Traditionally, books on Greek tragedy tend to fall into two classes: scholarly editions with commentaries on textual, linguistic, and detailed interpretive points, and literary-critical studies which sometimes include summary treatments of questions involving a detailed study of the texts. Classics specialists tend, for obvious reasons, to concentrate on the former. Readers of translations have, of necessity, been limited to the latter kind of aid in their reading of the works of the Greek tragedians, works that are often unfamiliar particularly in their cultural context. D.J. Conacher has brought these two approaches together in this comprehensive study of the three plays of Aeschylus'' Oresteia.
The major part of Conacher''s work is a detailed running commentary on, and dramatic analysis of, the three plays. It is supplemented in notes and appendixes by discussions of the philological problems relevant to the interpretation, and by a sampling of other scholaraly views on a number of controversial points.