These questions, which puzzled thoughtful Athenians in the decades after the battle of Marathon, provided the theme for Agamemnon, The Choephori and The Eumenides - those grim tragedies that make up the Oresteian Trilogy. In these plays Aeschylus (525-c. 456 BC) takes as his subject the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the roal family of Argos - a chain finally broken onyl by the interve