by Aeschylus
Or so we infer as Electra pours her cup on the grave and invites her living brother from the dead. She sees the locks, she trembles and she turns her catechism with the leader into a dialogue of breathless recognition - the locks belong to Orestes. Yes, but he must have sent them, he is banished. Their joy is dashed: Electra sees how desolate they are, yet in her desperation she animates the locks - she gives them breath and voice, she sees them as the seed of their entire line and begs the gods for guidance. They comply at once. Here are Orestes’ tracks, and the tracks relate the children still more closely. By pursuing the same path of feeling, Electra has persuaded her brother that this is friendly ground; now by following in his steps she makes him reappear. As they meet she cries aloud in anguish, and her word for anguish is the word for labour, too: ‘The pain, like pangs of labour - this is madness!’ Indeed Orestes’ birth will lead to his mother’s death and his own madness, as Anne Lebeck observes, but it will end in the renewal of himself and his society. His torment, like his sister’s, is constructive.
The Libation Bearers runs on act upon act of recognition. So it must; it is a play about the continuous readjustment of character and destiny, one’s perceptions and one’s place. When Electra tries to resist Orestes, he insists upon their kinship, their mutual re-creation of each other. He seizes on a piece of her weaving that he wears, her own creation that she gave him at his birth, perhaps, as a gnôrisma, a token of identity and swaddling band in one. She yields, she is euphoric, praises him as a living family in one, and rejoices in the help of Saving Zeus. But Orestes modulates her joy. Zeus may be the patron of their father, but Agamemnon is dead and his children must be cautious, they must ask the gods for help.
Yet Orestes’ help comes from Apollo, his patron and tormentor. Apollo has commanded him to avenge his father or suffer pains of guilt as political as exile, as physical as plague, and as psychological as madness and the Furies. Guilt is a strong god, and when he takes the name Apollo, a brutal one as well. Even his agent labours under a death sentence - Orestes has punishments, no incentives. And perhaps Apollo is not even to be trusted, he muses, so he improvises motives of his own: his grief for his father, his patrimony and his compatriots. He will do Apollo’s work, no doubt of that, but his own motives are based on loss, and they are strictly masculine; he seems strangely unaware the work involves his mother. He is still ‘determined’ by Apollo; like Cassandra, another victim of the god, he is denied the power of self-determination. He must find a relationship between his feelings and his fate, the vengeance he must perform and the justice he desires. He must recognize, in fact, that his revenge is just, but that justice takes the form of matricide, the greatest form of guilt. Apollo has brought the gods and the Furies to a new, more lethal deadlock in Orestes. But with the women and his sister he will bring these powers to a new, more fruitful union.
That is what happens in the great chant at the grave that now unfolds before us. Now to turn tender recognition into conspiracy and rough desire. The women pray that the Fates and Zeus conspire in terms of the old law, ‘stroke for bloody stroke’, and as the children join them, the structure of the chant embodies their growing unity and momentum. There are three movements. The first (312-412), by far the longest, has two complementary sections (322-68, 377-412). Orestes leads off with a slow, despairing dirge for Agamemnon, intensified by Electra’s prayer that he had never died at all, that his murderers had died instead. Their grief is giving rise to vengefulness and more, as the women evoke the true retributive force of the dirge and of the king himself. To avenge him would be just, and they turn the children’s dreams of glory into valid anger in the second, harsher section. Catching fire, the children call for the retribution massed behind their father’s ghost; and Electra, in control, cries out for the one power that can drive her brother into action - ‘Mother dear, you bred our wolves’ raw fury’ - charging the justice of the gods with the matriarchal energy it requires.
But the gods and Furies clash at the centre of the chant (413-42), surrounding Orestes with excruciating pressure. More than just, more than empowered by his mother, his vengeance is provoked by her own act of vengeance now revealed for the first time - she mutilated Agamemnon’s body. That horror spurs a further recognition within Orestes. He must kill his mother - it is as if Apollo never told him! Justice is matricide. Orestes’ peak of personal commitment is a peak of guilt as well: ‘Oh she’ll pay, /she’ll pay, by the gods and these bare hands - /just let me take her life and die!’ At the core of the chant he is torn apart. But in the final movement (443-52), as all three voices merge in a stretto swift and tense, Orestes begins to consolidate himself. He is both the avenger and the son, justice and the curse. He exults in both roles, calling out for blood and for his loved ones - ‘Now force will clash with force, right with right!’ Unlike Apollo, he will acknowledge his mother’s claims and pit them against his own. He is murderous and moral, predestined and aware, and so he can emerge as the leader, the Aeschylean hero. Electra follows, but the women recoil from what they have unleashed, the ‘cure’ that comes from the children’s ‘bloody strife’. Their fury may be truly homeopathic, however, as we see in the coda that concludes the chant.
They adopt their mother’s fury and train it on their father, taunting him, recriminating him with the ignominy of his death, until they have lashed his spirit back to life not only as a memory but as a force within themselves. Orestes reincarnates Agamemnon. Both must choose between doing something and doing nothing - both are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If Agamemnon fails his mission he incurs the wrath of Zeus; to perform it he must kill his daughter and incur the Furies later. It is a murderous choice, and Agamemnon makes it more so: he personifies vengeance as a law unto itself. But Orestes’ choice is worse: to avenge his father he must kill his mother. If he fails his mission he incites the Furies - if he performs it he incites the Furies. They are on both sides of the conflict now, struggling deep within him, asserting both his father’s just demand for vengeance and his mother’s just revenge in turn. He has no choice at all. Yet as his self-awareness grows he creates a choice between the Furies as administered by Apollo - the mortifying powers of conscience - and the Furies of his mother that may mortify him and electrify him too. This will be the crucial choice of his career, in fact, for even here, as he adopts his mother’s fury to revive his father, he radically reforms his father’s spirit. Orestes turns revenge into a force that can preserve his line from Pelops to posterity. And so at last Electra knows what to say as she pours her cup, and her brother has the answer to his question, ‘Dear father, father of dread, /what can I do or say to reach you now?’ The words are love-in-hate, the work is murder in behalf of life itself. The range, the promise of the chant is exhilarating. The warlord’s lust for glory resounds within his son, the new, moral hero, tortured now but soon triumphant. The witches’ Sabbath yields to prophecy, the old law to the new law - to the first real hope for the justice of the gods, yet that justice must be powered by the Furies.
Now for action, say the women, encouraged by the coda. But first Orestes must know more about the libations - why did his mother send them? Only now, thanks to his recognitions in the chant, can he fully respond to his mother’s dream. It has portrayed the dead as calling for revenge, yet its first effect is positive: the queen’s ritual of riddance has actually enlivened the dead and their avengers. Here we learn the very dream itself is a blend of life and death: Clytaemnestra has given birth to a serpent that destroys her. It is a nightmare, but as Orestes absorbs its meaning it becomes a waking vision: ‘I turn serpent,/I kill her.’ The serpent is a symbol of the underworld, and Orestes represents the dead - he will play dead, the dead who come to life. For the serpent is also a symbol of the Furies and their dual powers of vengeance and regeneration. Clytaemnestra bears Orestes’ fury - she suffers it and nurses it at once. If his first resolve to kill his mother ended in a death wish, this resolve may fulfil himself as well. ‘No empty dream. The
vision of a man.’ Like the serpent, jaws embracing the breast that it must cut, he is forever in the act of killing what he loves, yet somehow nourished by it.
That is a vision Apollo has never seen, and Orestes (like Cassandra) is inspired by the Furies. As he plots his course of action, however, he tries to bring his two divinities together. To suit the compulsions of Apollo he will disguise his speech with Parnassian dialect, the native eloquence of Delphi, and take Apollo’s delegate, Pylades, as his comrade-in-arms. At the same time the Furies within him cry for blood, the ‘third libation’ poured to Saving Zeus, as if insisting on a union between Orestes’ compulsion and his impulse, the Olympians and themselves. But between Orestes’ rehearsal here and his eventual performance lies a difference. Here as he writes his script he omits the Furies from the action. Full of the bravado of the young unseasoned actor, he can relish the killing of Aegisthus with a stroke, but there is not a word of matricide - he cringes at the thought.
A violent birth is coming. What tells us so is the central chorus that celebrates the ‘terrible marvels’ of creation. Like the voice of the whirlwind in the Book of Job, the voice of ‘terrible majesty’ that brings fair weather from the north, the women trace the Furies from their negative to their positive extreme. The only marvel equal to creation is the fury of women. They multiply crime on crime against creation and, as the chorus turns from women who murdered sons and fathers to those who murdered husbands and destroyed their line, it also moves from the deft, poetic justice of the gods that intercepted Scylla to their revenge that blotted out the Lemnian women. They sing of mounting crimes that are met by mounting retribution from on high, but as they turn to Clytaemnestra, ‘the wedded love-in-hate . . the curse of the halls’, something startling happens. The closer they come to her, the closer they come to her son who will ‘wipe clean/the inveterate stain of blood shed long ago’. Not only is this constructive retribution; it is human, and what’s more, it may even be summoned by the Queen herself, at least by the force they have in common: ‘Fury brings him home at last, /the brooding mother Fury.’ Orestes is the minister of the gods, but his mother must impel him. A terrible marvel; only she can generate his justice, only he can embody that justice, destroy her and the curse.
The central chorus is the fulcrum of the play. The Libation Bearers has two acts. At the house of the dead an old outrage is remembered and its vengeance is rehearsed. At the house of the living that vengeance is performed, its repercussions felt. We turn from vision to enactment, from a version of Homer’s underworld to his final battleground, the hearth. Here the dangers are more familiar and more deadly, and they catch Orestes off his guard. He comes on like a tiger at the gates, bristling for combat with Aegisthus, but the epic day of encounter is over. The hero gropes in a twilight zone - these walls, these echoes, he knows them all as from a childhood dream. Even the gateman’s formulaic question, ‘Where do you come from, stranger? Who are you?’ leads towards a fateful recognition. Orestes calls for his enemy - his mother enters. As if recalled from legend Clytaemnestra seems unchanged; her gracious welcome only brings the nightmare rushing back: ‘We have warm baths and beds to charm away your pains/and the eyes of Justice look on all we do.’ But the terms of her welcome also reassert her guilt. The eyes of justice belong to the curse, the curse has come to Argos, and Orestes has defences.
The rites of hospitality ask the guest to identify himself, and Orestes launches out on a cock-and-bull story, like many in the Odyssey, that reveals his life and tests his host in turn. He had not planned to meet his mother first, and the Fury in her makes him improvise and begin to sense the impact of his mission:
I’d just set out,
packing my own burden bound for Argos
(here I’d put my burden down and rest),
when I met a perfect stranger, out of the blue,
who asks about my way and tells me his . . .
‘Well, my friend,’ he says, ‘out for Argos
in any case? Remember to tell the parents
he is dead, Orestes . . .’
As an emissary of Apollo, Orestes is a merchant of destruction; he brings his mother death. Yet his story only makes her harder to contend with, especially since he ends by challenging her feelings as a parent. She responds with a typical outburst of grief; it shouts aloud her falseness - her excess may reveal her relief; even her triumph in Orestes’ demise - while it stirs with love-in-hate and the hope that he might just survive the worst. The mother in the Fury mourns her son. Strange, he had not thought to find a trace of affection left for him, and perhaps a gift for recognition even more surprising. As Clytaemnestra turns from him - ‘your words, you storm us, raze us to the roots’ - to address the curse itself, ‘you curse of the house so hard to wrestle down’, her subject never changes. She is probably distraught, unless she sees the stranger is the curse or, though this is conjecture, that the curse is Orestes quite alive before her, calling her to die and calling for assistance. In Agamemnon she extended sympathy to her victim, here perhaps she extends compassion to her son who must be baptized in her blood. A thing to terrify a mother and to rend her heart.
It also reaches Orestes’ heart, introducing him to the basic truth of his disguise. He plays on the custom that the one who brings bad news is punished; he is sorry to announce Orestes’ death and distress his hostess, and his ironies dissolve. He is sorry the young Orestes is gone and the mature Orestes has to face the destiny that, for the first time, may glimmer in his mother’s eyes. ‘The tie between/the host and stranger,’ he wonders, ‘what is kinder?’ He might even desert his mission, were he not ‘bound by honour, bound by the rights/of hospitality’. Bound to whom? To his philoi, as he says, though the word may mean his friends or his kin, or both. He is bound to his patron Apollo and his friendly hosts in Argos - bound, too, to avenge his father and perform a dreadful service for his mother, for whom he holds a lingering affection. And she answers him in kind: ‘For all that you receive what you deserve, /as welcome in these halls as one of us [philos].’ This is a threat, of course; she knows the stranger is no friend, she will welcome him as if he were that philos, Agamemnon home from war. Or is he the philos Orestes, her own offspring? Might she even breathe a kind of reassurance? ‘Whatever the cost, my son,’ she may almost seem to say, ‘our destiny lies before us, and it must be fulfilled.’ Over the years Clytaemnestra’s ironies have matured. They still assert her mastery - ‘we never lack for loved ones [philoi],’ she warns, meaning Aegisthus while speaking to Orestes; but now her ironies expose her vulnerability as well. Here she is diabolic and deeply human, too, the murderess and the mother. Here in the growing dark she may invite her son to suffer into truth - a mutual ordeal.
As they go through the doors, the women reassemble. Orestes needs their help - and here is his old nurse, already on her way to Aegisthus with word of Orestes’ death. But she hates her master and will take the women’s word as well: tell him to come without his bodyguard and be an easy kill. Cilissa gives Orestes equal odds, and her long harangue about his infancy, part humour and part heartbreak, gives him something more. The infant she nursed is gone, but as she mourns for him we glimpse a new tic between the innocent and the mature young man. Like her he comes from the shadows of the house, nursed by the bowl of pain that she has sipped, and nursed with her milk of kindness too, that lends a seasoned innocence, a decency to his later years. Cilissa is his second mother, perhaps as legitimate as Clytaemnestra, because the nurse enlarges the issue of their combat. Her monologue rambles from the time she took Orestes from his mother to the time she took him from his father, as the true successor born to liberate their people, the humanity Cilissa represents.
The sweetest, dearest plague of all our lives’ will offer further hardships first, but the captive women want their liberation now. They invoke the gods in all their benevolence, they rehearse a song of joy to sing when their hopes have reached their destination, and they speed Aegisthus towards his execution. Here he comes
again, unchanged, the mask of a man who pretends concern for the house but revels in its pain, the swaggering activist who, like a crude version of Agamemnon, takes a cue from the women and blunders to his death behind the doors - a death as insignificant as his role in Agamemnon’s murder.
There is nothing, in other words, that can compete with the act of matricide that is approaching. Clytaemnestra emerges of her own free will, majestic in anger, and when a servant warns, ‘The dead are cutting down the quick,’ she reads the riddle staunchly:By cunning we die, precisely as we killed.
Hand me the man axe, someone, hurry!
Now we will see. Win all or lose all,
we have come to this - the crisis of our lives.
Her suspicions are confirmed. ‘The dead’ are the generations of the curse embodied in her living son, her murderer, yet somehow the making of her, too, for not until she has engaged with him can she fulfil herself. The main doors open. Over her lover’s body stands Orestes. At first he is torn between extremes of hate and love, between a killer and a son who tears at his mother’s robes, bares her breast, and cannot take her life. As William Arrowsmith has made so clear, Orestes’ hesitation is the most momentous act in the Oresteia, for it will originate the justice of the gods, exacting and humane. But for the present the gods reject that hesitation as if they were not ready for the mercies of mankind, or so Apollo’s spokesman, Pylades would suggest. He has not said a word till now and, as he breaks his silence, it seems the god himself is urging on Orestes:
What of the future? What of the Prophet God Apollo,
the Delphic voice, the faith and oaths we swear?
Make all mankind your enemy, not the gods.
Apollo’s commandment is a mortal threat as well, and what it evokes within Orestes, as he hurls Clytaemnestra against the body of Aegisthus, is less a sense of principle than sexual envy of his mother and her lover.