Agamemnon

Agamemnon is the first play in the Oresteia, the only complete tragic trilogy to survive from ancient Greece, written by Aeschylus and first performed in 458 BC. King Agamemnon returns in triumph from the ten-year war at Troy, only to be killed in his own house by his wife Clytemnestra, who has waited all those years to avenge the daughter he sacrificed to launch the fleet. The play moves with terrible slowness toward its act of blood, watched by a chorus of old men who sense the doom gathering over the royal house. It sets in motion the trilogy’s great question of how the endless chain of revenge can ever be broken.