Oresteia by Aeschylus (-458)

For ten years a watchman has lain on the roof of Argos, waiting for the fire that means Troy has fallen and the king sails home. When the beacon finally leaps across the hills, it lights the way to a murder: Clytemnestra has drawn her husband a bath and laid out a robe stitched shut, and she has waited longer than he has. So begins the only Greek trilogy to reach us whole, three plays that set a killing in the first, its answering killing in the second, and on the third the question beneath both. What happens when every act of justice is also a crime, when blood can only call for more blood? Orestes avenges his father by killing his mother, and the Furies, older than the gods and deaf to his reasons, hunt him down. The wonder of the _Oresteia_ is that it refuses to end in more blood. It ends in a courtroom, the first one, the law invented in front of you because the only other road is a house that never stops bleeding.