The Libation Bearers

38 pages • 1 hour read

The Libation Bearers

Fiction | Play | Adult

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Lines 1-653

Lines 654-1076

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Themes

The Moral Implications of Retribution

The moral implications of retribution and the relationship between retribution and justice are important themes throughout the Oresteia trilogy. In Agamemnon, Clytaemestra kills her husband Agamemnon in retribution for his earlier killing of their daughter Iphigenia. Clytaemestra’s act of retribution only leads to further retribution when Orestes grows up and decides to avenge his father by killing her, causing the cycle of bloodshed to keep spinning out of control.

From the very beginning of Libation Bearers, Orestes and the other characters cast retribution in a positive light. Since Clytaemestra was unjust in her murder of Agamemnon, killing her to avenge Agamemnon must surely be just and even pious. Orestes thus prays to Zeus to “grant [him] vengeance for [his] father’s / murder” (17-18) upon first arriving in Argos, while Electra beseeches her father’s ghost to send an avenger to Argos so that “they / who kill [him] shall be killed in turn, as they deserve” (143-44).

Similarly, Orestes is confident throughout the play that his retribution is right because the god Apollo himself has commanded him to avenge his father, and one must always obey the gods. It is taken for granted in the first part of the play that Clytaemestra and Aegisthus must die, with Electra hoping for “one to kill them, for the life they took” (121). When Orestes finally confronts his mother, he explains to her, before he kills her, that she is suffering the retribution called forth by her own actions: “You killed, and it was wrong. Now suffer wrong” (930).

However, the play also pushes back against the simple identification of retribution with justice. For the Chorus, though it is a kind of natural law that “blood stroke for the stroke of blood shall be paid” and “[w]ho acts, shall suffer” (312-13), retribution also has certain moral consequences. The Chorus notes early in the play that retribution creates further guilt, since

All the world’s waters running in a single drift

may try to wash blood from the hand

of the stained man; they only bring new blood guilt on (72-74).

Likewise, though Orestes, Electra, and the Chorus repeatedly pray to the gods to bring justice, the play suggests that there is something disturbing about the way Orestes and Electra plan to kill their own mother. The Chorus, for all their support of Orestes and Electra, is sometimes ambivalent about their plan, saying that their “flesh crawls as [they] listen to them pray” (463). The Chorus—and eventually Orestes—realize that, even if one’s cause is just, acts of retribution in themselves are not always just. Indeed, it becomes clear by the end of the play that Orestes’s brutal murder of his mother and Aegisthus is not the “fair-spoken verdict” (805) that they had hoped it would be: Instead, Orestes merely continues the cycle of bloodshed and guilt.

Orestes finally concludes at the end of the play, as he stands over the bodies of Clytaemestra and Aegisthus, that his victory is “polluted” (1017), and soon after he is forced to leave Argos to escape the Furies. Orestes’s act of retribution, achieved through violent and morally-problematic means, must now be punished, and the only way for Orestes to escape his punishment is to be purified somehow by the gods. In presenting Orestes as hounded by the Furies, the play suggests that it is only true justice, and not more violent retribution, that can bring peace to the royal house of Argos.

Divine Commands Versus Personal Conscience

Just as the play challenges the idea that retribution and justice are the same, the play also challenges the idea that divine commands are always right just because they are the will of the gods. In Libation Bearers, Orestes explains that he returned to Argos to avenge his father because the god Apollo told him to do so. However, as the play proceeds, Orestes wrestles more and more with his own conscience about whether what he does is truly just.

While Apollo’s divine command makes Orestes confident that he will be successful, it also causes Orestes to fear the consequences of failing to obey:

The big strength of Apollo’s oracle will not

forsake me. For he charged me to win through this hazard,

with divination of much, and speech articulate,

warning of chill disaster under my warm heart

were I to fail against my father’s murderers;

told me to cut them down in their own fashion, turn

to bull-like fury in the loss of my estates (269-75).

In effect, then, Apollo is strongarming Orestes into killing Clytaemestra and Aegisthus. Orestes seems happy to comply with these commands, at least at first. In the first part of the play, neither Orestes nor Electra seem to feel any pangs of conscience at the thought of killing their own mother: After all, she murdered their father and ruined their lives, and so, in their opinion, deserves to die.

Everything changes when Orestes finally confronts Clytaemestra in the second part of the play. Clytaemestra begs Orestes to take pity on her, and for a moment Orestes hesitates. Apollo’s instructions do not prevent him from feeling ashamed of what he is about to do, though Pylades’s reminder that he must “[c]ount all men hateful rather than the gods” (902) confirms him in his resolution to avenge his father, as Apollo had commanded. Nevertheless, Orestes’s guilty conscience is evident in the exchange that ensues, as Orestes tries to absolve himself of the deed even before he kills his mother, first by telling his mother that it was she who killed herself by the way she acted, and later insisting that he must avenge his father or he will never escape his curse.

Even after Orestes kills Clytaemestra, however, he feels that his “victory is polluted, and has no pride” (1017). He knows that he did what he had to do, as the gods had commanded him to avenge his father, but he recognizes that vengeance has not brought him inward peace:

I killed my mother not without some right.

My father’s murder stained her, and the gods’ disgust.

As for the spells that charmed me to such daring, I

cite above all the seer of Pytho, Loxias. He

declared I could do this and not be charged with wrong,

while if I refused, the punishment I will not speak:

no archery could hit such height of agony (1027-33).

Despite Apollo’s sanction, Orestes still feels guilt for what he has done. And when the play ends, this guilt immediately begins to torment him in the form of the Furies, the underworld goddesses who punish murderers (especially those who murder their own family members). Only in the Eumenides, the final play of the trilogy, will Orestes achieve purification and reconcile his guilt so that he can return home with a lighter conscience.

The Dynamics of Power and Familial Loyalty

The play’s power and familial dynamics are complex. Orestes and Electra hate their mother and plot to murder her because she murdered their father. However, their desire to avenge their father’s murder and their own humiliation necessitates betraying their filial duty to their mother by killing her. The play thus explores the complicated dynamics of power and the conflicted emotions that can arise when wrestling with questions of family loyalty.

The siblings consistently demonstrate at the play’s opening that their primary loyalty is to their father, not to their mother. While Clytaemestra did have her reasons for murdering Agamemnon—she wished to avenge the death of their daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon sacrificed so that he could sail to Troy—Orestes and Electra are not equipped to understand these reasons. Orestes and Electra also hate their mother because of the way she has treated them. According to Electra, she and Orestes “have been sold, and go as wanderers / because [their] mother bought herself, for [them], a man” (132-33).

Even as Orestes and Electra disavow their mother, there is a special intimacy that arises between the two of them. Electra knows that Orestes has returned to Argos by simply looking at the lock of hair and the footprints he left at their father’s tomb, which she notes are exactly like hers. This scene was somewhat notorious even in antiquity, as two people will not have identical hair and foot sizes just because they are siblings (another Greek tragedian, Euripides, even parodied the scene in his play Electra). Nonetheless, this recognition scene highlights the close connection between Electra and Orestes, who are the only family either one has left. Thus, Electra remarks that Orestes’s return brings back “four lives” (239) to her:

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; my love

for a pitilessly slaughtered sister turns to you.

And now you were my steadfast brother after all (239-43).

Orestes and Electra decide that they are duty-bound to kill their mother to avenge their father. They bring offerings to their father’s tomb and pray to his tomb for success on their mission. When Orestes confronts Clytaemestra and Clytaemestra warns him to beware her curse if he kills her, he responds by asking her: “How shall I escape my father’s curse, if I fail here?” (925, emphasis added). Even when Orestes realizes that he will be punished for killing Clytaemestra, he still maintains that he “killed [his] mother not without some right,” as his “father’s murder stained her” (1028-29).

The power and familial dynamics of the play are also highly gendered. For Orestes, Electra, and the Chorus, what makes Agamemnon’s death all the more disgraceful is the fact that he—a great king and warrior—died ingloriously, “through a woman’s treacherous tricks” (5) and “the guile, treacheries of the / woman’s heart” (626-27). Clytaemestra, who holds power now in Argos, is turned into a kind of female monster, especially in the final stasimon sung by the Chorus, in which she comes to exemplify how,

The female force, the desperate

love crams its resisted way

on marriage and the dark embrace

of brute beasts, of mortal men (598-601).

Clytaemestra’s lover and co-conspirator Aegisthus, meanwhile, becomes almost a non-entity in terms of power. Indeed, just as Clytaemestra assumes the masculine role by killing her husband and assuming his power, Aegisthus assumes a female role as Clytaemestra’s consort. Orestes even refers to Aegisthus’s heart as “really female” (305). The Libation Bearers thus shows the masculine force of the family and the state—the right of the father—asserting itself against the feminine (or maternal) force. However, the feminine, maternal force will not go unavenged either, for at the end of the play the female Furies arrive to punish Orestes for killing his mother. The Furies’ appearance implies that, in trying to uphold one form of familial loyalty, Orestes is guilty of violating another.