Aeschylus (c.525/524 - c.456/455 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived but it is thought he was the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy and his Oresteia (458 BC) is the only ancient example of the form to have survived. The trilogy consists of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers (Choephorae) and The Furies (The Eumenides), and together these plays tell the bloody story of the family of Agamemnon, King of Argos, encompassing the themes of the retribution of crime and the inhertance of evil. This English translation of the Oresteia by Edmund Doidge Anderson Morshead (1849-1912), an English classicist and teacher, was first published in 1881. Rendered into metred verse, the translation makes great use of eye rhymes and similar devices, and the language is often archaic.