Do you know when the first translation of the Oresteia took place?
Answer Hello, If you refer to the first English translation of the Oresteia, it dates back to 1777, when the English clergyman Robert Potter (1721-1804) translated into English verse the complete plays of Aeschylus in his work The Tragedies of Aeschylus, Norwich 1777. As for the source material (the original script) of the Oresteia, I have to point out that we do not have the original manuscript written by Aeschylus (born 525 BC-died 456 BC), but a copy written by a professional scribe and revised by a contemporary scholar, who corrected the copyist’s mistakes, added the scholia (i.e. some explanatory comments on the text), the arguments and the dramatis personae of the plays, and at the end the Life of Aeschylus and the Catalogue of his Dramas, whose we have only seven ( The Suppliants,The Persians, The Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, and the Oresteia, the only extant trilogy, consisting of Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides). So, the source material, which is however only a
