Bloomsbury Academic (2026) h/b 254pp (ISBN 9781350534483)
No student of Greek tragedy can fail to be awed by the Oresteia trilogy. The three plays, Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides, trace one of the most terrible and consequential arcs of the genre. In the first play, Agamemnon returns in triumph from Troy only to be murdered in his bath by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, an act of vengeance for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia at Aulis. In the Choephori, their son Orestes returns from exile to avenge his father by killing his own mother, compelled by Apollo’s command, yet committing the most unnatural of crimes. In the Eumenides, the consequences of that matricide are worked out on a cosmic scale: Orestes is pursued by the Furies, the ancient goddesses of blood vengeance, until the matter is finally resolved by Athena’s institution of the Areopagus court at Athens, where Orestes is acquitted and the Furies are persuaded to become Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, beneficent guardians of the city. No other work of ancient literature moves so ambitiously from domestic horror to theological settlement, from the personal to the political, from the archaic logic of retribution to something approaching civic justice.
In this book Richard Jenkyns seeks to show why the Oresteia is a supreme work of literature. His approach is uncompromisingly aesthetic. Readers who come to the book hoping to learn about the historical background to Athens’s fifth-century treaty with Argos, or about the actual cultic worship of the Semnai Theai on the Areopagus hill, will need to look elsewhere. Jenkyns is not unaware of such matters, but he declines to let them crowd out what he takes to be the primary business of criticism: the experience of the poetry itself, the way images accumulate and reverberate, the texture of the dramatic language moment by moment. In Jenkyns’ hands this is a productive approach, though readers might occasionally crave a little more context when, for instance, the theological or political stakes of the Eumenides are under discussion.
The close readings are linguistically demanding. This is not a book that can be fully appreciated without Greek: the ideal reader will have a solid command of Greek and be at home with the terminology of Greek tragic composition. Jenkyns is scrupulous about translation, and no Greek word or phrase is left without an English rendering, but the reader who cannot feel how a word sits within the iambic trimeter, or hear the surprise of a particular compound adjective, may worry that something essential is slipping through their fingers even while the argument remains accessible.
Jenkyns sets his face firmly against those who see elements of harshness or crudity in Aeschylus’s writing, seeing instead a wide range of sensibility, from directness that strikes like a hammer-blow to subtle pathos and unexpected gentleness. He is unabashed about pressing questions that the text leaves implicit. In discussing the famous carpet scene, for instance, he asks us not merely to register the symbolic weight of the crimson cloths spread before Agamemnon, but to visualise what happens to them afterwards. Are they still lying there when Clytemnestra follows her husband into the palace? If so, she and Aegisthus will tread them too, but shod, whereas Agamemnon has walked on them barefoot. The distinction is quietly devastating: Agamemnon’s bare feet make his submission to Clytemnestra’s persuasion something bodily and exposed, a king humbled into a kind of nakedness even before the bath that will complete his humiliation and his death. His murderers, by contrast, pass over the same cloths insulated, untouched. The gesture that was meant to be transgressive hubris turns out to mark vulnerability rather than pride.
This kind of reading is well suited to Aeschylus, a dramatist whose stagecraft is so often a matter of what is withheld or implied. More than Sophocles or Euripides, Aeschylus composes in silences and lacunae: the watchman who hints at things he dare not say, the chorus who understand less than they feel, the offstage cry that tells us everything. A critic who is willing to ask what we would actually see, where the cloths lie, who treads on them, in what condition of exposure or protection, is working with the grain of a poetry that consistently does more than it says. This is not to impose on the text but to respond to its deeper implications. Aeschylus does not tell us whether the cloths remain, just as he has chosen not to tell us a great deal else; but the poetry insists we keep asking, even where certainty is beyond our reach.
Jenkyns brings the same attentiveness to the moral and psychological issues of the drama. The question of Agamemnon’s guilt is one of the great cruces of the play, and Jenkyns handles it at length. Of what, exactly, is Agamemnon guilty? Jenkyns distinguishes at least five categories that are held simultaneously in play: legal guilt, moral guilt, ritual guilt, contingent guilt (the guilt of a man caught in circumstances not of his making), and psychological guilt, the guilt that accrues from what a deed does to the soul of the one who commits it. These are overlapping lenses, each illuminating a different facet of a man who faces a dilemma between two courses of action, both of which are repugnant. To sail for Troy, Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter; to refuse is to abandon the expedition, to dishonour the obligations of guest-friendship, to leave a great wrong unavenged. There is no innocent path. Jenkyns is firm that Aeschylus intends Agamemnon to be impressive, not ‘the brute or jackass that some interpreters have supposed’, but a figure of genuine weight and dignity, whose destruction carries the full tragic force that only the fall of a great man can generate. The verdict of Eumenides resolves the blood feud but cannot dissolve its moral residue. Pollution can be cleansed, but not the image of Iphigeneia's father standing on the beach at Aulis. The trilogy ends in civic order, which is not the same thing as absolution.
And yet the trilogy ends in joy. ‘The Oresteia concludes with more than a hundred lines of pure jubilation’—a passage unlike anything that has preceded it, in which the darkness that has gathered across three plays is transfigured. In typical style, Jenkyns compares it to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which like the Oresteia ‘evolves late in its course into a different kind of piece’, something that could not have been predicted from what came before, yet which retrospectively makes everything before it feel like preparation. Both works earn their joy the hard way by refusing to abbreviate the suffering that precedes it. The jubilation at the end of the Eumenides carries the weight of Iphigeneia, the crimson cloths, and Orestes’ matricide into a new key.
Jenkyns’ scrupulous, many-sided attention makes the book worth returning to repeatedly, for it is dense and sophisticated and not an easy read. The author is well aware of the vast heritage of the play’s scholarly interpreters; he often engages with predecessors by name and is unafraid to wade into tricky problems of text and interpretation. Jenkyns does not simplify Aeschylus in order to praise him, nor does he aestheticise away the violence and moral darkness that are inseparable from the trilogy’s grandeur. He shows how the poetry holds irresolvable tensions, and how this leads not to a failure of meaning but to an enrichment of it. Those who read this book alongside the Oresteia will find themselves returning to the Greek with sharpened eyes and an expanded sense of how much is still there to be found.
Armand D’Angour
Jesus College Oxford