Agamemnon was the opening play in the tragic trilogy Oresteia, produced by the oldest of the three great Athenian dramatists, Aeschylus, in 458 B.C.E., when it won first prize at the major Athenian dramatic festival, the City Dionysia held in early March. It told how the supreme commander of the Greek expedition against Troy returned to find himself first supplanted and then murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. The story can be traced back to the earliest strata of Greek myth. The Odyssey mentions in more than one place the supreme commander’s fatal reception by his wife and her lover. Here the primary agent is Aegisthus, who, through the agency of a treacherous watchman, lures his …
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