Literature and is the history dot come. Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history. Episode 27, The Bloody King.

This show begins a trilogy of plays by Escales.

Escales was one of the four supremely important ancient Greek dramatists whose work has survived from Antiquity and this

trilogy was first produced in the spring of 458 b.C. in the city of Athens.

Today we're going to cover the first play in what is called

the Orestian trilogy, a play called Agamemnon.

Agamemnon in the works of Homer is the brutal king of the Greeks during the Trojan War, and the play Agamemnon is about him coming home.

The second play in the Aristian trilogy, which we'll cover in the next episode is called the

libation bearers. The second play is about Agamemnon's son, Orestes and a grisly crime that Orestes commits. And note that Agamemnon's son Orestes

is where the Orestian trilogy gets its name. The final play in the trilogy, and we'll cover

this one two episodes from now, is called The Humanities. This third play is about a group of monsters pursuing arrestees for the crime that he's committed, and what happens once he goes to Athens to seek justice.

In the trilogy that we'll explore over the next few episodes,

there will be cannibalism and incest and severed heads and horrifying betrayal, and a family inclined to

murder generation after nightmarish generation.

The playwright Escales is about to take us through some unforgettable darkness.

But at the end of it all, though, at the end of the whole story, there will be hope, the best kind of hope in all literature, the kind that looks into the rusty barrels and bloody trenches of human experience,

and says that if we work together, if we are organized and attentive, we can and will make things better for ourselves and for those who come after us.

Escales isn't quite the household name that Homer is but he should be ladies gentleman nymphs

saters get ready for the father of ancient Greek drama, Escales, and his masterpiece, the Orestian trilogy. I was I want you to think for a minute about the end of Homer's Odyssey. It's probably been a while or maybe you didn't catch my episodes on The Odyssey, so I'll recap.

At the end of this older Greek, Epic, the Odyssey, 300 or so years older than Escales' plays, Odysseus finishes his

Odyssey and he comes home to Ithaca. And when Odysseus gets there, he finds that over a hundred men have taken up

residence in his palace, and that these men are courting his wife and devouring his food and livestock.

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