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Produced in 458 BC, Aeschylus' Choephori stands as the second play in the Oresteian trilogy. The bloodshed begun in the first play with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra is here continued when Agamemnon's son Orestes avenges his father's death by killing Clytemnestra. It is not until the third and final play, Eumenides, that peace is restored to the family of the Atreiadae.
This edition (first published in hardback in 1986) takes into account the large amount of recent research on the play and tackles the problems presented by an unusually corrupt text. The introduction discusses the pre-Aeschylean 'Orestes' tradition in literature (from Homer to Pindar) and art (representations on vases and reliefs), as well as the place of Choephori within the Oresteia, its imagery and dramatic structure, the questions of staging the play, and the manuscript tradition. Much of the commentary looks at problems of style, dramatic technique, and interpretation of the play, and before each scene is discussed an analysis of its contribution to the drama as a whole is supplied. The text and critical apparatus reproduced are those of D. L. Page (Oxford Classical Texts).
