Aeschylus was born in Eleusis, a Greek city near Athens, in 525 BC. He was the first of the great Greek tragedians, preceding Sophocles and Euripides, and is often credited with the invention of tragic drama. Before Aeschylus, plays were primitive, consisting of a single actor and a commentating chorus. In his works, he added a “second actor” (often more than one) thus creating an infinite number of new dramatic possibilities. He lived until 456 BC, fighting in the wars against Persia and achieving great fame in the Athenian theater world. Aeschylus wrote nearly ninety plays; however, only seven have survived into the modern era, including such famous works as Prometheus Bound and The SevenAgainstThebes. Agamemnon is the first in a trilogy, called the Oresteia, which continues with The Libation Bearers and ends with The Eumenides. The trilogy – the only work of its type to survive from ancient Greece – is considered by many critics to be the greatest Athenian tragedy ever written, both for the power of its poetry and the strength of its characters. Agamemnon depicts the murder of the main character by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover; The Libation-Bearers continues the story with the return of Agamemnon's son, Orestes, who kills his mother and avenges his father. Orestes is pursued by the Furies as punishment for his matricide, and eventually finds refuge in Athens, where the god Athena relieves him of his persecution. The events of Agamemnon take place in a context that would have been familiar to an Athenian audience. Agamemnon returns from his victory at Troy, besieged for ten years by the Greek armies who were trying to recover Helen, the wife of Agamemnon's brother, treacherously stolen by the Trojan prince, Paris. (The events of the Trojan War are recounted in Homer's Iliad.) The tragic events of the play result from the crimes committed by Agamemnon's family. His father, Atreus, murdered and cooked the children of his own brother, Thyestes, and served them to him; Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus (Thyestes' only surviving son), seeks revenge for this crime. Meanwhile, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to obtain a favorable wind for Troy, and Clytemnestra murdered him to avenge his death. The tragedies were Athenian, reflecting the taste and intellectual climate of Athens in the mid-5th century. The weight of history and heritage becomes a major theme of the play, and indeed of the entire trilogy, as the family it depicts cannot escape the cursed cycle of bloodshed from its past. Aeschylus wrote this victorious trilogy in Athens, 458 BC. Participation in a loosely organized political “group” is thought to have influenced his personality.