Aeschylus: ‘The Libation Bearers’

 The libation bearers are enslaved women who are sent by Queen Clytemnestra to pour offerings on the grave of Agamemnon, the husband she murdered with the help of her lover. The queen’s daughter, Electra, loved her father for all his false and is tagging along with the women, who are the chorus.

The House of Atreus is a mess. King Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigeneia in furthering his disastrous, 10-year war against the Trojans. Clytemnestra welcomed Agamemnon when he finally got home. Then she murdered him in his bath with the help of her lover, Aegisthus.

While Electra and the other women are offering libations and prayers at the grave, she finds her brother Orestes, bent on vengeance. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus must be punished.

Maybe the play was so gripping this time because I was reading while the war in Gaza was raging. In this trilogy, you can get exhausted with the rants about why someone or another has committed unredeemable atrocities. Only blood for blood will do.

All the killing seems not only justifiable but righteous. So the killing doesn’t stop.

But then the old Nurse, the woman who raised Orestes while everyone else was busy, speaks.

Orestes, who has been away all these years, gets into the house unrecognized. He’s allowed in because he claims to be a traveler who has news that Orestes is dead. His mother and Aegisthus pretend to be sad. But they have feared Orestes because his father’s thrown is rightfully his.

But the Nurse is saddened by the loss of a life.

Professor H.F.D. Kitto, a wonderful guide to these plays, points out that the Nurse is a foil for all the calls of bloodletting from those who were “denied the luxury of natural affections.”

The Libation Bearers includes many wonders. My favorite is this passage from the chorus:

 

Terror, the dream diviner of

this house, belled clear, shuddered the skin, blew wrath

from sleep, a cry in night’s obscure watches,

a voice of fear deep in the house,

dropping deadweight in women’s inner chambers.

And they who read the dream meanings

And spoke under guarantee of God

told how under earth

dead men hold a grudge still

and smoldered at their murderers.

 

It’s all there: Clytemnestra has disturbing dreams, she sends the libation bearers and Electra to Agamemnon’s grave, Electra finds Orestes there … It’s early in the play, and a great playwright lets us know vengeance is coming.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Libation Bearers is on pages 81-90. 

The Libation Bearers, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Aeschylus I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 91-131. The quotation is on p. 94.