Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the Oresteia and the concept of the Warwick productions

Agamemnon was composed not as a standalone play, but as the first part of Aeschylus’ trilogy Oresteia (458 BC). It is almost as long as the two other plays put together, Libation Bearers and Eumenides, working as the ‘engine’ that powers the entire trilogy. It establishes the characters and dramatic action, as well as the central themes and motifs. These continue to be explored and developed in the following two plays, bringing the entire work of nearly four thousand lines to a stunning finale that leads audiences further away from anything they might have expected at the start.

Agamemnon is set in Argos, home of the eponymous king and his brother Menelaus, who in Aeschylus’ version is not king of Sparta, but crucially, of Argos jointly with Agamemnon. They led the military expedition against Troy together, an event which casts a shadow over the whole play. After Troy’s sack and heavy plundering, Agamemnon returns home with loot, in the only ship of the entire fleet that has survived a terrible storm. His homecoming, and the Trojan riches that the expedition had set off to take, are at first celebrated by a messenger who arrives to announce that the expedition has been a success, thus suppressing the army’s heavy losses and suffering. But this, rather forced, celebration does not last long. Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra usurps the action by helping reveal the fuller and much grimmer truth and orchestrating Agamemnon’s homecoming. She has waited ten long years to avenge the death of their daughter Iphigeneia, whom Agamemnon had sacrificed as a young maiden to facilitate the expedition’s sailing. Once Agamemnon sets foot in the house, Clytemnestra murders him alongside Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess, presumed concubine and most treasured possession of the war’s loot. The play closes with the queen glorifying her husband’s murder and assuming full control of the house and the kingdom’s power and riches, together with her own lover Aegisthus – also a scion of the Atreid household.

Agamemnon has been performed as a standalone play much more often than it has been as part of the entire Oresteia trilogy. As the summary above shows, it is more than capable of standing on its own. It has suspense and intrigue and a powerful and well-developed set of characters, which have captured audiences’ imagination for millennia: above all, the regal, sharp-witted and eloquent queen Clytemnestra, who holds all the male characters of the play in her grip, dominating the royal house and our stage with ease; and the Trojan Cassandra who, having already paid heavily for a failed deal with Apollo, ultimately shares Agamemnon’s brutal fate at the hands of Clytemnestra. In the wake of twentieth century feminist thought, such powerful female characters have cemented audiences’ fascination with the play: Clytemnestra and Cassandra are often referred to as symbols of female resistance against the patriarchy, which in this play is conveyed by the conduct of imperialists Agamemnon and Menelaus, and the cruelty of Apollo.

Thus, the performance history of the Agamemnon from antiquity to today often includes little more than a mention of the other two plays. These focus on Orestes’ revenge. In Libation Bearers, Orestes, returning to Argos (enacting one of the several homecomings which structure the trilogy), is reunited with his sister Electra and kills his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father. Orestes is then forced to flee Argos to escape the Erinyes (Furies), who hunt him down to avenge the latest murder, i.e. Clytemnestra’s. In the final play, the Eumenides, Orestes arrives in Delphi to seek protection by Apollo. Despite the god’s verbal assurances, Orestes can only find sanctuary in Athens, where he is acquitted in a court of law. The trilogy ends with an impressive, albeit enigmatic, scene, which focuses not on Orestes’ homecoming to Argos, but on the ‘homecoming’ of the Erinyes, cosmic and chthonic deities, who find a new home in Athens as well as an official cult – and thus a firm place in the wider cosmic order. In that impressive finale, from the wandering vagrants that they were before, the Erinyes now become part of the cosmic household led by Zeus and promise to channel their previously destructive energies into a more beneficent order.

This Warwick production has been conceived to allow Agamemnon to work both as a standalone play and as part of the Oresteia. We have planned for the Libation Bearers and the Eumenides to be produced together next year, in January 2026, in the same space at the Warwick Arts Centre, and we will make the videorecording of this year’s Agamemnon (2025) available to audiences to watch in advance so that they might experience the full effect of the trilogy.

This production has also been conceived to convey that Agamemnon was largely a reworking of Aeschylus’ earliest surviving play, the Persians (472 BC), which is where the Oresteia’s most salient themes appear to have been first developed (as far as we can tell, given the corpus that has survived). Both plays are deeply preoccupied with ideas of imperial greed and its destructive consequences on individuals, communities and the wider world. Both Persians and Agamemnon convey these ideas through colour and materiality, especially with the use of striking red fabrics that capture both wealth and the precious life that the greed of the powerful can callously destroy for their own enrichment. The production of Persians in 2024 conveyed the idea that loss of life is devastating and regrettable, even if it is the life of a hated enemy (as the Persians were for the Greeks in classical Greece). Life itself, and not the accoutrements of power, is ultimately the most sacred wealth.

Devastating loss of life is similarly at the centre of the Agamemnon: in almost every performed version of this play one can easily detect a major event that haunts it although the event itself is never shown: the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, Agamemnon’s young daughter, whom he killed in order to appease the angry winds that would prevent the expedition from sailing. Thus, in the Agamemnon the theme of violence against the feminine, which had already played a part in the Persians, steps up significantly. The description of Iphigeneia’s sacrifice in the words of the chorus -which has subtle, but unmistakable, connotations of sexual violence- is harrowing and informs much of the play, including its dramaturgy. In this production, the profound impact of Iphigeneia’s sacrifice is conveyed by the constant presence of the bloodied saffron dress on the stage. This is one of the heavily significant fabric-props which dominate the symbolism of the play, as fabrics do in the Persians (and as they did in the 2024 production). However, the haunting presence of the dress accentuates this effect even more. It conveys that harrowing brutality fuels more harrowing brutality and generates more of the same horrors: in her grief and anger, Clytemnestra murders not only Agamemnon but also Cassandra who, in many ways constitutes the mirror image of Iphigeneia.

As in the Persians, so in Agamemnon, loss of life, loss of the most precious of all wealth, does not concern only individual killings. Numerically, the losses in Agamemnon should be imagined as staggering as they are in the Persians. The chorus tells us that scores of Greek men have been turned into dust during the ten long years of the Trojan war: they have become ashes packed in funerary urns and shipped back to their loved ones. It is this dust, and not the golden dust that the expedition’s greedy leaders would have wanted, that the sacrifice of so much life has produced. Troy has of course been sacked and looted, but very little of all that loot has survived the journey back to Argos.

Moreover, it is not only ordinary soldiers’ houses that have been devastated as a result of the Trojan war: with Menelaus’ (and Helen’s?) fate unknown in the angry storm that annihilated the returning fleet, Agamemnon is the only royal household member who returns to Argos – only to be killed for starting the war in the first place. Thus, the play starts with the narration of an ambitious expedition designed to enrich Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ palace at Argos (and, of course, to remedy its losses by taking back precious Helen, whom Paris ‘stole’, as the play tells us; the language of Helen’s marriage to Paris is markedly economic). And it ends by showing us that the war achieved very few gains.

What it did achieve was devastation on both sides of the Aegean. At least three odes tell us about the extent of the Trojan catastrophe: the royal house and the city have been bled, annihilated and razed to the ground.

What of the other side of the war? The Argive palace, the oikos of the family of the Atreids, has not only failed to get richer, but has gone on to do what it has always done to itself. As a result of its ruling members’ inherited and generationally reinforced psychopathology, it has again devastated and bled itself, and will continue doing so. This is not something the audience needs to have prior knowledge of: during the play we hear about the previous generations’ kin-murders, including killing and cannibalism of children. The most recent kin- murder was fueled by the feud between Atreus and Thyestes, fathers of Agamemnon and Aegisthus respectively, over possession of a woman and the palace’s rule and riches. Now, by the end of the expedition, Iphigeneia has been murdered, Menelaus is lost at sea, Agamemnon has been brutally killed, and Orestes, who was until recently ‘sold’ (as the play tells us) into exile, is destined to kill his mother in revenge. Until he comes back to do so, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are determined to continue killing and crushing opponents to maintain the possession of the palace and its powers. The Trojan war was thus neither success nor failure. For the Atreid household, it was business as usual.

Where will this all end for the royal household of the Atreids? Aeschylean audiences are not accustomed to simple solutions. Aeschylus’ theatre does not consider myths and their outcomes merely in a local context, nor even in a context that focuses only on humanity. For this poet, anything that happens ‘on the ground’ is inextricably linked with, and has wider consequences in, the cosmos. And so it will be for the story of the Oresteia.

Come back in January 2026, to experience the cosmic finale of this tantalising play…