<DIV>'Anger still unreconciled<BR> Poisoning a house's life<BR> With darkness, treachery and strife' (47 <p>Aeschylus (525–c.456 BC) set his great trilogy in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of Troy, when King Agamemnon returns to Argos, a victor in war. <b>Agamemnon</b> depicts the hero's discovery that his family has been destroyed by his wife's infidelity and ends with his death at her callous hand. Clytemnestra's crime is repaid in <b>The Choephori</b> when her outraged son Orestes kills both her and her lover. <b>The Eumenides</b> then follows Orestes as he is hounded to Athens by the Furies' law of vengeance and depicts Athene replacing the bloody cycle of revenge with a system of civil justice. Written in the years after the Battle of Marathon, <b>The Oresteian Trilogy</b> affirmed the deliverance of democratic Athens not only from Persian conquest, but also from its own barbaric past.</p> <p>Philip Vellacott's verse translation makes this eternal dramatic masterpiece accessible for the modern reader. In his introduction, he examines the historical context and the literary style of the plays.<BR> </p> </div>