Oresteia by Aeschylus

Published -458 · 34,672 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Drama

How hard is Oresteia to read?

Oresteia scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
Aeschylus's dense, imagistic language piles metaphor upon metaphor; his compounds and coinages challenge even Greek readers.
Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
Choral odes of extreme complexity; extended metaphors unfold across many lines; difficulty was recognized in antiquity.
Abstraction: 75 out of 100
The transformation of Furies into Eumenides, the founding of the Areopagus—the abstract becomes visible through theatrical spectacle.
Information density: 75 out of 100
Three plays compress generations of myth, theological argument, and political allegory into concentrated dramatic form.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
The curse's history is told obliquely through choral memory and prophecy; events happen offstage and are reported.
Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
The net that catches Agamemnon, the blood that cannot be washed clean, the red carpet, the Furies transformed—symbol system of extraordinary density.
Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
Clytemnestra's false welcome, Cassandra's unheeded prophecy create irony; overall tone is monumental rather than ironic.
Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
Unusually conclusive for tragedy: the cycle of blood ends, the Furies accept new roles, civic order is established.
Structural complexity: 75 out of 100
Trilogy structure spanning generations; generic transformation from tragedy to something approaching civic ritual.

How Oresteia is regarded

Oresteia holds a literary regard score of 90 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

What Oresteia asks you to hold together

Oresteia sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. Its highest passage reaches the same stage on pages 49–50. Read from the full text, all 70 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Oresteia sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (70 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Oresteia scores 35 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: High Mimetic
I hold such pride in fear, And bid thee honour me as man, not god.
Symbol: Mythical (Archetypal)
Wisdom is child of pain, and born with many a tear;
Mythos: Tragedy iv (Agamemnon); resolves toward Comedy (tragedy iv)
Alas! that Frenzy, first of ills and worst, With evil craft men’s souls to sin hath ever stirred!
Genre: Drama
[The scene opens, disclosing Clytemnestra, who comes forward.

Where the story of Oresteia takes place

  • Mycenae, palace of Atreus, just after the fall of Troy (1200 BCE to 1150 BCE), the main setting
  • Delphi and Athens (Areopagus), the aftermath of the matricide (1200 BCE to 1150 BCE)

5 things that are true of Oresteia, with the passage for each

  1. The introduction states that the Oresteia is the only complete Greek tragic trilogy to survive.

    the “Oresteia,” the only example of a complete Greek tragic trilogy which has come down to us

  2. The news of Troy's fall reaches Argos by a chain of beacon-fires starting on Mount Ida.

    From Ida’s top Hephaestus, lord of fire, Sent forth his sign; and on, and ever on,

  3. Clytemnestra says she struck Agamemnon three times, the last blow sacred to Hades.

    Once more I smote him, with the last third blow, Sacred to Hades, saviour of the dead.

  4. Apollo argues before the court that the mother is not the true parent, only the nurse of the father's seed.

    Not the true parent is the woman’s womb That bears the child; she doth but nurse the seed

  5. The jury at Orestes' trial is split evenly before Athena's vote.

    Behold, this man is free from guilt of blood, For half the votes condemn him, half set free!

Scenes in Oresteia that Frye would name

30 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
O I am sped—a deep, a mortal blow. The offstage death-cry of Agamemnon is the sacrificial death scene of the first play.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I, I am he; seek not one more akin. Orestes reveals himself to Electra after she reads the lock and footprints, the recognition that turns the Libation-Bearers.
Hamartia, untitled
Alas! that Frenzy, first of ills and worst, With evil craft men’s souls to sin hath ever stirred! Agamemnon's fatal choice to sacrifice Iphigenia is cast as Frenzy driving his shifting will.
Hamartia, untitled
Then, if thou wilt, let some one stoop to loose Swiftly these sandals, slaves beneath my foot: Agamemnon yields to Clytemnestra and walks on the sacred purple, the hubristic step that seals his doom.
Sparagmos, untitled
A rueful burden—see, they hold them up, The entrails upon which their father fed! Cassandra's vision of the murdered children of Thyestes is a dismemberment image of the house.
Sparagmos, untitled
And bade my father to his board, and set Before him flesh that was his children once. Aegisthus tells of Atreus' feast of children's flesh, the tearing-apart that founds the curse.

Books that share these scenes with Oresteia

About the author

Aeschylus