The Libation Bearers

Libation Bearers is the second of the three tragedies that make up the ancient Greek trilogy known as the Oresteia. Aeschylus’s Oresteia was produced in 458 BCE at the dramatic competition of the City Dionysia, where it won the first prize. The three tragedies of Aeschylus’s Oresteia—Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides—dramatize the ancient Greek myth of the murder of Agamemnon and the aftermath of this crime. This trilogy is extremely important in ancient Greek literary history because it is the only Greek trilogy that has survived intact. In ancient Greek dramatic competitions, tragedians always presented four plays (that is, a “tetralogy”). Usually, these four plays included three tragedies (a “trilogy”) followed by a kind of comical burlesque known as a satyr play. The satyr play performed with the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s Proteus, is unfortunately lost, but all three tragedies can still be read today.

Agamemnon, the first part of the Oresteia, depicts the murder of Agamemnon at the hands of his wife Clytaemestra and her lover Aegisthus. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Clytaemestra has not forgiven Agamemnon for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia to Artemis in exchange for a wind to carry his fleet to Troy. She waits 10 years for Agamemnon to conquer Troy, and when he comes home at last she gives him a warm welcome, coaxes him into the palace, and then kills him and his concubine—the Trojan princess Cassandra—with the help of Aegisthus.

Agamemnon situates Agamemnon’s death within the context of the bloodshed that has already troubled his family for generations, with several characters referring to Agamemnon’s father Atreus and his violent rivalry with his brother Thyestes. Indeed, Clytaemestra’s lover and co-conspirator, Aegisthus, is none other than the son of Thyestes, who wants to kill Agamemnon to avenge all the terrible things that Agamemnon’s father did to his father. At the end of Agamemnon, Clytaemestra and Aegisthus seize control of Argos, Agamemnon’s kingdom.

Libation Bearers begins sometime after Agamemnon ends, with Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytaemestra, returning to Argos to avenge his father’s murder. He is helped by his sister Electra and his close friend Pylades. Perhaps most importantly, however, it is Apollo, the god of prophecy and culture, who has commanded Orestes to avenge his father by killing his mother. By the end of the play, Orestes fulfills this command, though his conscience wrestles with the idea of killing his own mother. By murdering Clytaemestra and Aegisthus, Orestes perpetuates the cycle of bloodshed and retribution begun by Atreus and Thyestes and continued by Agamemnon, Clytaemestra, and Aegisthus.

The play ends, therefore, with Orestes suffering the punishment for his crime as the goddesses known as the Furies (Erinyes in ancient Greek) come to torment him. It is only in the final play of the trilogy, Eumenides, that the cycle of violence finally comes to an end when Orestes stands on trial in Athens. When Orestes is acquitted of his mother’s murder and the Furies are mollified by the goddess Athena, true justice is finally established and peace is restored to the family of Agamemnon.