The Libation Bearers

Animals and natural imagery are important motifs in the play. The members of the family are repeatedly compared to different animals. Thus, Orestes and Electra become “bloody like the wolf / and savage born from the savage mother” (421-22) as they plot their revenge. Electra describes how she was kenneled like “a vicious dog” (446) after her mother killed their father. Electra and Orestes are also compared to orphaned birds like “fledglings” (255), “the eagle’s brood” (258), or “nestlings” (501).

The animal and nature symbolism evoked throughout the play often has sinister undertones. In the final stasimon, the Chorus describes the horrors of nature:

Numberless, the earth breeds

dangers, and the awful thought of fear.

The bending sea’s arms swarm

with bitter, savage beasts (585-88).

Of all these terrors, claims the Chorus, woman is the most terrible of all (Clytaemestra representing the evils of which women are capable). The most notable animal imagery in the play is that of snakes. In Clytaemestra’s dream, Orestes becomes a snake who bites his mother. Likewise, Clytaemestra is also depicted as a snake, with Orestes referring to her in disgust as “[s]ome water snake, some viper” (994), and the Chorus declaring that when Orestes killed Clytaemestra and Aegisthus he “lopped the head of these two snakes with one clean stroke” (1047).

All the characters of the play are thus reduced to snakes constantly fighting with each other. Even the Furies, who come to punish Orestes at the end of the play, are serpentine monsters, their heads “wreathed in a tangle / of snakes” (1049-50). These motifs of animal and nature illustrate the savagery of the family’s behavior toward one another, suggesting that there is something wild and unhuman about the cycle of violence in the royal house of Argos.