Essay Database

The Role of Cassandra in the Oresteia Trilogy "Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved. " - Immanuel Kant, "Crooked Timber of Humanity" The character Cassandra in Aeschylus' classic trilogy, The Oresteia, plays a small yet acutely important role in the advancement of the entire drama. Cassandra appears only in the first book, Agamemnon, but her prophetic visions and declarations concerning the House of Atreus …

…and this particular theme of Aeschylus' Oresteia. "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law." To define this work as "a classic" defines its message as eternal and close enough to "truth" that we grasp it for millennia. Perhaps the only testament to the validity of a work is its timelessness, wherein The Oresteia, as the oldest surviving Greek Trilogy, is defining in its stature.