Literature and history dot come Oh, Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 28, a Mother's Curse.

This show covers an ancient Greek play called The Libation Bearers.

The second play in the Orestian trilogy, the trilogy which is the most famous work of the great dramatist

Escales.

If you're just jumping in,

you might want to listen to the previous show

so you're up to speed on events so far. The Orestian trilogy, and again

we're about to cover the middle play in this trilogy, the Orestian trilogy

premiered in the spring of 458 BC in the Dionysian Festival of Athens, Greece.

The three plays won the 67-year-old war veteran Escales first prize in that

year's contest and they seem to epitomize the spirit of Athens in the middle part of the 400s. Ever since its first

premiere, the story of the Aristion trilogy has been sewn deeply into the history of world drama. Its core themes, revenge, an inescapable

curse, an inborn propensity for violence, and the search for order and clarity after ceaseless generations of brutality.

These themes are everywhere within the darker plays and films and television programs that we still watch today.

As we learned in the previous show, Escales was literature's first known war veteran.

He and his brother charged the Persian army at the fields of Marathon, and only one of them

made it back.

Escales was on the decks of ships that smashed into Persian ones at the Battle of

Solamas.

He was of the age of Leidas and Xerxes, Themistically's and Pericles.

And Escales who had seen real war was tired of screaming battlefield deaths and the spectacle of glamorized violence in the

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