With the ''Oresteia,'' Hughes seems to have no overarching sense of the trilogy's architectonics. Hughes fastens on this, and rhapsodizes over matrimony at far greater length than Aeschylus does. The trouble with this emphasis, as the classicist Froma Zeitlin has demonstrated, is that the arguments used by Athena and Apollo to support it are misogynist in their implications. The three plays represent the three stages of Athens' constitutional development, from monarchy through tyranny to democracy. Hughes muddles this point by such things as his misreading of the Furies' opposition to verbal argument.
Rational persuasion has to triumph in the end.
Insofar as the Hughes translation has any politics, it is a fuzzy liberal emphasis on compromise. When Athena tells the Furies to use their punitive force to prevent civil war, Hughes turns that into an anachronistic attack on all forms of war. And the dream . . . In the rapture of battle. Athens was a warrior state, and Athena wore the armor of her aegis into battle.