Scene 1
The watchman on the roof
The watchman has been stationed on the roof of Agamemnon's palace at Argos for a full year, watching the night sky for a signal-fire from Troy. When it finally blazes across the dark he springs to his feet, shouts with joy, dances the opening steps of his relief. He calls for the queen — Clytemnestra — to be told. And then, in the most precise dramatic foreshadowing in the trilogy, he says that an ox stands heavy on his tongue. He knows something about the house. He will not say it. But "if the house itself had a voice, it could best tell its own tale."
Scene 2
The parodos: ten years, the eagles, Aulis
The twelve Argive elders, leaning on their staves, enter chanting. Ten years since the army sailed. They recall the omen at the harbour of Aulis: two eagles tearing open a pregnant hare, a sign read by the prophet Calchas as meaning Troy will fall — and that Artemis, angry at the killing, will demand a price. The ode moves from the omen to the sacrifice at Aulis, where Agamemnon chose to kill his daughter Iphigenia in order to get a wind for the fleet. The parodos is the longest and most complex choral passage in surviving Greek tragedy; it is also the moral foundation of everything that follows.
Scene 3
Clytemnestra and the beacon chain
Clytemnestra appears and tells the incredulous elders that Troy has fallen. Her proof: a relay of beacon-fires she arranged from Troy to Argos — mountain peak to mountain peak across the sea. She names every station. The speech is extraordinary as a demonstration of planning, intelligence, and control. The elders are astonished. She is already five steps ahead of everyone.
Scene 4
First stasimon: Zeus and the justice of suffering
The first stasimon is the most important choral ode in Agamemnon for understanding the trilogy's theology. Zeus is not simply powerful; he compels wisdom through suffering. Paris stole Helen; Troy will pay for it in blood. But the ode circles back to a harder question: what is the price for the man who started all this — who sacrificed his daughter to get the war that is now, finally, won? The chorus cannot answer. It knows that the law is inescapable: whoever acts transgresses; whoever transgresses suffers.
Scene 5
The herald arrives from Troy
A herald arrives from Troy — the first man to reach Argos from the war in ten years. He greets the earth, the gods, the homeland with tears of joy. The chorus cannot tell him what is waiting for his master, because Clytemnestra is present. The herald reports the fall of Troy, praises Agamemnon, and is asked about Menelaus. He hedges, then confesses: a storm struck the fleet on the way home. Menelaus is missing. The chorus takes the news with dread.
Scene 6
Second stasimon: Helen and the ruin she brought
The second stasimon meditates on Helen through two interlocking images: first, the lion's cub raised as a pet that grows up to destroy the house that sheltered it; second, the spirit of Ruin that enters a prosperous city in the shape of a beautiful woman. The ode is not a misogynist attack on Helen — it is a meditation on how destruction conceals itself inside what looks like grace. The chorus is also, obliquely, thinking about the woman who is even now preparing the palace for Agamemnon's return.
Scene 7
The purple carpet
Agamemnon enters on a chariot with Cassandra beside him. Clytemnestra delivers her great speech of welcome — describing her lonely ten years, her vigilance, her devotion — in terms that the audience knows are systematically false. Then she orders her women to strew the path with purple tapestries and asks the king to walk across them. Agamemnon resists: this is the honour of gods, not men. Clytemnestra presses him. He gives in. He walks across the purple and into the palace.
Scene 8
Third stasimon: the foreboding of the chorus
The third stasimon is the chorus's attempt to diagnose its own fear. Agamemnon has returned, Troy has fallen, the prayers of ten years have been answered. And yet there is an inexplicable dread in the chorus's breast — a sense that something is not right, that the scales are about to move. The ode turns on the image of blood spilled on the ground that cannot be called back, and the law that prosperity, left unchecked, eventually destroys itself.
Scene 9
Cassandra's vision
Cassandra has been sitting silent in the chariot since Agamemnon's arrival. Clytemnestra tries to get her into the palace; she will not move. When Clytemnestra gives up and goes in, Cassandra begins to speak — first in cries, then in oracular verse, then in plain speech. She names the curse on the house, sees the murdered children of Thyestes, sees the bathtub, sees the axe. The chorus cannot understand her. She is the trilogy's most complete witness: she knows the past crimes, sees the present crime as it is happening, and knows her own death is five minutes away. Then she takes off her prophet's robes and goes in.
Scene 10
The exodos: the murder, the body, the defence
Agamemnon's voice cries out from inside the palace — struck, again, mortally. The twelve old men fragment into twelve separate voices, each suggesting a different action, none decisive enough to act. The doors open. Clytemnestra stands in a pool of blood over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. She gives a speech of absolute self-justification: she did this; she is not ashamed; this blood answers the blood of Iphigenia; the curse of the house has moved through her and she has discharged its debt. The chorus mourns, argues, condemns her. Aegisthus appears to claim political power. The scene ends in a standoff.
Scene 11
Orestes at his father's tomb
Eight years have passed. Orestes has grown up in exile at the court of Strophius of Phocis. He has come home to Argos with his cousin Pylades, commanded by Apollo to avenge his father's murder. He kneels at Agamemnon's tomb and cuts two locks of hair — a ritual offering. Then he sees a group of women coming in mourning clothes toward the tomb: his sister Electra among them, sent by Clytemnestra to pour libations. He steps aside to watch.
Scene 12
Parodos: the women sent to the tomb
Electra leads a chorus of captive women toward the tomb. They sing of the terror of the night — Clytemnestra has had a dream, and the dream was bad enough to send them out with offerings for the dead king she murdered. The women are loyal to the house of Atreus, not to its current rulers; their grief is real. They describe the dream in their song: a serpent nursed at a woman's breast.
Scene 13
The recognition at the tomb
Electra pours the libations and prays — for the return of an avenger, for Orestes. Then she sees on the grave a lock of hair — the same colour as her own, the same texture. She is bewildered: she cannot believe it is from anyone but Orestes, and yet she cannot be sure. Then she finds the footprints. Then Orestes steps forward, and they are recognised — in a scene that is the emotional centre of the second play.
Scene 14
The Kommos: the great lyric exchange
The Kommos is the lyric and emotional heart of the second play. Orestes, Electra, and the chorus exchange verses at the tomb — calling on Agamemnon's ghost to hear them, naming their grievances, building toward the decision that must be made. It is not a plan; it is a summoning. The three parties are not plotting a course of action; they are drawing on the dead man's weight to give them the strength to do what they have to do.
Scene 15
The plan: Orestes will enter as a stranger
The recognition scene leads directly into planning. Orestes lays out what Apollo commanded and what he intends to do: enter the palace as a Phocian stranger with news that Orestes is dead, gain Clytemnestra's trust, and kill Aegisthus first, then her. He gives the chorus its instructions. Then, crucially, the nurse Cilissa appears — a woman who raised Orestes from infancy and is genuinely grieving at the false news of his death — and the chorus uses her to ensure that Aegisthus will come alone, without his bodyguard.
Scene 16
Second stasimon: crimes of women, justice coming
The second stasimon of the Libation Bearers catalogues famous crimes of women — Althaea who burned the brand that held her son's life, the women of Lemnos who killed all their husbands, Scylla who betrayed her father for a foreign enemy. The ode is not simply a list of atrocities; it is the chorus building its moral authority for what is about to happen. Then it turns: and now, Justice herself is being sharpened and put into a hand fit to wield it.
Scene 17
The killing — Aegisthus, then Clytemnestra
Orestes and Pylades, disguised as Phocian travellers, have gained entry and told Clytemnestra that Orestes is dead. Aegisthus arrives alone, as the chorus arranged. He is killed inside, off stage. A servant runs out crying murder. Clytemnestra appears. She and Orestes speak directly to each other — mother and son — and she bares her breast and asks if he will kill the woman who nursed him. Pylades speaks his only lines in the play: Apollo's command must be obeyed. Orestes takes her inside. The killing happens off stage.
Scene 18
Orestes flees — the Furies begin
The final scene of the second play is very short. Orestes stands over the bodies, justifying his actions. And then — mid-speech — he begins to see things the others cannot: women, robed in black, with snakes in their hair, dripping blood from their eyes. He knows what they are. The chorus cannot see them. He names them: the Furies of his mother. He tells the chorus he will go to Delphi and throw himself on Apollo's protection. He runs.
Scene 19
The Pythia finds something at the altar
The Pythian priestess opens the temple of Apollo at Delphi with a prayer cataloguing the gods who have held the shrine since the beginning. Then she goes in to open for the day's consultations. She comes back out almost immediately, unable to stand upright, crawling on her hands. At the central altar is a blood-stained man with a drawn sword and an olive branch. Around him, slumped asleep on the altar steps, a pack of women unlike anything she has ever seen — not quite Gorgons, not quite Harpies, "black, and altogether abominable." She calls for Apollo.
Scene 20
Parodos: the ghost of Clytemnestra wakes the Furies
The ghost of Clytemnestra appears above the sleeping Furies. She taunts them: while they sleep, their quarry is escaping. She is among the dishonoured dead — killed by her own son — and they have done nothing. She wakes them one by one. The Furies rouse, sniff the air for Orestes's blood, find he has gone, and break into the binding song — their great hymn to their own power, with which they intend to freeze their prey wherever he has fled.
Scene 21
Orestes at the shrine of Athena
Orestes has arrived at Athens and taken hold of the ancient wooden statue of Athena at the Acropolis — the act of a formal suppliant claiming divine protection. He has followed every instruction: he has kept himself ritually pure, he has done what Apollo commanded, he has come to the one place Apollo said would give him justice. He calls on Athena to come and judge his case.
Scene 22
Athena arrives and founds the court
Athena appears, having heard Orestes's prayer from afar — from her temple at Troy, in fact. She listens to both parties. The Furies explain their mandate; Orestes explains his situation. Athena says: the case is too grave for any single authority to resolve. She will summon a jury of twelve Athenian citizens. She names the place — the hill of Ares, the Areopagus — and the purpose: a court for homicide cases, to stand forever as the city's legal institution. She goes to summon the jurors.
Scene 23
First stasimon: the Furies defend their ancient right
The Furies sing their stasimon while the jury is being assembled. Their ode is a defence of fear — not panic, but the awe that citizens feel before the law, especially before the oldest laws that govern blood. If the new court acquits Orestes, they warn, the old laws that hold murder in check will be dissolved. Men will commit crimes without fear. The city will suffer. The Furies are not simply defending themselves; they are defending the principle of deterrence.
Scene 24
The trial on the Areopagus
The trial of Orestes before the first Athenian jury. The Furies prosecute: did you kill your mother? Yes. Then the blood-right is theirs. Apollo defends: on divine command; and in any case, the mother is not the true parent, only the vessel for the father's seed. Athena charges the jury. The votes are cast into the urns — one for conviction, one for acquittal. When the count comes, the votes are exactly equal.
Scene 25
Second stasimon: the Furies' rage at the verdict
Athena declares her ballot: she votes for acquittal, because she herself was born without a mother and is therefore inclined to favour the male principle in all disputes. With her vote, acquittal has one more than conviction. Orestes is free. He thanks Athena and the court and leaves for Argos. The Furies begin their stasimon of rage: they have been dishonoured by younger gods; they will poison Athens and destroy its crops.
Scene 26
Athena persuades the Furies: the Eumenides
Athena speaks to the Furies three times — each time they refuse; each time she offers more — until they finally accept. She offers them a home beneath the Areopagus, permanent honour from the citizens, a share in Athens's prosperity, and a new name: the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. They accept. The procession forms — citizens, torchbearers, the Furies now robed in crimson, the whole city escorting them to their new shrine. The cycle of vengeance ends not with a final killing but with a ceremony.