Aegisthus is a figure in Greek mythology. He is Orestes and Iphigeneia’s stepfather, and he appears in Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and Sophocles’s Electra. As the story goes, Aegisthus is killed by Orestes as an act of revenge after Aegisthus works with Orestes’s mother, Clytemnestra, to kill Orestes’s father, Agamemnon. Aristotle briefly mentions Aegisthus to illustrate the violence involved in tragedy.
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Aegisthus Character Timeline in Poetics
The timeline below shows where the character Aegisthus appears in Poetics. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7. The Best Kinds of Tragic Plot
...comedy, Aristotle argues, in which enemies resolve their differences (even bitter enemies like Orestes and Aegisthus make up) and no one is killed.
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