'Bring me my man-killing axe!' If that doesn't say it all for Clytemnestra, I don't know what does.'Eumenides' was ok. Her killing Agamemnon wasn't *right*, but it wasn't all that terrible (for fiction), considering Iphigenia.I suppose I just rooted a lot more for Clytemnestra than Orestes. She misused them, her own daughter included. (If we're assuming that Aegisthus is female in marrow.) Granted, two harmful women who killed his father, but the issue of Iphigenia wasn't addressed at all, not even by Clytemnestra.I think it was just of Orestes to kill Clytemnestra, but only because it seemed that Clytemnestra had done wrong in the way she managed the people. Orestes comes back and saves the day by being male and being able to kill two women. In Libation Bearers, that tension wasn't there for me. I thought that it was all right, as far as these things go, but the others which I've read before were much more satisfying.I knew that Clytemnestra was going to kill Agamemnon (as the play-goers in Athens would have known, who went to see it performed for the first time). The Libation Bearers seemed too two-dimensional. We could peer into their soul and see who they were, and why they should be spared from harm. Perhaps I can come about this a different way.In Agamemnon, every single character seemed involved and (to me) interesting. It was too predictable and, to me, didn't even come close to the depth of Agamemnon, with its turns and twists and deceit and intimate wishes for personal.personal something. Libation Bearers had people whining, 'Woe is me! Whatever am I to do?' with Big Good Orestes killing the Evil Villains With No Heart in the end. Agamemnon simply seemed to have more drama and problems in it. I didn't really like 'Libation Bearers,' actually. Definitely amusing, to say the least.Agamemnon is surely my favorite of the three in the Oresteia. It just made me smile the subtle turns of phrase which he peppered all around the play. I won't say that I laughed out loud, because I didn't.

I thought that they had much more soul than in 'Iphigenia at Aulis.' Aeschylus paid attention to each character, whether they were main or not.There was also a kind of sly wit in the Agamemnon which was lacking in Iphigenia.

Perhaps it was the depth of the characters. And then, when the chorus rebuked her and told her why she was abhorrent and should be exiled, I moved next to them and was nodding again. When she ranted on about how she was right to kill her husband, it was as if I was standing over her shoulder, nodding away. It was as if I was having a conversation with the guard at the beginning, and with the herald, with the chorus, with Clytemnestra and then Agamemnon and definitely with Clytemnestra again. There's something that he did that brought me right up close, face to face with each character. I definitely liked Aeschylus's style better than Euripides' (in 'Iphigenia at Aulis').

Aeschylus produced the oresteia