The Oresteia
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50 free The Oresteia trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Oresteia is the only trilogy to survive complete from the ancient Greek stage, and it still reads like a thriller. A king comes home from a long war, a queen has been waiting with a plan, and the children are left to decide what they owe the dead. This quiz follows Aeschylus's three plays in order: the homecoming in Agamemnon, the reunion at the tomb in The Libation Bearers, and the trial that closes The Eumenides. Along the way it asks about the family curse behind the killings, the gods who take sides, the playwright's life, and the novelists, composers and dramatists who have borrowed the story since. It suits students revising for a class or an exam, teachers who want a quick check on the reading, and anyone who met the trilogy once and wants to see how much of the plot stayed.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US politician quoted Aeschylus's Agamemnon when telling a crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. was dead?
Robert F. Kennedy
Robert F. Kennedy called Aeschylus his favourite poet in that 1968 speech, and the passage he recited was later inscribed at his own grave.
Q 02Which showbusiness custom is traced to a scene in Agamemnon where a returning king fears offending the gods?
The red carpet
The red carpet has its earliest known literary mention here: the queen lays a red path to the palace door, and her husband worries that only gods should walk on such luxury.
Q 03According to an ancient legend, the playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped which animal on his head?
A tortoise
A tortoise, the story goes, was dropped by a bird that mistook his head for a rock to crack the shell on. The tale may come from a misreading of the carving on his tomb.
Q 04Which Harry Potter novel opens with two epigraphs, one of them taken from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers?
Deathly Hallows
Deathly Hallows pairs the pagan passage with a Christian one by the Quaker William Penn, and J. K. Rowling said she had picked the two out years ahead.
Q 05Aeschylus, author of the Oresteia, fought the invading Persians in which famous battle of 490 BC?
Marathon
Marathon cost Aeschylus his brother Cynegeirus, who was killed trying to stop a Persian ship from leaving the shore.
Q 06Which Trojan captive, cursed so that nobody believes her prophecies, foresees her own murder in Aeschylus's Agamemnon?
Cassandra
Cassandra arrives as the king's war prize and tells the chorus outright that he is about to be butchered, yet the old men still cannot take in what she means.
Q 07Which goddess presides over the trial of Orestes in The Eumenides and casts her own vote to free him?
Athena
Athena sides with Orestes, then spends the rest of the play persuading his furious accusers to stay on as honoured guardians of her city.
Q 08Where in the palace is King Agamemnon killed by his wife on the day he comes home from Troy?
In his bath
In his bath is where the queen strikes, and when the palace doors open she stands over the body and describes the killing without a trace of regret.
Q 09Which daughter of Agamemnon meets her long-lost brother Orestes at their father's tomb in The Libation Bearers?
Electra
Electra has been sent with offerings meant to quiet her mother's nightmares, and instead joins her brother in praying for revenge.
Q 10Which American playwright recast Agamemnon as a general coming home from the Civil War in a three-part retelling?
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill renamed the returning king Ezra Mannon and swapped the gods for Freudian and Jungian psychology; the cycle ran for 150 performances on Broadway.
Q 11Which German opera composer revered Aeschylus so much that a book compares his masterwork with the Oresteia?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner's Ring is set beside the trilogy character by character in Michael Ewans's study, though one critic called its arguments unreasonable and forced.
Q 12Clytemnestra was the half-sister of which legendary beauty, who married the brother of Clytemnestra's husband?
Helen
Helen and Clytemnestra, half-sisters, wed two brothers: one marriage launched the Trojan War and the other ended in murder.
Q 13Which daughter did Agamemnon sacrifice to win a fair wind for Troy, the death Clytemnestra waits ten years to avenge?
Iphigenia
Q 21Critics read the Oresteia as dramatising a society's shift from which older custom to justice decided in a court?
The vendetta
The vendetta, each killing answered by another inside one family, gives way in the last play to a hearing with speeches, sworn judges and ballots.
Q 22Which lover of Clytemnestra shares her throne after Agamemnon's murder and boasts that he designed the scheme himself?
Aegisthus
Aegisthus bursts in with armed men only once the deed is done, claiming he planned it to repay a wrong done to his own father.
Q 23Clytemnestra's lover claims revenge for which father, who was tricked into eating his own sons at a feast?
Thyestes
Iphigenia was the couple's eldest daughter, and the queen says she still weeps for her as she stands over her husband's body.
Q 14Which goddess held the Greek fleet in port at Aulis until Agamemnon offered up his own child?
Artemis
Artemis had been offended by the arrogant king; in one common telling he had killed a deer that was sacred to her.
Q 15Which god orders Orestes to avenge his father and later speaks in his defence at the trial in The Eumenides?
Apollo
Apollo tells the court he bears the blame for the killing; he had warned Orestes of disaster if the task was refused.
Q 16The Eumenides opens at which famous oracle site, where a priestess finds Orestes surrounded by sleeping Furies?
Delphi
Delphi is where Orestes has fled to be purified of the blood on his hands, and the sight sends the priestess crawling out of the temple on all fours.
Q 17Which term names the crime that sets the Furies on Orestes after he kills Clytemnestra in The Libation Bearers?
Matricide
Matricide is the one killing the Furies refuse to excuse: they had ignored the queen's murder of her husband because the pair were not blood relations.
Q 18The Oresteia follows the last generations of which cursed royal family, named after the father of Agamemnon?
The House of Atreus
The House of Atreus carried a curse that demanded blood for blood in every generation, and the acquittal of Orestes is what finally ends it.
Q 19The curse on Agamemnon's family is traced back to which ancestor, who served up his own son to the gods?
Tantalus
Tantalus tried to feed the gods his son Pelops; they were not fooled, brought the boy back to life and banished his father to the underworld.
Q 20The goddess who frees Orestes is held up in court as born without a mother, straight from which god's head?
Zeus
Zeus alone brought her forth, a point the defence seizes on to argue that a father can exist without a mother.
Thyestes cursed his brother's descendants after that meal, which is why his one surviving son helps to topple the king.
Q 24Which king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon, is reported lost at sea by the herald in the first play?
Menelaus
Menelaus vanished with his ships on the voyage home, a loose end that the trilogy's lost fourth play is thought to have picked up.
Q 25Aeschylus sets Agamemnon's palace in Argos rather than which nearby citadel, usually named as the king's capital?
Mycenae
Mycenae may have lost the honour for political reasons: Argos had recently become an ally of the playwright's own city.
Q 26The captive prophetess Agamemnon brings home is a daughter of which Trojan, the old king of the city he sacked?
Priam
Priam fathered fifty sons and many daughters in the legends, and the Iliad calls this one the loveliest of them.
Q 27At the start of Agamemnon, a watchman on the palace roof has spent a year looking out for which signal?
A beacon
A beacon, the last in a relay of them, tells the queen that Troy has fallen long before any ship could bring the news.
Q 28What does Orestes leave on Agamemnon's tomb in The Libation Bearers that his sister realises must be her brother's?
A lock of hair
A lock of hair, left to mark his grief, matches her own so closely that she guesses the truth before he steps out of hiding.
Q 29In The Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra sends offerings to the tomb after dreaming that she gave birth to what?
A snake
A snake, wrapped up like a baby, drew blood as it nursed, and Orestes reads the dream as a picture of himself.
Q 30In The Libation Bearers, a disguised Orestes gets into the palace by bringing false news of whose death?
His own
His own death is the story he tells his mother at the door, posing as a traveller who heard it from a stranger on the road.