The results are unfolded in the Oresteia.
Atreus had sown the first seeds of woe by his murder of the children of Thyestes and Agamemnon, later on, had sacrificed the life of his daughter, Iphigenia to his own ambition. The subject of the trilogy is one of those dark stories of hereditary guilt, of which the Septem (Seven Against Thebes) example. The contents of the Proteus are unknown, and its connection with the preceding tragedies obscure but it probably dealt with the fortunes of Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon, and related the story of his detention on the coast of Egypt, and his rescue by the help of Proteus, the sea-god. The tetralogy as a whole was called the Oresteia, a name which, whether due to Aeschylus or not, appears to have been in use at any rate as early as the time of Aristophanes. The Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides were the last tragedies composed by Aeschylus, and were produced in 458, two years before his death, along with the satyric drama Proteus. The following essay on the Oresteia was originally published in The Tragic Drama of the Greeks.
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