Teaching the Oresteia with Minority Report

Abstract

This article demonstrates a series of uncanny parallels between the Oresteia and the 2002 film Minority Report, and their import for our understanding of tragedy and film alike. I explore Minority Report’s Agatha as a modern Cassandra (as has been covered in some literature before), and extend the analogy to pair John Anderton and Orestes, Lamar Burgess and Apollo, and Spielberg’s Washington, DC and Aeschylus’ Athens. I encourage every classicist who teaches the Oresteia to assign their students Minority Report, and to think about this film, and science-fiction more generally, as a new frontier in classical reception studies.