50 Fun Facts About The Oresteia

Which US politician quoted Aeschylus's Agamemnon when telling a crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. was dead?

Robert F. Kennedy called Aeschylus his favourite poet in that 1968 speech, and the passage he recited was later inscribed at his own grave.

Which showbusiness custom is traced to a scene in Agamemnon where a returning king fears offending the gods?

The red carpet has its earliest known literary mention here: the queen lays a red path to the palace door, and her husband worries that only gods should walk on such luxury.

According to an ancient legend, the playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped which animal on his head?

A tortoise, the story goes, was dropped by a bird that mistook his head for a rock to crack the shell on. The tale may come from a misreading of the carving on his tomb.

Which Harry Potter novel opens with two epigraphs, one of them taken from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers?

Deathly Hallows pairs the pagan passage with a Christian one by the Quaker William Penn, and J. K. Rowling said she had picked the two out years ahead.

Aeschylus, author of the Oresteia, fought the invading Persians in which famous battle of 490 BC?

Marathon cost Aeschylus his brother Cynegeirus, who was killed trying to stop a Persian ship from leaving the shore.

Which Trojan captive, cursed so that nobody believes her prophecies, foresees her own murder in Aeschylus's Agamemnon?

Cassandra arrives as the king's war prize and tells the chorus outright that he is about to be butchered, yet the old men still cannot take in what she means.

Which goddess presides over the trial of Orestes in The Eumenides and casts her own vote to free him?

Athena sides with Orestes, then spends the rest of the play persuading his furious accusers to stay on as honoured guardians of her city.

Where in the palace is King Agamemnon killed by his wife on the day he comes home from Troy?

In his bath is where the queen strikes, and when the palace doors open she stands over the body and describes the killing without a trace of regret.

Which daughter of Agamemnon meets her long-lost brother Orestes at their father's tomb in The Libation Bearers?

Electra has been sent with offerings meant to quiet her mother's nightmares, and instead joins her brother in praying for revenge.

Which American playwright recast Agamemnon as a general coming home from the Civil War in a three-part retelling?

Eugene O'Neill renamed the returning king Ezra Mannon and swapped the gods for Freudian and Jungian psychology; the cycle ran for 150 performances on Broadway.

Which German opera composer revered Aeschylus so much that a book compares his masterwork with the Oresteia?

Richard Wagner's Ring is set beside the trilogy character by character in Michael Ewans's study, though one critic called its arguments unreasonable and forced.

Clytemnestra was the half-sister of which legendary beauty, who married the brother of Clytemnestra's husband?

Helen and Clytemnestra, half-sisters, wed two brothers: one marriage launched the Trojan War and the other ended in murder.

Which daughter did Agamemnon sacrifice to win a fair wind for Troy, the death Clytemnestra waits ten years to avenge?

Iphigenia was the couple's eldest daughter, and the queen says she still weeps for her as she stands over her husband's body.

Which goddess held the Greek fleet in port at Aulis until Agamemnon offered up his own child?

Artemis had been offended by the arrogant king; in one common telling he had killed a deer that was sacred to her.

Which god orders Orestes to avenge his father and later speaks in his defence at the trial in The Eumenides?

Apollo tells the court he bears the blame for the killing; he had warned Orestes of disaster if the task was refused.

The Eumenides opens at which famous oracle site, where a priestess finds Orestes surrounded by sleeping Furies?

Delphi is where Orestes has fled to be purified of the blood on his hands, and the sight sends the priestess crawling out of the temple on all fours.

Which term names the crime that sets the Furies on Orestes after he kills Clytemnestra in The Libation Bearers?

Matricide is the one killing the Furies refuse to excuse: they had ignored the queen's murder of her husband because the pair were not blood relations.

The Oresteia follows the last generations of which cursed royal family, named after the father of Agamemnon?

The House of Atreus carried a curse that demanded blood for blood in every generation, and the acquittal of Orestes is what finally ends it.

The curse on Agamemnon's family is traced back to which ancestor, who served up his own son to the gods?

Tantalus tried to feed the gods his son Pelops; they were not fooled, brought the boy back to life and banished his father to the underworld.

The goddess who frees Orestes is held up in court as born without a mother, straight from which god's head?

Zeus alone brought her forth, a point the defence seizes on to argue that a father can exist without a mother.

Critics read the Oresteia as dramatising a society's shift from which older custom to justice decided in a court?

The vendetta, each killing answered by another inside one family, gives way in the last play to a hearing with speeches, sworn judges and ballots.

Which lover of Clytemnestra shares her throne after Agamemnon's murder and boasts that he designed the scheme himself?

Aegisthus bursts in with armed men only once the deed is done, claiming he planned it to repay a wrong done to his own father.

Clytemnestra's lover claims revenge for which father, who was tricked into eating his own sons at a feast?

Thyestes cursed his brother's descendants after that meal, which is why his one surviving son helps to topple the king.

Which king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon, is reported lost at sea by the herald in the first play?

Menelaus vanished with his ships on the voyage home, a loose end that the trilogy's lost fourth play is thought to have picked up.

Aeschylus sets Agamemnon's palace in Argos rather than which nearby citadel, usually named as the king's capital?

Mycenae may have lost the honour for political reasons: Argos had recently become an ally of the playwright's own city.

The captive prophetess Agamemnon brings home is a daughter of which Trojan, the old king of the city he sacked?

Priam fathered fifty sons and many daughters in the legends, and the Iliad calls this one the loveliest of them.

At the start of Agamemnon, a watchman on the palace roof has spent a year looking out for which signal?

A beacon, the last in a relay of them, tells the queen that Troy has fallen long before any ship could bring the news.

What does Orestes leave on Agamemnon's tomb in The Libation Bearers that his sister realises must be her brother's?

A lock of hair, left to mark his grief, matches her own so closely that she guesses the truth before he steps out of hiding.

In The Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra sends offerings to the tomb after dreaming that she gave birth to what?

A snake, wrapped up like a baby, drew blood as it nursed, and Orestes reads the dream as a picture of himself.

In The Libation Bearers, a disguised Orestes gets into the palace by bringing false news of whose death?

His own death is the story he tells his mother at the door, posing as a traveller who heard it from a stranger on the road.

Which loyal friend of Orestes speaks only once in The Libation Bearers, at the moment the avenger hesitates?

Pylades had grown up beside Orestes in exile, and his single speech reminds his friend of the oath sworn at the oracle.

The title The Eumenides is usually translated as which name, given to the Furies once they are won over?

The Kindly Ones was a name used partly out of caution: Greeks thought it unwise to call such powers by their real name and risk drawing their attention.

By which Greek name are the Furies, the vengeance goddesses who hound Orestes for his crime, properly known?

The Erinyes were held to be older than any Olympian god, and their task was to hound those who wronged parents, guests or suppliants.

On which rocky hill below the Acropolis, later the seat of a homicide court, is Orestes tried in The Eumenides?

The Areopagus means the Hill of Ares, where legend said the war god himself had once stood trial before the other gods for murder.

When the ballots are counted at the trial of Orestes in The Eumenides, what is the result?

An even split is enough to free Orestes, who promises that his country will never attack his hosts and goes home to rule Argos as king.

At which drama festival, where three tragedians competed each year, did the Oresteia win first prize?

The Dionysia gave each playwright a day to present his full set of plays, so the first audience watched the whole story in a single sitting.

Which lost satyr play, named after Homer's Old Man of the Sea, originally followed the Oresteia's three tragedies?

Proteus survives only as a two-line fragment about a wounded dove, preserved because a later author happened to quote it.

The lost fourth play of the Oresteia is thought to retell an episode from Book IV of which ancient epic?

The Odyssey strands a Greek king on an island off Egypt, where he has to force a sea god to tell him the way home.

Aeschylus is credited with which innovation in Greek theatre, which made the chorus less important to the plot?

A second actor meant real dialogue between characters; before that a single performer could only trade lines with the chorus.

Unlike the Argive elders of the first play, the chorus of The Libation Bearers is made up of which group?

Foreign slave women drive the plot rather than watch it: they urge revenge and alter a message so that the usurper arrives without his guard.

Aeschylus was born in which town west of his future stage, home of secret rites he was later accused of revealing?

Eleusis was the seat of the Mysteries of Demeter, and when he was tried for giving away their secrets on stage he was acquitted.

Which novel of animal adventure has a visionary character modelled on the doomed prophetess of Aeschylus's Agamemnon?

Watership Down opens with an epigraph from the play, and its rabbit seer Fiver has a vision of his birthplace drenched in blood.

Yaël Farber's Molora resets the Oresteia during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings of which country?

South Africa also gave the piece its first stage, the Market Theatre in Johannesburg; the title Molora means ashes.

Which French philosopher retold the revenge of Orestes in The Flies, written during the Nazi occupation of France?

Jean-Paul Sartre ends with an Orestes who refuses remorse: he takes the townspeople's guilt on himself and walks out with the Furies chasing him.

Which Poet Laureate's translation of the Oresteia was staged by Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre in 1999?

Ted Hughes died in October 1998 while still Poet Laureate, so he never saw the production that used his text in the Cottesloe.

Which poet set the Furies loose in an English stately home in his verse play The Family Reunion?

T. S. Eliot later judged his own Furies a failure, saying they looked like uninvited guests from a fancy dress ball.

Which poet wrote the version of the Oresteia that Peter Hall staged in masks at the National Theatre in 1981?

Tony Harrison's text was played in the Olivier Theatre with a score by the composer Harrison Birtwistle and designs by Jocelyn Herbert.

Which Russian composer made the Oresteia his only opera, a musical trilogy first staged at the Mariinsky Theatre?

Sergei Taneyev spent seven years composing it, and was angered when the theatre's management cut the score soon after the premiere.

Which democratic reformer cut the powers of the old homicide court a few years before the Oresteia was staged?

Ephialtes was assassinated soon afterwards, and scholars still argue over whether the trilogy's ending backs his reform or warns against it.

In which region of Greece was the young Orestes raised in exile, at the court of King Strophius?

Phocis also supplies his cover story: at the palace door he claims a Phocian he met on the road gave him the news he carries.