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The Choephori - music to a play

'The Choephori or 'Libation Bearers' is the second of the Oresteia trilogy by the Greek playwright Aeschylus.

Aeschylus wrote nearly 90 plays and was one of the most celebrated playwrights of ancient greece. Many of his plays deal with battles, victories and the ramifications of social justice in ancient Greece.

Although written nearly 2,500 years ago the stories told are timeless in their portrayal of human emotions and the depths of the human psyche.The Oresteia trilogy looks at the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos, a chain which is finally broken by the goddess Athene. 'The Choephori' has justice as it's central theme and asks whether justice can be reconciled with the forces of fate, the demands of religion and the violence of human feeling.

In the play Orestes obeys Apollo's oracular commands and kills his mother Clytemnestra and her lover in order to avenge the death of his father, Agamemnon, cruelly slaughtered by his mother. Orestes slaying of his mother contravenes the justice upheld by the older deities who decree that the killing of a blood relation, one's mother is an act that must be paid for, whilst the slaughter of a husband by a wife is of no consequence.

The play thus ends with the central character Orestes having to flee the scene.