crifice] shatters thereby the bond of love as between himself and his daughter and wife, which Clytemnestra retains in the depths of a mother's heart, and in revenge prepares an ignominious death for her husband on his return. Orestes, their son, respects his mother, but is bound to represent the right of his father, the king, and strikes dead the mother who bore him (Hegel 69).
The sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis accomplished, the Greeks set sail, spending some 10 years winning the war and reuniting Helen with Menelaus and Agamemnon with Clytemnestra. Although as a piece of dramatic action the sacrifice is most directly relevant to what motivates Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to kill Agamemnon in the Agamemnon, it cannot be divorced from the action of the Eumenides, especially if (1) as Hegel says, Orestes feels bound to honor his father's memory even if it means killing his mother and, more generally, (2) one is on the lookout for a confluence of justice and order--a vain search if one accepts as just the verdict of Athena's court.
But for the Eumenides to be intelligible, it is necessary to know about the intelligibility of its "prequels." The end of the Trojan war and the return of Agamemnon to Argos begin the action of the Oresteia, which quickly descends into chaos as Clytemnestra and her lover murder Agamemnon and his war prize Cassandra, and as Orestes in the Choephoroi conspires to kill Clytemnestra, exiling himself to at Delphi to seek the justification from Apollo's oracle--pursued by revenge-mad Furies who want Clytemnestra's death to be revenged. Argos is now without a ruler, in permanent disarray.
It is at Delphi that the Eumenides begins the process of reestablishing order. Orestes has the object in view of being absolved, even though he claims not to be in search of absolution since he freely admits that he slit his mother's throat (Eum. 668). Yet Orestes intends to have his matricide guilt washed clean in a court ...