The Libation Bearers

Libation Bearers is set some years after Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia trilogy (See: Background). The play begins before the tomb of Agamemnon in Argos. Later, in the second part of the play, the scene will shift to the Argive royal palace. It is unclear whether the scene would have actually changed or whether the staging itself would have had two focal points (i.e., the tomb in one part of the stage, the palace in another). True scene shifts were uncommon in ancient tragedy, with most tragedies taking place in a single setting. This makes it tempting to adopt the latter option, namely, that the staging of Libation Bearers used two focal points. However, staging shifts were not entirely unknown in tragedy either, with Aeschylus’s Eumenides—the final play of the Oresteia trilogy—featuring very marked staging shifts.

In Agamemnon, Aeschylus had depicted Clytaemestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon with the help of her lover Aegisthus. In Libation Bearers, Orestes—the only son of Agamemnon and Clytaemestra—returns from exile to avenge his father. Orestes’s revenge had already been anticipated in Agamemnon, especially by the Chorus. Nevertheless, Aegisthus dismisses Orestes, whom he and Clytaemestra have exiled from Argos, noting that, “Exiles feed on empty dreams of hope” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Line 1668, trans. Richmond Lattimore). Aegisthus was wrong to dismiss Orestes, as is demonstrated by the opening of Libation Bearers. Now a young man on the cusp of adulthood, Orestes has returned to Argos to avenge his father’s murder. In this mission, Orestes is supported by his close friend Pylades and by his sister Electra, who has spent the last few years in Argos, hating her mother and Aegisthus and longing for Orestes’s return.

To avenge their father, however, Orestes and Electra will need to kill their own mother. This dilemma fuels the play’s exploration of the theme of The Dynamics of Power and Familial Loyalty. Both Orestes and Electra adopt an idealized vision of their father as a great king and warrior who conquered Troy but who was cut down “through a woman’s treacherous tricks” (6)—that is, through their mother’s treachery. The siblings see their mother as a villain, who “sold” her children and “bought herself, for us, a man” (132-33), effectively turning her children into exiles or outcasts from their own home.

However, this perspective simplifies Clytaemestra’s character and motives while glossing over much of the ambivalence embodied by Agamemnon: After all, Aeschylus had shown in the preceding play, Agamemnon, that the reason Clytaemestra hated her husband so much and plotted to kill him was not for power or for her lover but because Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia. Orestes’s and Electra’s loyalties, nevertheless, are firmly with their murdered father. As Electra says when she invokes her father’s shade:

To call you father is constraint of fact,

and all the love I could have borne my mother turns

your way, while she is loathed as she deserves (239-41).

Further complicating the play’s familial dynamics are the themes of The Moral Implications of Retribution and Divine Commands Versus Personal Conscience. It is Apollo, the god of prophecy himself, who has ordered Orestes to avenge his father by killing his mother. Consequently, Orestes is very confident in the success of his mission, sure that “[t]he big strength of Apollo’s oracle will not / forsake [him]” (269-70). However, Apollo’s oracle also makes it very easy for Orestes, Electra, and the Chorus to assume that their retribution is just precisely because it has been divinely sanctioned. Thus, Electra hopes that somebody will come to “judge” her father’s murderers “or to give them punishment” (120), the Chorus prays that the murder of Clytaemestra and Aegisthus will be accomplished “in the turning of Justice” (308), and Electra asks the gods to “be just in what [they] bring to pass” (462).

Despite the confidence of the siblings and the Chorus in the justice of their cause, the first episode of the play already begins to challenge the conflation of retribution and justice. In Clytaemestra’s prophetic dream, Orestes becomes a snake, an ambivalent creature representing death and treachery, while Electra declares that she and Orestes “are bloody like the wolf / and savage born from the savage mother” (421-22). In other words, Orestes and Electra must become treacherous and animalistic just like their mother if they are to punish her for her crimes. Even the Chorus, for all their support of Orestes and Electra, begin to recoil from their plot, saying that:

My flesh crawls as I listen to them pray.

The day of doom has waited long.

They call for it. It may come (463-65).

It almost seems that the Chorus realizes that killing Clytaemestra and Aegisthus will only perpetuate the cycle of violence and bloodshed that has already plagued the royal family of Argos for generations. The characters of the play speak of seeking justice, seeking retribution, and seeking a true end to the cycle of bloodshed, but it becomes increasingly clear that these are different things: Justice and retribution are not one and the same (Apollo’s oracle notwithstanding), and the bloodshed of Agamemnon’s family becomes a “Sickness that fights all remedy” (470), with its “cure” (472, 517) proving elusive. Clytaemestra cannot cure the violence by sending offerings to her murdered husband’s tomb, as Orestes observes, but Orestes himself is about to learn that killing his mother is not the cure either.