The Libation Bearers

Overview

The Libation Bearers is the shortest and the tautest of the three. Agamemnon spent two thirds of its length on the past; this play has a job to do and does it, and the whole thing is built on one hesitation.

It also has a structural oddity worth knowing in advance. The middle of the play is not dialogue or action but a kommos, a long sung lament shared between Orestes, Electra and the chorus at the grave, and it is the longest passage of its kind in Greek tragedy. Nothing happens during it. What it is doing is working the two of them up to the point where they can do the thing, and summoning the dead man to help. If you read it as a delay you will be impatient; it is closer to a ritual that has to be completed before the plot is permitted to move.

The title refers to the chorus: captive women of the household, sent to pour offerings at a tomb by a queen who is frightened of a dream. They are slaves, they have no power at all, and they intervene decisively twice.

The opening of the play is damaged. Our only manuscript begins partway in, and the first lines are reconstructed from quotations in other ancient authors, which is why translations differ about what Orestes says first.

What happens

Orestes and his friend Pylades arrive at Agamemnon’s grave. Orestes has come back in secret from Phocis under Apollo’s instruction, and he lays a lock of his hair on the tomb. Hearing people approach, they hide.

Electra comes with the chorus, carrying offerings. She explains the errand and is miserable about it: her mother has sent gifts to the man she killed, because of a dream, and Electra does not know what to say over the grave. The chorus tell her to pray for herself, for her brother, and for someone to come and kill.

Then she finds the hair, which is the same colour as her own, and the footprints beside the grave, which match her feet. It is the most notorious recognition scene in Greek drama, and Euripides thought it was absurd enough to parody at length in his own Electra, where an old man proposes exactly these tokens and Electra demolishes them one by one. Orestes steps out, and has to produce a piece of weaving she made as a child before she will believe him.

Then the kommos. Brother, sister and chorus call on Agamemnon in the ground: reminding him how he died, what was done to his body, what his children have become. By the end they have talked themselves into a state where the deed is not only possible but owed. The chorus reveal the dream at last: Clytemnestra bore a snake, swaddled it, put it to her breast, and it drew blood along with the milk. Orestes says immediately that he is the snake, and that he will make the dream true.

The plan is simple. Orestes and Pylades will come to the door as travellers from Phocis with news that Orestes is dead. It works. Clytemnestra receives the news with a speech of grief that is either perfectly judged acting or something more complicated, and sends for Aegisthus.

The best scene in the play is a small one. Cilissa, the old nurse, comes out weeping, sent to fetch Aegisthus, and remembers looking after Orestes as a baby, the laundry, the crying at night, the fact that an infant has no language and you simply have to guess. The chorus tell her to change the message and bring Aegisthus without his guards. She does. That is the chorus of slaves deciding the outcome.

Aegisthus goes in and is killed offstage. A servant hammers on the women’s door shouting that the dead are killing the living. Clytemnestra calls for an axe, and then Orestes is in front of her and she has no weapon.

What follows is the point of the play. She bares her breast and reminds him that he fed there. Orestes stops, turns to the friend who has not spoken a word in eight hundred lines, and asks whether he should be ashamed to kill his mother. Pylades answers with three lines: remember the oracle, count every man your enemy before the gods. Orestes kills her.

The doors open on the tableau that answers the end of Agamemnon: the son standing over two bodies, holding up the robe his father was trapped in, explaining himself to the chorus and to the city. He is already losing the thread. He says he must go to Delphi while he can still speak sensibly, and then he sees them: women with snakes in their hair, coming for him. The chorus see nothing and tell him so. He runs, and the play ends with them asking where this will end.

How to read it

Read Agamemnon first. This play is unintelligible without it and takes about ninety minutes.

Do not skim the kommos. Read it as the thing that makes the murder possible rather than as an interruption before it, and notice how Electra and Orestes escalate each other.

Read the Pylades moment slowly, and count his lines. A silent character speaking three lines at the exact hinge of a trilogy is a deliberate and shocking effect, and Aeschylus never uses him again.

Watch the chorus. They are slaves and foreigners with nothing to gain, and they push at every stage: they tell Electra what to pray for, they tell the nurse to change the message, and they celebrate afterwards. The play’s judgement of them is not given.

Compare the recognition with Euripides’ Electra and Sophocles’ Electra if you have time. All three playwrights staged this scene, and the differences are the clearest short demonstration of what separates them.

Notice that the play does not end. Orestes has obeyed a god and is being hunted for it, and nothing has been settled. The trilogy was designed to make that unbearable for one more play.

Questions it raises

• Apollo commanded the killing and threatened Orestes with madness and disease if he refused. Does a divine order make the act right, and if it does, why do the Furies come?
• Clytemnestra bares her breast and he stops. What does that gesture appeal to, and why does an oracle beat it?
• Pylades is silent for the whole play and then decides it. What is Aeschylus doing by putting the answer in the mouth of someone with no stake?
• Is Clytemnestra’s grief at the false news of Orestes’ death genuine?
• The chorus of slave women intervene twice and change everything. What does the play think about people with no standing who act anyway?
• The Furies are invisible to everyone but Orestes. Is he mad, haunted, or both, and does the next play settle it?