Research on this topic began in the Spring, when, in a class called Political Theory in Greek Authors, individual students utilized Perseus 2.0 for the purpose of examining the usage of the word "freedom" in various ancient works. Two years before, in my freshman year at college, I had taken a course on translating the Oresteia. Upon first glance, I thought there was nothing new Perseus could show me, nothing Fraenkel or Denniston and Page had not already analyzed countless years before me. Searching the word "freedom" with the English Greek Word Search² in Perseus, I was astounded by the multitude of possibilities that appeared on the screen! By looking up these words in the Perseus Dictionary³ (i.e., Liddell and Scott's Greek Lexicon),⁴ certain words were immediately discarded as not pertaining to my examination. The most poignant words were what became the crux of this paper. Now, nearly a year after my initial research, I return to the final draft of my paper, which was submitted to the professor, and I have inserted comments every once in a while in order to show readers the value of Perseus in researching and writing analytical papers. While the student researching with Perseus may not be treading on untrodden ground, the experience of discovering some little snippet of information for oneself is an exhilarating process.

The word eleutheros appears frequently in the Oresteia in connection with kardia and glossa, as if the first word was dependent upon the last two. Expanding my search to include references in the Oresteia to the heart and the tongue, I found that true freedom is attainable only through a sense of internal freedom, that what a person wants to say is what a person does end up saying. Aeschylus, as determined by this research, understood the concept of freedom as being an individual notion rather than a political ideal.

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