Most of the Greek commanders had a hard journey home from Troy. Storms, shipwrecks, ten years of wandering. Odysseus is the famous case. Agamemnon had an easy one. He sailed straight back to Mycenae with his ships and his plunder, arrived in triumph to a cheering city, and was dead within the hour. Peabody's summary is the whole thing in a line: one who escaped such hardships came home to find a bitter welcome. This is the story that produced the Oresteia — a trilogy that runs from a murder in a bathroom to the founding of the jury system, and is arguably the most ambitious thing anyone wrote in the ancient world.
What He Left Behind
Agamemnon was king of Mycenae and Argos, commander-in-chief of the Greek forces, and brother to the wronged Menelaus. And when the fleet was becalmed at Aulis and the oracle demanded a life, he had put his own daughter Iphigenia on an altar. He lured her there with a story about marrying Achilles. That's the first thing you need to know about this household, and everything after it follows. Before he sailed, he handed the running of the state to his cousin Aegisthus, and commended to his protection his wife Clytemnestra and their two remaining children, Electra and Orestes. Aegisthus, incidentally, had his own reasons for being interested in this family. His father Thyestes and Agamemnon's father Atreus were brothers who had spent their lives destroying each other — culminating in Atreus killing Thyestes' children and serving them to him at a banquet. Aegisthus was the surviving son, raised specifically for revenge. Nobody in this house is starting from a clean position. That's the point of it.
Ten Years
Clytemnestra was Helen of Troy's sister, and beautiful. Peabody's judgement of her — her heart was as evil as her face was fair — is the least interesting thing anyone has ever said about her. Because she had a reason, and it isn't ambiguous. Her husband killed her daughter. She took Aegisthus as her partner in every sense, installed him openly as king, and ran the kingdom with him for ten years while the Argives watched and said nothing.
As Orestes grew towards manhood, Aegisthus became nervous. A grown prince with a legitimate claim was a problem. Electra worked out what was coming and got her brother out of the country, to the court of King Strophius in Phocis, where he was raised alongside Strophius's son Pylades. The two became inseparable — the standard Greek example of unbreakable friendship. Electra stayed. She was kept in the palace, treated as a servant or worse, watching her mother and her mother's lover celebrate her father's absence year after year, and sending secret messages north begging her brother to come back.
The Homecoming
The war ended. Agamemnon came home to a jubilant city — his soldiers behind him carrying the spoils, the population out in the streets. He was sharing his chariot with a captive: Cassandra, princess of Troy, taken as his prize. Clytemnestra came out to meet him with every appearance of joy. She had a cloth of purple spread on the ground from the chariot to the palace doors so that her husband could enter his home in proper state. Aeschylus makes the purple cloth into one of the great scenes in world theatre. Agamemnon doesn't want to walk on it — it's the kind of extravagance the gods punish, and he says so. She works on him. She makes it about pride, and about what a great king would do, and about whether he's really refusing his own wife a small thing after ten years. He takes his shoes off and walks on it. He is being talked into an act of arrogance by the woman who is about to kill him, and he does it in front of the entire city, and the audience knows.
Cassandra at the Door
Agamemnon went in. Cassandra stayed in the chariot and wouldn't move. Aeschylus gives her the longest and strangest scene in the play. She sits outside the doors and starts to see it — blood in the air, the old murders in this house, the children served at the table, and then her own death and Agamemnon's, right now, inside. The chorus of Argive elders listen to her, and they can hear that she's saying something, and they cannot make any of it mean anything. That is the curse operating at close range: not disbelief exactly, but a total inability to convert what she says into action.
Then she gets down from the chariot, having decided there's no avoiding it, and walks in through the doors on her own feet. The elders stand outside pitying her for being mad.
She could hear herself saying it. They heard her saying something. Neither disbelief exactly — a total inability to convert what she said into action.
The Bath
Clytemnestra did what a wife would do for a traveller: she led him to a bath. He put his weapons down and got in. And she and Aegisthus threw a net over him — a fishing net, so he couldn't get his arms free — and killed him where he sat. Peabody's phrasing is exact and cold: as they would have snared any beast of prey, and slew him, defenceless. The great commander of the Greek army, who survived ten years of the bloodiest war in the tradition, is killed naked in a bath by his wife with a net. Cassandra was killed in the same hour. Then the two of them came out and declared themselves king and queen in front of the people, and nobody said a word — because what were the people going to do?
Aeschylus, importantly, gives Clytemnestra a speech afterwards that is not a confession but an argument. She stands over the body and says: this man sacrificed my child to buy a wind for his fleet. He came home with another woman in his chariot. I am not sorry. I did it, I planned it, and it was justice. She is not wrong, and that's the problem the rest of the trilogy has to solve.
She stood over the body and argued. This man sacrificed my child to buy a wind for his fleet. I am not sorry. It was justice. She was not wrong.
Orestes Comes Back
Aegisthus never relaxed. Then a rumour reached Argos that Orestes had died. Electra gave up. It was the last thing she had. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus made no attempt to hide their relief. A few days later two young men from Phocis arrived at the palace with details of Orestes' last days, and were admitted to the king and queen. They were Orestes and Pylades. Orestes killed Aegisthus, and then his mother, and presented himself to the Argives as their rightful prince. Sophocles and Euripides both wrote versions of this and they differ on one crucial question: how much of it was Electra's doing? In Sophocles she is the driving force, the one who has kept the rage alive for a decade and who stands outside the door urging her brother on while their mother screams inside. It's an extraordinary role and it's why Electra has never gone out of fashion — Strauss made an opera of it in 1909, and Jung coined the Electra complex as a counterpart to Freud's Oedipus.
The Furies
And then Orestes discovered that being right doesn't help. He had killed his mother. Whatever she'd done, that act was the single most polluted thing a Greek could do — hateful, as Peabody says, to gods and men alike. The Furies came for him. They are the most frightening things in Greek mythology, and Peabody's description of them is genuinely the best short account I've read anywhere. They never leave Hades except to pursue a guilty conscience. They wear black like the wings of a bat. Their hair writhes with serpents as fierce as remorse. They carry burning torches that make every shape look bigger and worse than it is.
And here's the detail that does it: no sleep can soothe the mind of him they follow. They come between his eyes and the daylight; at night their torches drive away all comfortable darkness. They take away the two things that make existence bearable — clear sight in the day and darkness at night — and leave you with neither. Orestes wandered from country to country, going mad, with one companion. Pylades never left him. In the entire story he is the only person who does something decent for no reason at all.
They never leave Hades except to pursue a guilty conscience. They take away the two things that make existence bearable — clear sight in the day, and darkness at night.
The Trial
Orestes eventually reached Athens and put himself under the protection of Athena, and asked to be tried. And Aeschylus, in The Eumenides, does something with this that is genuinely one of the great moments in the history of ideas. Athena says the case is too serious for any single judge, including her. So she assembles a court of Athenian citizens on the hill of the Areopagus, has both sides argue — the Furies prosecuting, Apollo defending — and puts it to a vote. The jury splits evenly. Athena casts the deciding vote for acquittal. Then she has to deal with the Furies, who are ancient powers, deeply offended, and threatening to blight the land. She doesn't defeat them. She negotiates. She offers them a permanent honoured place in Athens, a cult, a home under the city, and a new function: not hounding the guilty, but guarding against wrongdoing in the first place. They accept, and are renamed the Eumenides — the Kindly Ones.
That's the trilogy's whole argument, and it's remarkable. The cycle of blood vengeance — Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes — cannot be stopped by anyone getting revenge correctly. It stops when the community takes the decision out of the family's hands and puts it in front of a jury. Aeschylus wrote this in 458 BCE, for an Athens that had just been arguing bitterly about the powers of that exact court. It's mythology functioning as constitutional argument.
She didn't defeat them. She negotiated — a permanent place in Athens, a cult, a new function. The cycle only stops when the community takes the decision out of the family's hands.
Iphigenia in Tauris
Peabody follows a different strand — Euripides' version rather than Aeschylus's. In this telling, the Areopagus acquits Orestes but not all the Furies leave him. So he consults the oracle of Apollo, and is told: go to Tauris in Scythia, and bring back the image of Artemis that fell from heaven. He and Pylades sailed for the Black Sea coast. The Taurians were a people who honoured Artemis by sacrificing every stranger who landed. And the priestess who had to consecrate the victims — sorely against her will — was a Greek woman who had appeared there miraculously years before. She was Iphigenia. Snatched from the altar at Aulis, and alive.
Orestes and Pylades were captured and brought in front of her. Neither party recognised the other, and Euripides plays the recognition scene for everything it's worth. She learns they're Greeks from Argos, and starts asking desperate questions about Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and the war. Then she offers to save one of them if he'll carry a letter home for her. Orestes says his friend should be the one to go, and he'll stay and die. Pylades objects on a technicality — he might be shipwrecked and lose the letter. So she reads the message out loud so he can memorise it. And the message begins: to Orestes, son of Agamemnon — say that Iphigenia, his sister, is dead to her parents but not to him. He is standing in front of her. The three of them got out by a trick of Iphigenia's own devising — she told the Taurian king that the prisoners were polluted and had to be purified in seawater by her hands alone, kept the people indoors to avoid the pollution, and walked her two victims down to the sea, where they got on a ship.
What the Story Is About
Nobody in it is innocent, and everybody has a case. Agamemnon killed his daughter. Clytemnestra killed her husband. Orestes killed his mother. Every single one of them can point at what came before and say it was owed. That's not a flaw in the story; it's the entire subject. Justice by revenge doesn't terminate. Each act of just retribution creates the next obligation. The house of Atreus has been doing this for three generations and the only reason it stops is that Athens invents a court. And the Furies are not villains. This is the bit people miss. They're right about Orestes — he did kill his mother. They're not lying or malicious. They are the principle that blood demands blood, and the trilogy's resolution isn't defeating them but giving them a job that doesn't require anyone else to die.
Sources
Aeschylus, the Oresteia (458 BCE) — Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides. The only complete Greek tragic trilogy that survives, and if you read one work of Greek drama, it's this. Sophocles, Electra and Euripides, Electra — two very different takes on the same events, both centred on the sister. Euripides, Iphigenia at Aulis (the sacrifice) and Iphigenia in Tauris (the reunion) — Peabody follows the latter closely. Homer, Odyssey — Agamemnon's ghost tells Odysseus what happened to him, and warns him to be careful coming home. It's the earliest version we have. Josephine Preston Peabody's Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew (1897) compresses the whole cycle into one chapter and her description of the Furies is worth reading on its own.
