Aeschylus - The Oresteia - 1979

Aeschylus – The Oresteia – Easton Press – 1979
100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series

Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC) was the earliest of the three great Athenian tragedians and is conventionally called the father of tragedy. Born at Eleusis, he fought in the Greek lines at Marathon against the first Persian invasion and probably also at Salamis, experiences that left their mark on his earliest surviving play, The Persians. Of some ninety plays attributed to him in antiquity, only seven survive complete. He is credited with the decisive innovation of introducing a second actor onto the stage, transforming tragedy from a single performer's exchange with the chorus into genuine dramatic dialogue, and his work established many of the conventions on which Sophocles and Euripides would build. He died at Gela in Sicily, where, according to tradition, his epitaph commemorated only his service at Marathon.

This volume presents Aeschylus's masterpiece, the Oresteia, the only complete trilogy of Greek tragedies that has come down from antiquity. First performed at Athens in 458 BC, two years before the poet's death, it comprises the three plays that follow the curse on the house of Atreus: Agamemnon, in which the returning king of Mycenae is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; The Libation Bearers, in which their son Orestes avenges his father by killing his mother and her lover Aegisthus; and The Furies, in which Orestes is pursued by the avenging spirits and at last absolved by a court convened by Athena on the Areopagus. The trilogy traces the movement from blood vengeance to civil justice, and remains one of the foundational works of European drama, taken up by writers as different as Eugene O'Neill in Mourning Becomes Electra, Sartre, Giraudoux, and Richard Strauss.

The text is given in the verse translation of E.D.A. Morshead, the Victorian classical scholar whose Oresteia of 1881 long stood as the standard English rendering, revised by Moses Hadas. The introduction is by the English novelist and translator Rex Warner. The illustrations are by the British painter, sculptor, and writer Michael Ayrton (1921–1975), whose work was preoccupied throughout his career with the figures and myths of ancient Greece, and whose paintings for the Oresteia were first published by the Limited Editions Club in 1961.

Full genuine leather binding in dark forest green
Front and back covers with Greek key borders framing a central gilt design of paired tragic and comic masks
Spine without raised bands, decorated with gilt urn and wave motifs and gilt title and author lettering
Easton Press monogram stamped in gilt on the lower spine panel
All edges gilt
Frontispiece portrait of Aeschylus, specially commissioned
Printed on archival-quality acid-neutral paper
Printed and bound in the United States of America

Condition is fine. A well-preserved collector's copy.
Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.