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Hello Richard Wagner recalled the visceral sensations of reading east-class great trilogy for the first time.

I could see the Oresti in my mind's eye hereot. Nothing could equal the sublime emotion with which the Agamemnon inspired me.

And to the last word of the Humanities, I remained in an atmosphere so far removed from a present day that I've never since been really able to reconcile myself with modern literature.

Each class audience were all familiar with the tale of one man's return home from the Trojan War.

Home as Odyssey recounted Odysseus perilous journey home, the forcefully juction of the suitors from his household, and his reunion with his wife Penelope and his son Telemarchus.

East-class had a very different tale of homecoming to tell in his Oresti. Agamemnon arrives home from Troy to a murderous welcome from a vengeful wife and a cycle of atrocities unfolds in his household.

Why did East-class make the family the subject of his bloody revenge tragedy? And how did his trilogy make a contribution to the development of Athenian legal institutions?

And why has the Oresti had such a powerful hold over the modern imagination?

When me to discuss East-class Oresti, I read Heath Hall, leave a Hugh and Professor of Greek Cultural History at Durham University, Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Berkburg College University of London.

Edith Hall, can we start with East-class himself? What do you know about him?

We don't know very much about him. We do know that he was born in about 525 BC in Iluses, which is on the outskirts of Athenian territory, into an upper class citizen family, lives through the most extraordinary period in Athenian history when the democracy was actually founded, when he was a young man.

He must have had a huge effect on him, and fought in the Persian Wars, and died at some point a few years after the Oresti, which was produced in 458 BC.

So as usual, with that time in that city, he was a soldier as well as everything else. He had to be a soldier as well as everything else.

Absolutely. If you wanted the rights of the democratic citizen, you had the responsibility to fight as a hot-light on the frontline and risk your life.

He was riding in the 5th century BC when the players were performed at festivals. Can you give us some sort of cultural context, which enables to have an idea of what sort of place the Oresti would be performed in who would turn up, what he pretended and so on and so forth?

All the dramas we've got were first performed at festivals of the wine god Dionysus. There's a very big festival every year in what we would call April, which is actually when the sailing season starts, and it's a huge international Greek festival.

Greeks come from all over the Mediterranean. That's the most important thing. It's Athens on display. Athens showing itself off to her allies and to the world.

It's on the cusp between a religious event, a worship of the god, and a civic event, a political event like something a bit more like the Commonwealth Games or something as sort of international display.

And the plays are performed competitively. Escalus is putting in a group of three tragedies against other tragedians, and he's trying to win.

And the way you won was by Clappometer. The only way that you could win was if the judges were influenced by the crowd into figuring out which was actually the play that had gone down best.

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