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Jun 07, 2010The_Bill rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
The first play, AGAMEMNON, has a really amazing climax. The death, when it finally comes, has been built up to what Nietzsche might call a Dionysian climax, in which the reader is swept up in a euphoric wave as identity, the principium individuatonis, is burst asunder. This is not tragedy in the Aristotelian sense of catharsis - it is not a mere release of tension; it is something more than that, and sensitive readers will find a lot of value in it. The second and third plays in the trilogy are more notable for their tight plots and intriguing team-ups. EUMENIDES, I believe, begins with Orestes and Apollo in a sort of buddy-cop relationship as the Sun God helps the young king escape the Furies, those terrible spirits of vengeance that the Greeks ironically called The Kindly Ones (Eumenides). The climax of these is not the sublime ecstasy of AGAMEMNON, but rather a much more directed and mundane ending - likely anticlimactic for most readers.