by Aeschylus
The first appearance of the motif in the trilogy is slight but almost programmatic in its complexity. The Argive elders juxtapose to the painful picture of Iphigenia about to be sacrificed on the altar a remarkable evocation of happier days. Iphigenia has been gagged, so that she cannot cry out, and is being held “like / a goat” (267–68 / 232) above the altar.
And with her saffron robe now streaming
down from her shoulders to the ground,
with pitiful arrows from her eyes
she shot each sacrificer, vivid
as in a picture, wanting to speak,
to call each one by name, for often
at the rich feast in her father’s halls
the girl had sung before the men
and with the pure voice of a virgin,
at the third libation, lovingly
had given honor to her loving
father’s paean for healing luck. (273–84 / 239–47)
The contrast between the images is as sharp as possible. Approaching the moment of Iphigenia’s death, which they cannot bring themselves to mention, the Chorus moves further back in memory to evoke the maiden appearing freely among her father’s friends and taking part in the joyous ritual of the libations. The most obvious point of this picture of serene, unsuspecting piety, with its emphasis on Iphigenia’s purity and love for her father, is its contrast with the pathetic image of the child about to be slain. More is at stake, however, in “third libation,” which evokes Zeus the Savior and the “healing luck” that should come from this rite. In the Greek text, the words translated “third libation” and “healing luck” are juxtaposed and have similar terminations: tritóspondon eúpotmon. Their juxtaposition marks for Chorus and audience the gap between prayer for blessing and the unspeakable horror that answers it, and in the end can be referred to none other than Zeus, no savior now.
A far more direct and more glaring perversion of the accepted meaning of the third libation comes when Clytemnestra, standing over the corpse of her victims, recalls in a kind of ecstasy the slaughter of Agamemnon:
I struck him twice, and while he cried two cries,
his legs gave way. Then soon as he was down,
I struck him yet again, and the third stroke fell
as a votive offering for the Zeus
below the ground, the savior of the dead.
And so he fell, and panted his life away,
and breathing out a last sharp gale of blood
he drenched me in the dark red showering gore,
and I rejoiced in it, rejoiced no less
than all the plants rejoice in Zeus-given
rainfalls at the birthtime of the buds. (1577–87 / 1384–92)
Here, Agamemnon’s blood is the wine of offering, the three blows are the three libations, and the third and final blow, delivered when the victim’s limbs have already gone slack, is a welcome “votive offering” not to Zeus Savior, but to Hades, the Zeus of the underworld whom Clytemnestra ironically calls “the savior of the dead.” The blasphemy is simply stunning, and is increased, if possible, in the final lines by the implicit perversion of the primeval creation myth of the mating of Heaven and Earth—with Clytemnestra cast as Earth and Agamemnon’s blood becoming the rain-semen of creation and symbolizing not love’s consummation, but the fulfillment of Clytemnestra’s hatred.27 A similar, though less blatant, blasphemy informs the oath with which Clytemnestra claims support for her deed: “I swear by Justice, completed for my child, / by Ruin, by the blood-crazed Erinyes” (1637–38 / 1432–33). Here, the traditional triad of libation is supplanted by a personal and sinister constellation of divinities that culminates not in the saving Zeus but in the vengeful Fury whom Clytemnestra will shortly identify as “the triple-glutted / spirit of this race” (1692–93 / 1476–77). Zeus’ absence in this triad is all the more striking because the epithet teleios (translated here by “completed”) belongs, particularly in this trilogy, to Zeus. Clytemnestra herself invoked Zeus Teleios just before entering the palace to murder her husband: Zeu, Zeu teleie, tas emas tuchas telei, “Zeus. Zeus, sovereign accomplisher / accomplish this my prayer” (1116–17 / 973–74). Ironically, the next “completion” of dikê will be Clytemnestra’s own death.28
Libation Bearers is punctuated by three striking references to Zeus Savior and his third libation. The first concludes Electra’s joyous response to Orestes’ revelation that he is her long-lost brother. Greeting him as “hope of saving [soteriou] seed, much missed, long wept for” (268 / 236), Electra turns to a triad of gods for aid in accomplishing the salvation that now seems possible. Like Clytemnestra’s triad in the Agamemnon, Electra’s is a personal one, but she restores Zeus to his rightful place, third and last: “May Power and Justice / and Zeus the third, supreme, be on your side!” (277–78 / 244–45). Having recognized Orestes as the agent of salvation, Electra invokes its ultimate source, the saving Zeus. Something similar can be said about Orestes’ reference to the impending murder of Aegisthus as a third libation:
And then
the Erinys, full as she is with blood, will still
guzzle his unmixed gore, poured out in a third,
a last libation. (657–60 / 577–78)
This is reminiscent of Clytemnestra’s libation of blood, but without her blasphemous perversion of the figure of Zeus Savior. Orestes dedicates Aegisthus’ murder as an offering to appease the Fury, the Spirit of the house that cries our for vengeance. In calling this new death the third libation, Orestes might be supposed to be reckoning (like the Chorus at the end of the play) Thyestes’ banquet as the first libation and the assassination of Agamemnon as the second. Primarily, however, “third” here seems to connote “third and last,” implying the hope that this will indeed be the final outpouring of blood.29
But salvation will not come quickly or easily, and Orestes’ attempt to placate the Spirit of the house is no more successful than was Clytemnestra’s (Agamemnon, 1802–9 / 1569–73). The contradiction in Orestes’ crimes of vengeance is apparent in the shocking paradox that identifies the blood of the victim with the third libation to the saving god. Other Erinyes will rise from his mother’s blood to pursue him, will seek to drink his blood in exchange for hers. The radical ambiguity of Orestes’ situation is nowhere more forcefully put than in the startling variation of the motif of the third savior with which The Libation Bearers ends:
Again, for the third time, on the royal house
the storm has crashed,
its curses blowing through the blood,
and run its course. First came the feast
of children’s flesh, Thyestes’ anguish;
next came the grim fate of the man,
the king, the warlord
of the Achaeans—killed in the bath;
Now once again for the third time
from somewhere comes
a savior, or should I say a death?
When will it end? When will it all
be lulled back into sleep, and cease,
the bloody hatred, the destruction? (1204–17 / 1065–76)
Electra had invoked Zeus Savior for vengeance; now that vengeance has been achieved, the Chorus momentarily identifies Orestes with Zeus Savior. But the first elements of this triad, the most daring of the series, are not deities to be propitiated, but horrible crimes that called out for and received revenge. Orestes’ murder of his mother is another such deed, and Orestes has just rushed from the stage pursued by creatures the Chorus could not see, but who can be expected to exact the same price from him that others have paid before. Will Orestes, coming third and last, be the savior (sôtêr) of his house or should he be called death (moron)? The Chorus members have no answer, but the expressive equivocation of their question contains not only their greatest fear, but also the one remaining hope, the suggestion of salvation still somehow to emerge from the wreckage of the house.
The question receives its answer in Eumenides, when Athena announces that Orestes has been acquitted. He
responds to the news that his birthright has been restored at last with a final allusion to the three libations:
O Pallas Athena, you have saved my house!
When I was stripped bare of my homeland,
you gave it back to me. Now Greeks will say:
“The man is Argive once again; he lives
among his father’s holdings by the grace
of Pallas and Apollo, and of the third,
the Savior, he who brings all to fulfillment.”
Yes, he himself gave due weight to the way
my father died, and has delivered me
to safety from my mother’s advocates. (875–84 / 754–61)
The disjunction that the Chorus of Libation Bearers applied to Orestes, savior or death, is resolved by applying its terms to appropriate referents. The savior (sôtêr) is of course Zeus, as the allusion to the third libation makes clear. And Zeus saves Orestes because he honors the death (moron) of Agamemnon, and thus permits its vengeance to go unavenged despite the claims of Clytemnestra’s “advocates,” the Erinyes. Orestes, in short, reclaims his true place as his father’s son; in return he recognizes Zeus as his savior by restoring him to the third place, the place of honor, the place usurped by the Erinys to whom Orestes had poured his libations of blood.
Two general considerations emerge from following this single imagistic thread throughout the Oresteia. First, we have noticed a pattern in which a distorted and even perverted image is gradually restored to a positive form. In this respect, Aeschylus’ evocation of the third libation typifies a procedure that he repeats in many ways and on many levels. To take a prominent example, themes of hunting, taming, and restraining are embodied throughout the trilogy in images of nets, curbs, yokes and entangling cloths. In Agamemnon, Agamemnon puts on the yoke of necessity (248–49 / 218) and Troy has the yoke of slavery fastened to its neck (600–601 / 529); Iphigenia has “her mouth gagged, the bit yanked / roughly” (270–71 / 325–26); Clytemnestra, in her shameless speech on Agamemnon’s return, says (with what relish we can guess) that if all the rumors of his wounding had been true, “his body now would / be more net than body, pierced with so many holes” (994–95 / 867–68). The primary vehicle of this imagery, of course, is another kind of net: the blood-red tapestries down which Clytemnestra lures Agamemnon to his death, the robes in which she entangles him in the bath as she kills him. Like the tapestries strewn at Agamemnon’s feet, these robes become visible symbols when Clytemnestra displays them in her vaunt over the corpses of her victims. In Libation Bearers, Orestes displays them again to justify his own killings, but as he holds them, the blood that stains them seems to symbolize his own pollution as well. He recognizes that his is “a filthy and unenviable triumph” (1151 / 1017), and begins his descent into madness. Eumenides brings Orestes’ escape from the entanglement of blood-guilt, and beyond that, the transformation of the bloody robes into another visible symbol: the crimson tunics that the Erinyes now wear as marks of their new honor. An image of treachery, pollution, and death turns into an auspicious sign—one, we should add, whose power comes largely from the long, arduous process of transformation itself.
A similar process can be seen at work in other, interlocking clusters of images. Fire, for example, a prominent part of the trilogy’s pervasive themes of light and dark, is given a characteristic twist when the longed-for beacon-fire that announces the Greek victory at Troy becomes a firebrand spreading conflagration through the house, only to reach resolution on stage in the final torchlit procession. There are similar patterns involving, among others, themes of disease, animals (above all, serpents and lions), blood, and rites of sacrifice. Images of sacrificial ritual have mostly ominous connotations from the beginning of the trilogy through the opening of Eumenides. That murders can themselves consistently be figured as rites of sacrifice is emblematic of the distortion of values that the bloody chain of crime and retribution has effected. Finally, the procession that ends Eumenides restores sacrifice and other rites of propitiation to positive significance and a proper civic role as elements of cult designed to promote general well-being (e.g., 1173–74 / 1006, 1213–14 / 1037–38). The restoration of Zeus Savior to his place in the rite of the three libations, and thus in the perpetuation of family and community, is also part of this transformation.
A further reflection arising from the motif of the three libations weaves several strands of imagery and allusion into a larger pattern, leading us back to the question of trilogic structure and its significance. We noticed that “third” in the context of the libation imagery seems to carry with it the common Greek sense of “third and last.” However, the attempt of the principals to give their acts of revenge this finality is everywhere opposed by the doubleness of the lex talionis, the iron law of blood for blood, which moves by twos and demands apparently endless pairings. The opposition is clearest in the remarkable dialogue between Clytemnestra and the Chorus as she stands over the bodies of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The Chorus predicts that she will “pay stroke for stroke” (1635 / 1430; the Greek is a wonderful bit of sound-painting: tymma tymmati teisai). Clytemnestra replies by claiming that her deed was a sacrifice to the family Erinys, to whom, as we saw, she allots the third place of the Savior in her private triad. It is the Chorus’ insistence on the principle of blood for blood (“he who does will suffer. That is the law,” 1798 / 1564) that prompts Clytemnestra to offer most of her wealth to the Spirit of the house as blood-money, in the vain hope of escaping retribution.
The third libation, however, is not the only image in the Oresteia for the idea of coming third and last, performing an act of violence that will bring the violence to an end. The paradigm for this pattern is furnished by another aspect of Zeus, embedded in the story of his rise to power. Aeschylus alludes to this story in the great “Hymn to Zeus” of the Agamemnon:
He who was once great, boundless
in strength, unappeasable, is now
unnamed, unsung, as if
he never was, and he
who threw him, only to be
thrown in turn, losing
the third fall, he
is gone, too, past and gone.
But he who sings glad praise
of Zeus’ victory
strikes to the heart of knowledge. (189–99 / 168–75)
In typically cryptic fashion, Aeschylus sketches the succession myth, familiar from Hesiod’s Theogony: Cronus castrated his father Uranus and succeeded to his power. He in turn was overcome by Zeus after a desperate struggle and confined beneath the earth (cf. Eumenides, 749–50 / 641), along with other gods of the Titan generation. The metaphor for Zeus’ victory comes from wrestling; Zeus comes third as the triaktêr, the wrestler who wins the third and final fall.30 The allusion to his predecessors is artfully vague, at least in part because the Chorus’ attention is fixed upon the finality of the victory.
The metaphor of the third fall recurs in at various stages of Orestes’ struggle. In Libation Bearers, Electra asks in a moment of uncertainty:
What here is well?
What here is free of evil? Who here
can wrestle Ruin to a third fall? (384–86 / 338–39)
Orestes’ return to Argos ensures at any rate that the match will continue. After Aegisthus has entered the palace, where Orestes waits in ambush, the Chorus comments:
All by himself the brave Orestes
will have to wrestle now with two
opponents. May
he win out at last and throw them. (992–95 / 866–68)
The next sounds heard are Aegisthus’ screams. But victory in this round is not final. In Eumenides, Orestes must still wrestle the Erinyes, who claim one of the three falls in their match against him when he admits that he did indeed kill his mother:
CHORUS LEADER The first fall goes to us. Two more to go.
ORESTES Or so you boast, but no one’s thrown me yet. (687–88 / 589–90)
And he goes on to win. Through the “associative repetitio
n” of images, Orestes unwittingly imitates Zeus’ combat, stands to the house of Atreus as Zeus to the house of Uranus, and comes in to his own as sôtêr (savior) and triaktêr (winner of the third fall) for his troubled line. Needless to say, the analogy is far from complete: Orestes does not defeat and suppress his father; he avenges him, and only thus is he able to succeed him in Argos. So the history of Orestes’ family is both like and unlike that of Zeus’. As unexpected as the connection between Zeus and Orestes may be, it is made more interesting if we recall the link the Erinyes make between their own fate and that of the Titans hidden away in caves beneath the earth. Again, the two situations are both like and unlike. Far from being despised and rendered powerless, the Erinyes will have new honors and bestow great blessings in return. Athena’s patient mediation finally persuades them to enter their new home gladly, not in chains as victims of superior might.