Oresteia

2. After a brief chronological survey of the trilogy's production history in this century, B. proceeds thematically, dividing the productions he studies into three main ideological groups. The first is what he describes as the "evolutionary" or "affirmative" model, in which the trilogy's movement from a dark world of blood guilt and disorder to a new and more just society is taken as a kind of charter myth for whatever political order the producer cares to …

…to a celebration of Athens and her perfected institutions, Aeschylus's masterpiece resounds with the victory of mankind--"Cry, cry in triumph, carry on the dancing on and on." Aeschylus was born in 525 BC at Eleusis, the scene of the ancient Mysteries, and died in the new Greek world of Sicily in 456, yet he was a complete fifth-century Athenian--an aristocrat by birth, a democrat by commitment. He was the creator of her proudest artistic achievement, tragedy.