Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the only tragic trilogy to have survived to the present day, is fragmented and imprecise, yet, in its entirety, it is a masterpiece of world drama. Aeschylus, the first tragedian of the Western canon, yet still as relevant and unsettling as Shakespeare, Chekhov or Beckett, distils the whole of human nature into this work.
In Agamemnon, the king returns to Argos victorious from the Trojan War and is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra. In The Libation Bearers, Electra mourns her dead father and longs for her brother, Orestes, who returns from exile to commit matricide. The Eumenides deals with the trial of Orestes, after he has been pursued by the Furies to Athens. This public trial, presided over by Athena, establishes a new principle of justice and brings an end to the cycle of bloodshed and vengeance (here haunted by the curse of the house of Atreus).
The power of this text, which may strike us as desperately alien, unsettles us because of the clarity with which it reveals itself to be eternally contemporary in its many dramatic dimensions: here it speaks of power, of powerlessness, of democracy, of autocracy, of justice, of vengeance, death, madness, war, vanity and excess, pain and suffering; in short, of human nature and its fierce and merciless need to organise itself collectively.
The Oresteia is a monument of dramatic literature on a par with the great works of theatre. Its poetry, which runs through the drama, the choruses and the dances, is rendered here into Portuguese by José Pedro Serra.

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