The Libation Bearers of the Oresteia Trilogy

The second drama of the “Oresteia” trilogy, “The Libation Bearers”, is the continuation of “Agamemnon” and looks like a revenge work. Although his prologue is preserved only in its last part, and that with gaps, we can see the impressive juxtaposition of this work with the end of the previous one: “Agamemnon” closed with the departure of the guilty couple under the burden of their guilt and of his fate.

At the beginning of the second act we see Orestes praying at his father’s grave, so the revenge hinted at by the Chorus in “Agamemnon” cannot but arrive now, and the tragic fate of the Atreides find its fatal continuation . Here the dramatic action, contrary to what happens in the first drama with its extended chorio-lyrical foreshock, unfolds from the beginning before the eyes of the spectators:

Orestes has returned to Argos from the country of Phocis, where he had been sent as a child to his uncle Strophio, with strict orders from Apollo to avenge his father’s murder. He is accompanied by Pylades’ cousin and friend, a mute person throughout the play, except for the triptych 900-902, where he intervenes decisively at a critical moment, when Orestes hesitates to strike his mother, to remind his inviolable debt.

Orestes’ first act is to worship at his father’s grave, leaving a lock of his hair on it as a sign of mourning. Soon a group of black-clad women appears: it is Electra with the Dance of the female captives from Troy, sent by Clytemnestra to offer libations at Agamemnon’s tomb, troubled by ominous dreams she had seen at night. These are persons who fully feel their humiliation and can only passionately expect justice to be served.

At the sight of the women, Orestes and Pylades step aside and hide, but Electra suspects the presence of her brother from the curl of hair and from his footprints nearby, finding that the stork resembles her hair and the footprints are same as hers! Then her brother is revealed and the recognition takes place, as a piece of cloth that Orestes had with him, the one that Electra herself had woven many years ago, also contributes to this.

After this, the two brothers with the Dance, in an amazing combination of ode, dance and song around the burial mound, call the spirit of their father from Hades to come out and help them, to avenge his murder, against God’s commands. It is a chilling and extremely poetic scene.

The action that follows then moves before our eyes with remarkable speed until the end of the play: Orestes and Pylades, disguised as Phocian travelers, appear at the gate of the palace – Aeschylus is not bound by the “Unity of the Place” – where they is greeted by Clytemnestra, to whom her son truthfully recounts his supposed death in Phocis.

The queen, with mixed feelings, but apparently relieved that he is no longer there to avenge her, greets the two youths and orders them to lead the supposed strangers to the men’s quarters of the palace,’ she herself withdraws, to inform her lover Aegisthus of unexpected developments. After a tender human note, unexpected for Aeschylus, with the appearance of Kilissa, Orestes’s nurse, who reflects on how she raised him and mourns his fate, the events develop rapidly:

First the murder of Aegisthus takes place and then the horror of matricide, after a momentary hesitation by Orestes, which is however weakened by the unique intervention of Pylades. Finally the door opens wide and shows the two corpses, Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, and the two young men, Orestes and Pylades, standing above them.

The horrible stage image naturally corresponds with its parallel in “Agamemnon” and gives a sense of perfect symmetry, a sense of an end, after the ancient law of revenge has been fulfilled. However, the Choros, who yearned for revenge with such passion, now speaks of the impasse and guilt that have irrevocably surrounded the cursed household. The final scene of the “the Libation Bearers” will transform everything:

It shows Orestes, in a singularly desperate struggle to justify his act, bringing to the scene the fatal net in which his father was murdered, and slowly revealing his insanity, the salem of his mind: He sees, only he, “the wild dogs of his mother”, the black-clad Furies, may menacingly flood the place, with snakes coiled in their hair and with blood flowing from their eyes, and threaten to crush him! He too, maddened, rushes out of the scene, chased by the demons of horror.

The almost absolute correspondence in the structure of the “Hoifores” with that of “Agamemnon” has been pointed out that both plays the path to destruction follows roughly parallel stages, until it reaches the final explosion after the fatal encounter with Clytemnestra, Agamemnon in the first drama, the victim, and Orestes in the second, the perpetrator.

This analogy the poet insistently emphasizes it, especially after the decisive act of murder, when each time the gate of the palaces opens and shows the perpetrator standing over the corpses of his victims. In both plays, at this point a struggle for justice begins, in one case it ends with the loss of Clytemnestra’s self-confidence and in the other with the loss of Orestes’ logic.

“It is obvious what the poet wanted to show: Crime and punishment fatally follow each other, creating a chain whose end one cannot predict”, as rightly pointed out. Thus “Hoifori” closes in a more gloomy atmosphere of darkness, uncertainty and despair, which tightens everyone’s hearts.

Significant difficulties were caused by the absolute lack of realism in the scene of the identification of the two brothers, the absurd pattern with the stilt and the footprints of Orestes, which Electra compares with her own, and based on the similarity concludes the presence of her brother .

Already Euripides, fifty years later, commented on it with sarcasm in his own “Electra” and many younger scholars, based on rational reasoning, reached the point of erasing the relevant verses of Aeschylus, as unacceptable.

However, in the Aeschylean world, where life is chosen by magic, the improbable can have more meaning and effectiveness, as a symbol of a deeper insightful truth, than any meticulous reality’ for such a reality the poet seems to be indifferent, preferring his fictional imagination , which justifies absurdities of the mind, especially when it is clouded by a strong emotion.
It is well known that other laws govern realistic reality and others the world of poetry with its own consequence of magic.