She desires his death to avenge the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia, to exterminate the only thing hindering her from taking the crown, and to finally be able to publicly embrace her good-time lover Aegisthus.

[4] The play opens with a watchman looking down and over the sea, reporting that he has been lying restless "like a dog" for a year, waiting to see some sort of signal confirming a Greek victory in Troy.

The watchman sees a light far off in the distance—a bonfire signaling Troy's fall—and is overjoyed at the victory and hopes for the hasty return of his king, as the house has "wallowed" in his absence.

Similarly, Clytemnestra is both her husband's murderer and her daughter's avenger; Aeschylus continues to explore the fundamental moral quandary of vengeance and "justified" bloodshed in The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.

Unrecognized, Orestes is then able to enter the palace, where he then kills Aegisthus, who was without a guard due to the intervention of the chorus in relaying Clytemnestra's message.

48-52The final play of the Oresteia, called The Eumenides (Εὐμενίδες, Eumenídes), illustrates how the sequence of events in the trilogy ends up in the development of social order or a proper judicial system in Athenian society.

[14] This does not sit well with the Furies but Athena eventually persuades them to accept the decision; instead of violently retaliating against wrongdoers, become a constructive force of vigilance in Athens.

It is widely believed to have been based on the story told in Book IV of Homer's Odyssey, where Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother, tries to return home from Troy and finds himself on an island off Egypt, "whither he seems to have been carried by the storm described in Agam.674".

The title character, "the deathless Egyptian Proteus", the Old Man of the Sea, is described in Homer as having been visited by Menelaus, who sought to learn his future.

[17] The only extant fragment that has been definitively attributed to Proteus was translated by Herbert Weir Smyth: A wretched piteous dove, in quest of food, dashed amid the winnowing-fans, its breast broken in twain.

[3]In 2002, Theatre Kingston mounted a production of The Oresteia and included a new reconstruction of Proteus based on the episode in The Odyssey and loosely arranged according to the structure of extant satyr plays.

She found a new lover Aegisthus and when Agamemnon returned to Argos from the Trojan War, Clytemnestra killed him by stabbing him in the bathtub and went on to inherit his throne.

The death of Cassandra, the princess of Troy, taken captive by Agamemnon in order to fill a place as a concubine, can also be seen as an act of revenge for taking another woman as well as the life of Iphigenia.

[23] Later on, in The Libation Bearers, Orestes and Electra (siblings and remaining children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra) succeed in killing their mother to avenge their father's death.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung attributes her behavior to what he coined as the "Electra complex" the jealousy of the daughter towards the mother for her sexual engagement with the father.

Sigmund Freud disagreed with this claim, noting that the "Oedipus complex" cannot be applied directly to the female sex, since sons do not undergo the same penis-envy as daughters.

[29] Many contemporary scholars have theorized what this matricide means in the context of womanhood: Dana Tor invokes Lacan to argue that Electra's scheming represents a "ravage" between mother and daughter; Doris Bernstein sees the murder as a step on the path towards Electra's individuation; and Melanie Klein views it as emblematic of the dual power of the psyche to split of the mother into a good object and a bad one.

[30] Serena Heller recalls Ronald Britton's idea of the Athene-Antigone Complex to explain Electra's hatred of her mother deriving from an intense idolization of her father and, thus, a compulsion to exonerate herself from the restraints of feminity and the female body.

[32] Amber Jacobs also claims that the matricide in the Oresteia ultimately embodies a societal repulsion towards the female gender, as Athena's motherless status allows Zeus to argue that the father is more important than the mother and absolve Orestes of his crimes.

[33] Tor ultimately claims that the convergence of both Orestes' and Electra's motivations for revenge are two-fold: both a repayment for the debt of desire and a symbol of feminine jouissance.

Professor of philosophical and historical anthropology Elizabeth von Samsonow notes the intense debate over Electra's relevance in the murder of Clymenestra—Sophocles, for example, viewed her as a key component of the killing while Aeschylus sees her as incidental—but refutes the tendency to shoehorn her motivations into Freud's model.

She asks for scholars to reconsider Electra as undergoing vagina-envy, resulting from the woman's powerful and sexually-active position in pre-Hellenic society.

By liberating Electra from the male-centric complexes and histories that restrict her motivations, study of mother-daughter relations can evolve into an "outline of a future world.

"[34] In another of her works, Jacobs, too, writes on the untheorized state of matricide in literature and asks for an expansion of symbolism beyond the classic Oedipean model.

Leading up to here, we can see that the curse of the House of Atreus was one forged from murder, incest and deceit, and continued in this way for generations through the family line.

[37][38] Those who join the family seem to play a part in the curse as well, as seen in Clytemnestra when she murders her husband Agamemnon, in revenge for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia.

A few years previously, legislation sponsored by the democratic reformer Ephialtes had stripped the court of the Areopagus, hitherto one of the most powerful vehicles of upper-class political power, of all of its functions except some minor religious duties and the authority to try homicide cases; By having his story being resolved by a judgement of the Areopagus, Aeschylus may be expressing his approval of this reform.

[46] In 2015, Robert Icke's production of his own adaptation was a sold out hit at the Almeida Theatre and was transferred that same year to the West End's Trafalgar Studios.

[48] The following year, in 2016, playwright Zinnie Harris premiered her adaptation, This Restless House, at the Citizen's Theatre to five-star critical acclaim.