia* — while Aeschylus answers for his own grandeur - The comedy's closing torchlit procession of the Eleusinian Initiates deliberately echoes the *Oresteia*'s own luminous finale
• Medea by Euripides. The Oresteia shaped it. - Euripides built Medea's revenge on Aeschylus's blueprint — the verbal echoes of the *Choephoroi* are specific enough to catch - Medea frames her killing as a 'sacrifice,' an echo of the *Agamemnon*; she stands over the corpses exactly as Clytemnestra stood over Agamemnon and Cassandra - The poisoned robe that kills is patterned on the entangling robe Clytemnestra used — Aeschylus's signature image, turned to a new horror
• Wasps by Aristophanes. The Oresteia shaped it. - The tragedy Aristophanes spent a whole comedy taking apart - *Wasps* rebuilds the *Eumenides* jury trial as a domestic farce — a dog hauled up for stealing cheese instead of Orestes on trial for matricide - The watchman's prologue of *Agamemnon* and the Furies' costume change after the verdict both reappear, deflated into slapstick — proof that within thirty years Aeschylus was canonical enough to parody
• The Republic by Plato. The Oresteia shaped it. - Plato names Aeschylus directly — and not to praise him - Book 2 of the *Republic* faults the *Oresteia*'s poet for endorsing a justice valued only for its reputation, the exact view Socrates sets out to demolish - And when Plato bars the tragedians from his ideal city, Aeschylus is named on the list of the exiled

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