Cannibals and Vampires in Aeschylus and O'NeillAeschylus and Eugene O'Neill populated their trilogies with cannibals and vampires. Family members nurture each other both literally and figuratively. For the houses of Agamemnon and Ezra Mannon, this bloodlust is insatiable and hereditary, an inescapable curse. A family curse provides the dramatic force necessary to push characters towards crucial actions and events. At the conclusion of both trilogies the curse is finally broken (or at least supplanted). While O'Neill and Aeschylus articulate the destructive and violent effects of the curse in similar terms, each playwright breaks the curse to achieve distinctly different thematic goals. The curse is described and decentralized in order to be criticized. Both families attempt to consume themselves. The desire for revenge, to enforce a code of personal justice, carries the family curse from generation to generation. The house of Agamemnon was virtually born from cannibalism. Tantalus, the founder of the house, is tormented eternally in Hades for having fed the flesh of his sons Pelops to the gods. Much later, Agamemnon himself is held responsible for Aegisthus' cannibalism of his father. Aegisthus' desire for revenge is overshadowed only by Clytemnestra's thirst for her husband's blood. He speaks of his corpse as a sacrificial animal and compares his blood to wine. Pushed by Apollo, Orestes also brings the curse with him. As a baby he was nourished by his mother's milk but now he will only be satisfied with his mother's flesh. Only Orestes and Electra survive. The Mannon family implodes, leaving only one survivor, Lavinia. Mannon's self-destructive hunger has a sexual tension absent in the Greek trilogy. This incestuous obsession reiterates the self-perpetuating nature of their legacy of hatred and violence. They too feed on the suffering of others, yet there is an almost symbiotic need for the survival of each member. More like vampires than cannibals, they slowly drain their victims over time. However, no Mannon profits from this practice. As the action of the play unfolds, Ezra and Christine are drained and cast aside. Their deaths, along with Orin's death that follows, bring Lavinia even greater suffering and do not free her from responsibility as she might have hoped. Like Orestes, he is both agent and victim of his family's curse. Although obtained with different methods, the judgment is expressed in each work. The family curse will not claim another generation.