That killing had been rationalized by the king as a human sacrifice made necessary by his burning desire for the Achaeans to sail off to Troy, propelled by winds blowing from west to east. Meanwhile his wife, Clytemnestra, is plotting revenge for the killing of the couple’s daughter, Iphigeneia, by Agamemnon himself. He is coming from Troy, a sacred city that he and his army have just captured and burned. The story-line of this drama starts at the time when Agamemnon, over-king of prototypical Greeks known as the Achaeans, is returning to his home at Argos. This set of three tragedies traces the story of Agamemnon and his family, highlighting their dysfunctionality as a symptom of whatever was evil in the past era of heroes, to be contrasted with the functionality of society as it was figured by the State in the “present” era of Athens in 458 BCE, which was the original date of production. Aeschylus: overviews of three of his tragedies-(1) Agamemnon, (2) Libation-Bearers, (3) Eumenides Those two terms are hero cult and cult hero, explained in my book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours 0§14. There will be only two terms that I explain not here in my overviews but elsewhere. For example, the ancient Greek word polis, as used above, is explained by way of the definition ‘city-state’. My seven overviews contain explanations for words that are out of the ordinary. Here I give the basic historical facts about ancient Greek drama, in one sentence:ĭrama in the polis or ‘city-state’ of Athens was originally developed by the State for the purpose of educating the Athenians to be good citizens. In my overviews, I will be using the word drama interchangeably with the word tragedy. The word tragedy, as I use it here, refers to the most prestigious form of ancient Greek drama. Three comments, before I start the overviews Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities (Myr. Mask of Dionysus, found in Myrina (now in Turkey). In my overviews, I expect of the reader no previous knowledge of these seven tragedies. I challenge myself here to write up seven elementary “plot outlines”-I call them overviews-for seven Greek tragedies: (1) Agamemnon and (2) Libation-Bearers and (3) Eumenides, by Aeschylus (4) Oedipus at Colonus and (5) Oedipus Tyrannus, by Sophocles (6) Hippolytus and (7) Bacchae (or Bacchic Women), by Euripides.
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