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Greek tragedies come in threes. Playwrights were invited to have their plays performed at the City Dionysia, a huge festival in honour of Dionysus where Athens showed off how cultured it was. This is important: Athenian values are being defended to outsiders, at least a little. Comedies were performed at smaller, local festivals, and they have a lot more jokes about politics.

People were paid to attend the theatre in Athens (starting around the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles, or a bit before, I think). It'd almost be worth the lack of indoor plumbing and the horrific sex roles.

Greek theatre was not like modern theatre - there was lots of singing, and the conditions of staging were entirely different, but that's a huge tangent and I'll talk about it if it becomes relevant. The origins of tragedy are something lots of people talk about but no one actually knows anything about, so we'll drop that too. These are the basics.

Every playwright got one full day for his plays. The tragedies were performed one after another, with short breaks in between. After the three tragedies came the satyr play, which used tragic meter to make lots of dirty jokes about some of the same themes the trilogy covered. Right after the death of Ajax, when you're still all shell-shocked and horrified, you get to watch a bunch of satyrs getting drunk while wearing giant strap-ons. This is what Aristotle called catharsis.

This is entirely different from the modern experience, even of Greek plays, since we only have one surviving complete trilogy, Aeschylus's Oresteia, which is missing its satyr play.

Aeschylus's trilogies (we think) were all focused on one myth each, like the Oresteia. Later on, playwrights mostly wrote individual plays about different myths, and then presented three together as a trilogy. We have three plays by Sophocles about Odysseus, but he wrote them for three different festivals.

So what is the Oresteia?



Atreus and Thyestes were the two sons of Pelops, the king of Argos. Thyestes seduced his brother's wife and tried to claim the throne, they quarreled, and Thyestes was cast out. Later, impoverished, he returned with his sons as a suppliant.

Atreus welcomed him in, prepared a feast, sat him down to dinner and served him a meat stew. At the end, he asked Thyestes how he'd liked the food. Thyestes said he'd loved it.

Then Atreus had a covered platter brought in, and uncovered it, revealing the heads and hands of Thyestes's sons. He'd killed them and had them cooked for dinner.*

Thyestes, naturally, fled with his surviving son Aegisthus. Remember him, he's important later.

Atreus had two sons, Menelaus and Agamemnon. Menelaus grew up and married Helen and became king of Sparta, where her father ruled. Agamemnon married Helen's sister, Clytemnestra, and was king of Argos.

Helen's father had made all her other suitors promise that if she was ever kidnapped they'd all go after her and take her back to her rightful husband. The point was stopping a major war, since she was the most beautiful woman in the world and everyone in Greece wanted her.

The flaw in this plan was that there were people outside of Greece, and also gods, and the behaviour of these was unpredictable.

So a while later Paris shows up, as Menelaus's guest, with Aphrodite's promise that the most beautiful woman in the world will fall in love with him.** He runs off with Helen, or Helen runs off with him (exercise for the student: how does each interpretation change the meaning of the Trojan War?), and Menelaus gathers up everyone in Greece to go after them, as they'd promised.

Except when they show up at Aulis with all their boats, the winds won't blow.

As it turns out, Artemis is kind of annoyed by the whole affair, possibly because her colleague has started a major war just so she can have bragging rights, and doesn't want them to go to Troy. (She's also pissed off at Agamemnon specifically for claiming to be a better hunter than her, and killing a deer in her sacred grove. You'd think mortals would at some point figure out that bragging they're better than the gods is stupid, but they never do.) So they get a priest to tell them what sacrifice to make to her so she'll let them start.

Greek gods are generally not thrilled by the concept of human sacrifice, and in fact one guy got severely punished in the Underworld just for that. But for some reason Artemis asks Agamemnon to sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. Maybe she thought he wouldn't do it and then they could all go home.

Agamemnon calls her bluff and sends a messenger to his wife to bring Iphigenia, because, he says, Achilles wants to marry her. God knows what she said when she showed up and he had to tell he the truth.

In some versions of the myth Artemis transformed Iphigenia into a deer when the knife fell, and transported her to become her priestess in Tauris. In other versions she just dies, messily. Then everyone goes off to fight.

This is not what you'd call a good omen, and the war proves it right.

The Greeks hang around outside Troy for ten years, lots of people die on both sides, no one in Troy tells Paris to just suck it up and hand her over, none of the Greeks tell Menelaus there's plenty of pretty girls back home, and wouldn't it be nice to see some of them, hint hint***, and eventually the Greeks build the Trojan horse and win.

Then they rape all the women in Troy, pillage the temples, desecrate the bodies, and drop the children of the warriors off the city walls. You see why Artemis was hoping to call the whole thing off.

So Agamemnon shows up at home, with a piece of war booty named Cassandra (yes, the famous one), to Clytemnestra, who is forewarned of his arrival by a series of beacons. Good thing, too, because she had to sharpen the axe.

That's the backstory, and this is long enough already.


*This happens a lot more often than you'd think in Greek mythology.

**Come to think of it, shouldn't Helen have gotten the Apple of Discord? Unless all goddesses are just naturally more beautiful than all humans.

***There are various fascinating theories about the heritability of kingship in the Bronze Age, and one of the possibilities is that the actual ruler of Sparta wasn't Agamemnon himself, but just anyone married to Helen - just as kingship later seems to go to the person married to Clytemnestra in Argos, or how ancient Egyptians had to marry their eldest sister to ensure they became Pharaoh. But in later Greece this definitely wasn't how it worked at all.

You have no idea how many times I typed 'Troy' as 'Tory' in this post.