Oresteia of Aeschylus by Francis Bacon is one of the most explicitly literary works he ever made — a triptych that reaches back to the foundational text of Western tragedy and finds in it a mirror for everything he had spent his career painting.

Bacon's engagement with ancient myth was lifelong and serious. He returned repeatedly to the Greeks — not as a classicist but as someone who recognised in their stories the same primal forces he was trying to paint. Oedipus and the Sphinx appears elsewhere in his work, the blinded king and the creature that poses the unanswerable question about human nature — what walks on four legs, then two, then three — reduced in Bacon's hands to two figures under mutual pressure, the mythological confrontation stripped of its narrative and left as pure psychological encounter. The Furies that pursue Orestes through the Oresteia belonged to the same imaginative territory: forces that are not external to the human but erupt from within it, guilt made corporeal, the past refusing to stay buried.

The Oresteia itself — Aeschylus's trilogy following the House of Atreus through murder, matricide, and the institution of justice — gave Bacon a structure for thinking about cyclical violence that matched his own understanding of human experience. Orestes kills his mother to avenge his father, and is himself then hunted. There is no clean resolution, no escape from the consequences of what has been done. Justice, when it finally arrives, is provisional and hard-won. These were not abstract themes for Bacon. He had watched George Dyer destroy himself slowly and been unable to intervene. He understood guilt, complicity, and the way the past inhabits the present as a physical pressure rather than a memory.

The figures in the triptych emerge from darkness — compressed, distorted, placed within enclosed spaces that function as both stage set and trap. The mythological source gives the imagery a scale that lifts it beyond the personal without diminishing it. These are not just Bacon's private obsessions. They are the oldest stories Western culture has told about what it means to be human and unable to escape what you have done.

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