1. In organizing a banquet on Mt. Olympus, the gods and goddesses fail to invite Eris, Goddess of Discord. Displeased, Eris appears unexpectedly at the banquet and hurls a golden apple down the table in front of the astonished guests before leaving. The apple is found to bear the inscription "TO THE FAIREST." Aphrodite (Venus), Pallas Athena (Minerva), and Queen Hera (Juno) all claim this prize but decide to leave the choice up to a handsome young Trojan prince, Paris, temporarily employed as a shepherd (one of 50 sons and 50 daughters of old King Priam of Troy). To bribe him, Hera offers power, Athena offers wisdom, but Aphrodite wins out by promising him the most beautiful woman in the world, Queen Helen of Sparta.

2. Unfortunately, Helen’s husband King Menelaus resents her non-violent abduction by his erstwhile house guest Paris. Menelaus promptly invokes Sparta’s alliance with the other Greek city-states to organize a pan-Hellenic expedition against Troy, where Helen is now living quite comfortably.

3. Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon, King of Argos, is forced to allow his young daughter Iphigenia to be sacrificed to Artemis (Diana) to enable the becalmed Greek fleet to reach the Trojan coast. After a ten-year siege, Troy is finally captured and razed, with the slaughter of the surviving males and the distribution of the women as slave prizes among the victors. Achilles’ adolescent son Pyrrhus, having slain King Priam himself (and whose father Achilles had previously slain the Trojan hero Hector), is awarded Andromache, Hector’s beautiful widow; Pyrrhus then returns with his captive and her young son Astyanax to his kingdom of Epirus (near present-day Albania in western Greece). Meanwhile, Menelaus has graciously granted Pyrrhus the hand of his (and Helen’s) young daughter Hermione, who soon proceeds from Sparta to Epirus to await this expected wedding.

4. When Agamemnon returns home with the captive Trojan princess Cassandra, he is promptly murdered by his vengeful wife Clytemnaestra, whose resentment at the the death of Iphigenia had been craftily built up during Agamemnon’s long absence by Aegisthus, her paramour and bitter enemy of his kinsmen, the brothers Agamemnon and Menelaus. In due time, Clytemnaestra is in turn murdered by her son Orestes at the behest of his sister Electra. Clytemnaestra’s ghost orders the Furies to pursue and punish the fugitive Orestes; in Racine’s version, this imminent punishment is seen rationally in Orestes’ incipient madness.

5. The action of Racine’s Andromaque takes place about a year after the return of the Greeks from the Trojan War. For some months Hermione has been waiting at the court of Pyrrhus in increasing humiliation, ignored by Pyrrhus who loves only his unresponsive captive Andromaque.

                                                  Atreus                                                                         Priam
                                           _______|_______                                                         ______|______
(Clytemnaestra m.)  Agamemnon       Menelaus (m. Helen)        Achilles       Hector  Paris   +98
             __________|__________                         |                               |                 | (m. ANDROMACHE)
   Iphigenia      Electra      ORESTES      HERMIONE            PYRRHUS     Astyanax
                                                   ( =  first cousins)