The plays comprising Aeschylus' trilogy, The Oresteia, continue and complete the story of the Fall of the House of Atreus. In Agamemnon, the title hero comes home victorious after 10 years of warfare at Troy, only to be killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Jumping forward in time, Libation Bearers shows Agamemnon's son, Orestes, returning home as an adult and avenging his father by killing his mother. At the beginning of Eumenides we find Orestes, desperate to shed the Furies, the primordial avenging spirits chasing him, in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. A newly established civic court in Athens judges his case, Athena casts her vote in his favour and so ends the cycle of bloody revenge.
