The Libation Bearers of the Oresteia

  The Libation Bearers 

The Libation Bearers clearly stands out as the beginning of  a tradition of lyrical tragedy. As John Herington observes in Aeschylus : 

The action of the play, quite unlike that of Agamemnon , lies almost entirely in the dramatic here and now.  There are few of those wide sweeps into distant places and the past on the wings of verbal poetry. Indeed, all the significant incidents in this plot which tragic convention permitted to be enacted onstage--that is, all except the actual murders--take place before the audience's eyes. 4 

Consequently, as Herington notes, " The Libation Bearers  anticipates  the effects of drama as drama has been understood from Sophocles onward . . . ." 5  Furthermore, as Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish comment, in the notes to their translation of the Oresteia ,  in language and style, The Libation Bearers is the simplest of the trilogy, and more importantly, "the action of the play operates almost entirely on the human level:  the gods are there, but only as seen and invoked by men." 6   In brief, The Libation Bearers is part of the canon of tragedy which extends across the millennia in that it is a dramatic presentation of an individual struggling with a human dilemma in the here-and- now world in which he lives.     

In choosing to focus on The Libation Bearers , I am, ipso facto, contending that such an investigation will not betray (that is to say, misconstrue) the basic import of the Oresteia .  This contention launches us into the basic debate about the nature of Greek tragedy--a debate to which we have already seen reference; for example, by the Halletts  in their "do-suffer-know" formula for Greek tragedy, and by Steiner in his insistence on the necessity of god to tragedy.  The traditional argument, in its most simplified form, is that Greek  tragedy, like ritual, was a means of reaffirming a community of values and a shared vision of the universe.  We can recognize this underlying precept in Herington's description of the Eumenides .  He contends that in relation to the earlier plays of the Oresteia ,   Eumenides stands as an epiphany in which "the supernatural takes shape, and with that manifestation all doubts are dispelled." 7 

In his book, The Logic of Tragedy , Philip Vellacott challenges this view of Greek tragedy in general and of the Oresteia in particular.  The view that the Eumenides vindicates Orestes and through this vindication shines a brighter light upon the world, in effect, as Vellacott argues, "tells us that at the end of his drama the poet forgets the truths of which he convinced us at the beginning: namely, the reality of wickedness, the permanence of pollution; above all, the necessity of justice . . . ."  As Vellacott points out, traditional criticism of the Oresteia implies that 

. . . Aeschylus allows true pathos and seriousness to give way to the formal and superficial, morality to masculine sentiment, tragedy to complacency.  At the close of Eumenides the sudden crowd representing the panathenaic procession unites stage and auditorium in fervent rejoicing.  Agamemnon's cruelty, Clytaemestra's heroic justice, Orestes' matricide, the abdication of the Erinyes--all have been forgotten, every question answered in Athena's bland principle:  I favor the male cause, and am wholly on the side of the father. 8 

Vellacott's rhetorical conclusion is thus:  "If by this principle alone Fate and Zeus are to be reconciled, and the city glorified, does not Aeschylus invite us to suspect, behind the jubilant music, a sombre tone of tragic irony?" 9 

In concert with Vellacott, in my reading of translations of the trilogy, I cannot, in any serious sense, find a resolution to the dilemma Orestes faced in The Libation Bearers .  The Eumenides does not answer the questions which Orestes has faced, does not really come to terms with the justice or injustice of his actions, and, in fact, ceases to deal with Orestes in the same terms which prevail in The Libation Bearers ; that is, as a human, struggling for selfhood, facing an internal, passionate conflict.  It is therefore apparent that The Libation Bearers  can be analysed on its own as a play about an unanswered, and in fact, unresolvable dilemma.   

The point is reinforced by Peter M. Smith's argument in On the Hymn to Zeus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon .  Smith prefaces his argument by noting, as has Vellacott, that much of the criticism of the Oresteia has misguidedly insisted upon the play's underlying message of optimism and renewal. 

In the Eumenides Orestes' acquittal and the reform of the Furies are often seen as implying Aeschylus' faith in human, and even in divine, progress.  The arbitrary nature of that acquittal is generally either overlooked or else is excused as a paradoxical symbol of an irrational faith.  The partial and very ambivalent character of the Furies' reform is often given short shrift or none.  And the failure of a human jury--even one armed with Apollo's arguments and Athena's leading instructions--to decide the issue before it is hardly noticed, for all that Aeschylus strove to put it at the center of his stage. 10        

Smith's thesis is a direct contradiction of the "do-suffer-know" vision of tragedy in so far as it might be applied to the Oresteia .  In a close study of lines 160-180 of the first speech of the Chorus in Agamemnon , Smith concludes that wisdom gained through suffering is a Christian notion which has been imposed upon the text, and on translations of the text, and that the notion is in fact "foreign to classical Greece." 11 

The oft repeated conviction that tragedy is a reaffirmation of religious or communal values seems most often informed by the  notion that tragedy is somehow connected to ritual.  There is, as Wayne Schumaker notes in Literature and the Irrational , a marked resemblance between initiation ritual and the trilogy structure of tragedy.  There are, I would agree,  many noteworthy similarities between tragedy and initiation ritual.  The basic pattern underlying the initiation ritual, as outlined by Frazer in The Golden Bough , is that of the death of the soul of a young man in order that his soul, or another of his souls, or his new soul, can be reborn within his tribal totem.  The totem is a symbol of the community of men, of the order of nature and the universe, and it provides protection for the soul it houses.  A symbolic death or near death, or encounter with death is the climax of tragedy and of initiation.  However, as Hallman has argued, tragedy imposes rationality upon the death drama it presents.  Rationalism does not cause a new embrace of the community of the faithful as mysticism and the unconscious had done. Therefore, the death enacted by tragedy is without rebirth.  Tragedy, in relation to ritual, is a failed initiation.  This is the pattern we  find repeated:  an individual trying to be a man or trying to be a woman, and suffering the death of his/her soul in the process, but without the rebirth which that death afforded his primitive ancestors.  This difference, however, makes ritual and tragedy opposites, enemies; it casts them in the roles of tyrant and subversive.  As Charles Segal points out in Tragedy and Civilization : 

Ritual tends to be conservative and affirmative of the cosmic order.  Tragedy is innovative, polysemous, and deeply questioning of that order.  The myths embodied or reflected in ritual are basically unitary in their meaning.  Those of tragedy are complex and problematical, open to new interpretations, focal points of conflicted points of view and divided values. 12              

Thus, what we find in Greek tragedy, according to Segal, is not the reaffirmation of self but rather a questioning of the centrality and strength of self, 13 not the unity of selfhood but its inner division and "doubleness" 14 , not the rehearsal of civilization, its order, clarity, justice and wisdom but rather "the boundary situations of human life, the experience of nothingness in moving between or beyond the familiar categories into the irregular, interstitial, the ambiguous, the unique and unclassified." 15  The action and language of Greek tragedy, rather than bringing greater clarity or assured knowledge, bring us to the limits of comprehension and language. 

As the action of tragedy represents the negation of the religious norms such as the violation of taboos against incest and murder, so the language of tragedy presents the violation of the linguistic norms:  ambiguity, confusion, screams of agony, roars of pain, the incoherence of terror or madness.  Logical argument fails. The words of friends or loved ones ( philoi ) are unable to persuade.  Civilized discourse gives way suddenly to curse or bellow, to horrendous cries or ominous silences. 

As the unity of the world cracks to reveal its duality of seeming and being, so the unity of the logos dissolves into dichotomy and ambiguity. 16 

The madman has a special role to play here.  Behind tragedy lies the continuing concern with man's place in the world, a place which must be somewhere between god and beast.   The madman occupies that marginal territory somewhere between man and beast, 17 and paradoxically is also seen as standing between man and god.  Segal likens this role played by the madman to that of the tragic hero. 

As the hero is suspended between god and beast, so is his discourse suspended between clarity and ambiguity, sense and silence.  Ajax' loss of language or bull-like roar, like Cassandra's otototoi or Lear's "Howl, Howl, Howl," expresses the deepest level of his suffering.  It is akin to the madness that marks his total isolation from society.  To have lost the ability to communicate by language is itself to be an outcast, an exile even in the midst of the most populous city. 

The hero's relation to language reflects the same precariousness as his relation to myth, society, and the gods. 18 

    

The precariousness of Orestes' position is the essence of The Libation Bearers , and, as such, the play stands as the prototype of lyrical tragedy.   Orestes' eventual madness is both the climax and the conclusion of the drama.  The underlying unity of the drama is Orestes' struggle to affirm himself, to recover and assert his identity as a man, as a prince and as an individual human.  Motifs of initiation are prevalent in the opening of the play as we see Orestes establishing  the elements of his reality, asserting who he is in terms of his lineage, his soil, his home, and the god to whom he prays for assistance.  The intimation that  Orestes is embarking on an initiation becomes more specific as he offers a lock of his hair to his river god, Inachus, "who made him grow to manhood," (6) 19 and goes on to  note how his right to mourn his father was denied him. 20  Orestes' "manhood" and "rights" are motivating issues throughout the drama.  However, the play does not afford him a smooth transition into new awareness, nor does it confirm that he gains any significant knowledge through his ordeal. 

In   The Libation Bearers a series of countervailing injunctions, much like the pattern Bateson outlines in his description of the double bind, are evident.  An oracle of Apollo has instructed Orestes to avenge his father's murder or suffer disease, ostracism, madness and a painful death.   The oracle notwithstanding, Orestes is still compelled to carry out the assassination of Clytaemestra and Aegisthus. 

Shall I not trust such oracles as this?  Or if 

I do not trust them, here is work that must be done. 

Here numerous desires converge to drive me on: 

the god's urgency and my father's passion, and 

with these the loss of my estates wears hard on me; 

the thought that these my citizens, most high renounced 

of men, who toppled Troy in show of courage, 

must go subject to this brace of women; 

since his heart is female; or, if it be not, that soon will show. 

(297-305) 

The secondary injunction  is, of course, that hardly a greater crime can be thought of than matricide.  In addition, the penalty, the curse, for matricide is also madness inflicted by the Furies.  The tertiary injunction comes about in the simple fact that the gods cannot be escaped, but a more immediate compunction, as indicated in the above speech, comes from Orestes' sense of himself.  Not only is he the son of the victim and of the murderess, but he is the one, by virtue of being a man, and a man of character and a prince, upon whom the responsibility  of action must fall.  This potential is either to be affirmed or denied depending on whether he does or does not take action.  The murder of his mother, in the present context, is his initiation into the fullness of manhood.  The basic contradiction of this requirement is the essence of his double bind. 

I would argue that this double-bind situation is the eventual cause of Orestes' madness.  However, we should note that in The Madness of Antigone , Gerald Else deduces a quite different set of conclusions about madness in Aeschylean tragedy. 

The first is that "madness", in Aischylos [Aeschylus], is a strictly limited and focussed condition, having to do with the perception of certain truths or the performance of certain acts.  The madman speaks coherently and shows no sign of being mad except in those particular respects.  The second corollary is very close to the first, namely that madness, in Aischylos, comes upon its victim from the outside, like a disease.  In order to understand it we must look to the gods or a factor like Oidipous's [Oedipus] curse, not to any psychic disposition to madness within the sufferer.  The king of Argos, Agamemnon, Orestes, Eteokles [Eteocles], all appear as perfectly normal human beings wherever we see them outside of the moment of their affliction. 21 

In approaching the issue of madness in The Libation Bearers I hold to Else's earlier assessment of Aeschylus as a "philosopher," persistent in his search for reasons and causes.  Like Sophocles and Shakespeare, Aeschylus operates within the vernacular of common understandings and myths about madness, but The Libation Bearers , like the tragedies of the later tragedians, reveals that madness, while perhaps orchestrated by supernatural forces, is, at the same time, consequent to actual, mundane situations which create extreme psychological pressures.  Else's key example of sudden madness is the abrupt change in character, from highly rational to irrational, which Eteocles undergoes in Seven Against Thebes.

 

The specific mark of madness in the case of Eteokles [Eteocles] is his inaccessibility to ordinary reasoning.  We have seen that proved in the epirrhematic scene and following stichomythy, 677-719.  But impermeability to reason is not Eteokles' normal character, as we see with equal clarity from his previous confrontation with the chorus, 203-54. 22 

If we look at the content of the scene in question (677-719), we discover that it is in fact Eteocles' reaction to the discovery that the  seventh captain, attacking the seventh gate of Thebes, is his own brother, Polyneices.  Else later describes Eteocles' dilemma as one in which to face his brother in battle would bring shame and not to face him would bring equal shame.  Else concludes:  "There is no honorable way out." 23  This is the double bind which provokes Eteocles' sudden irrationality, and, as our present analysis will demonstrate,  it is this quality of double-bind entrapment which permeates The Libation Bearers . 

From Orestes' recounting  of the oracle and the injunctions he faces it is apparent that he is in a no-win situation.  As we have noted, if he refuses to obey Apollo and avenge his father, the threat is madness, but if he obeys and murders his mother, his destiny, according to the same myths of the Furies which Apollo's oracle invokes, would still be madness.  The situation stirs doubt, indecision, painful incertitude, and brings him to the question which is the ultimate theme of the drama, "Shall I not trust such oracles as this?" 

     The pattern of the drama is to repeatedly direct us toward such basic questions.  Orestes' opening prayer is interrupted by the arrival of Electra and the Chorus of slave girls.  After making clear his intentions:  "Zeus, Zeus, grant me vengeance for my father's/ murder. Stand and fight beside me, of your grace" (19-20). Orestes, with his companion, Pylades, hides in order to overhear the women's prayers.  There is minor dramatic irony in Orestes  overhearing  their prayers, but the true irony of the scene is far subtler. 

On the one hand, the speech of the Chorus offers reinforcement to Orestes' conviction.  The Chorus have been mistreated by their masters, a dream diviner has predicted disaster for the house of Aegisthus and Clytaemestra, and Clytaemestra is a "godless woman."  On the other hand, their sudden rhetorical question,  "what can wash off  blood once spilled upon the ground?" (47) would cut to the heart of Orestes' misgivings.  The Chorus then notes the contemporary loss of pride and values in what was once the noble house of Atreus.  Pride "has shrunk away" and "high fortune, this in man's eyes is god" (57, 60).  Once again they begin to establish the high ground upon which Orestes might take action, but the Chorus's conclusions about "too much glut of blood" and "the vengeful gore" would again undercut Orestes' will.  “All the world's waters running in a single drift / may try to wash blood from the hand / of the stained man; they only bring new blood guilt on”  (72-5). 

In the same tenor as the entire speech, their final stanza is a strange, weakly justified argument for the necessity of action.  The chorist bemoans being carried off from her home and enslaved by Agamemnon, and still she weeps for "the vanities that have killed my lord [Agamemnon]."  Agamemnon's "vanities" are  never dwelt upon, even Clytaemestra mentions them but briefly when she pleads for her life, but Electra mentions her sister Iphigeneia, who was  sacrificed  to the gods by Agamemnon, as "a pitilessly slaughtered sister" (242).  How do we account for this inopportune reference?  In fact, such "slips" are in keeping with the pattern of the entire drama.  Aeschylus does not present an open dialectic, nor does he directly attack the patterns or rules governing Orestes' behaviour, instead he shows us an apparently unified front, while almost at once, showing us the cracks and fissures of that facade.  Orestes is fated to take action, but each of these slips in moral momentum threatens to condemn him.   

The moral issue of whether or not Orestes has grounds to take action lies close to the surface of the drama.  Clearly the moral grounds seem uncertain to Orestes; hence extended supplication to the gods.  Throughout the play the presentation of reasons why Orestes should kill Clytaemestra outweighs the rhetoric of why he should not.  The superficies of the drama tell him that he should carry out the murder--Apollo tells him he must, the Chorus recommends it, Electra pushes the plan, and Pylades advises it.  However, the weight of Agamemnon's guilt, of the justice of Clytaemestra's murder of her husband, and of the horror of matricide carry enough force that even infrequent allusions to them manage to countervail much of the force in favour of the matricide.  From his point of view the issue must boil down to the simple fact:  ‘I must perform this action because I am Orestes.’  Unless the moral mathematics adds up clearly and overwhelmingly in favour of his planned actions (which it does not), who Orestes is (that is to say, his intuitions as an honourable and civilized man) becomes the basis for action, and who he is pre-empts all other themes. 

While Orestes is hidden within earshot of the Chorus and Electra, their speeches are as vital to him as his own thoughts.  The emotional direction of their speeches is clear--revenge against the masters of the house--but they lack consistency and certitude.  Orestes overhears their invective, which is the emotional energy he requires, but it is punctuated with confusion and statements which would renew Orestes' doubt.  These contrasts of rage and misgiving would be even stronger and more polemical from Orestes' point of view. 

Electra's confusion is a minor version of Orestes' situation.  She has been forced into the paradoxical situation of offering libations to the departed father whom she honours and mourns on behalf of the mother she loathes.  The irony of the situation is lost to no one. 

What shall I say, as I pour out these outpourings 

of sorrow?  How say the good word, how make my prayer 

to my father?   Shall I say I bring it to the man 

beloved, from a  loving wife, and mean my mother?  I 

have not the daring to say this, nor know what else 

to say, as I pour this liquid on my  father's tomb. 

Shall I say this sentence, regular in human use: 

"Grant good return to those who send to you these flowers 

of honor:  gifts to match the . . . evil they have done." (88-95) 

Electra's dilemma, which echoes that of Orestes, is one of how to perform a holy act in such unholy and contradictory circumstances.  The advice of the Chorus is, in effect, to turn her prayer into a curse, asking for a man to kill Clytaemestra and Aegisthus.  ("Say simply:  ‘One to kill them, for the life they took’" (121). )  At this point Electra's course of action closely parallels that of Orestes.  What she acts out in ritual, he must act out in fact; what she prays for, he must do.  The question she asks of the Chorus is one which Orestes must ask of himself:  "I can ask this, and not be wrong in the gods' eyes?" (122). 

Orestes in his hiding place is being schooled in his course of action.  We cannot, however, overlook the continued inconsistencies of his instruction.  The same Chorus which had earlier spoken of the inescapable stain of blood is now asking for "some man at arms who will set free the house/ holding the Scythian bow backbent in his hands, a barbarous god of war spattering arrows/ or closing to slash, with sword hilted fast to his hand" (160-3).   When Electra finally makes her prayer, she begins by asking pity for herself and for Orestes who "lives outcast from his great properties."  Should we not be reminded at this point of how the great house has fallen and "high fortune" has become a god? 

Once Electra has shown her conviction, the prayed-for Orestes presents himself. 24  As Orestes himself notes, it is strange that Electra is quick to identify him from insubstantial evidence such as a lock of his hair and his footprints, but is slow to recognize him in person. 25   

Electra 

Yes; but how am I given an answer to my prayers. 

Orestes 

Look at me.  Look for no one closer to you than I. 

Electra 

Is this some net of treachery, friend, you catch me in? 

Orestes 

Then I must be contriving against my self. 

Electra 

It is your pleasure to laugh at my unhappiness. 

Orestes 

I only mock my own then, if I laugh at you. 

Electra 

Are you really Orestes?  Can I call you by that name? (218-24) 

This "recognition scene" is much debated in the criticism of the Oresteia .  George Thomson, in The Oresteia of Aeschylus , argues for the plausibility and realism of the scene but his arguments do not overcome the very apparent incongruity of the scene.  Herington, on the other hand, notes that "the sheer unrealism of this recognition scene, by any ordinary standards of logic, has been noted by Aeschylus critics ever since Euripides, who less than half a century later exposed it with wicked humour in his Electra (lines 508-45 of that play)." 26  Herington describes the scene as surrealistic and later as absurdist.  Clearly, the scene makes itself conspicuous and demands interpretation, or at the very least ‘to be noticed.’ It thereby draws to our attention at least three of the major images of the play:  Orestes proving his identity, "the net of treachery," and Electra's role as a double for Orestes, as his other self. 

Orestes recognizes Electra immediately, even from a distance.  Yet Orestes must submit to what seems a rather extensive rite to prove to Electra that he is Orestes.   By throwing emphasis on Orestes' identity, the scene reinforces the basic theme of the drama, that this is Orestes'  initiation.  He is here to "prove" himself, to show himself a man, and to assume his proper identity and place in the world.  It also brings to mind the capriciousness of what he must face in the process. 

The scene also introduces us to Electra as the foreboding, determining, weaker part of Orestes' nature.  She is quick to lose her wits upon the discovery of Orestes'  footprints  ("Oh this is torment, and my wits are going.") (210)  and, once she has recognized him, Orestes finds it necessary to tell her:  "No, no, control yourself, and do not lose your head for joy" (232).  While ostensibly encouraging Orestes, she introduces nagging doubts and feeble justifications.  Her weakness becomes Orestes'  weakness.  She introduces an element of contradiction into his resolve, much as he contradicts himself.  Of Clytaemestra he asks, "Let me but take her life and die for it" (438). Yet later he requests:  "Father, o King who died no kingly death, I ask/ the gift of lordship at your hands, to rule your house" (479-80).  Electra's prayer then seems to accidentally mock Orestes:  "I too, my father, ask of you such grace as this:/ to murder Aegisthus with strong hand, and then go free" (481-2). 

The "net" is perhaps the most dominant image of the play. The image is first and most frequently used to describe the cloak in which Agamemnon was entangled when he was murdered.  Electra first mentions it in her final prayers to Agamemnon:  "Think of the casting net that they contrived for you" (492).  Electra again uses the image to describe how they as Agamemnon's heirs might be like the corks that hold the net afloat to trap Aegisthus and Clytaemestra (505).  Finally Orestes sets their plan into action with the comment that "as they by treachery killed a man of high/ degree, by treachery tangled in the self same net/ they too shall die."  The final irony is Orestes' own entanglement. 

The net is the entire tragic double-bind situation which Aeschylus has woven, and it is also the cultural, historical situation in which Orestes and Electra have become entrapped.  They are lost children caught in the cycle of blood.  As the Chorus underlines: 

It is but law that when the red drops have been spilled 

upon the ground they cry aloud for fresh 

blood.  For the death act calls out on Fury 

to bring out of those who were slain before 

new ruin on ruin accomplished. (400-4) 

Though they call on Zeus, and Right, and the spirit of Agamemnon to make the evil they are about to do good and just, there are no assurances.  The best face Orestes can put on the situation is the image of a war:  "Warstrength shall collide with warstrength; right with right" (461).  Of  course, Orestes' matricide is not a war, and the situation is one of right against right and wrong against wrong. 

In the absence of a clear moral direction, the play returns to the theme of initiation.  What Orestes is and who he has a right to be form the motive, the objective, and the basis of the action.  "Behold the last of the sons of Atreus, foundering/  lost, without future, cast/ from house and right" (407-9) becomes Orestes' eventual battle cry, but throughout the play his grasp of his identity and therefore of his moral direction is shown to be tenuous.   After finally recognizing him, Electra attempts to reinforce but, in fact,  hyperbolizes the identity of this prayed-for man. 

O dearest, treasured darling of my father's house, 

hope of the seed of our salvation, wept for, trust 

your strength of hand, and win your father's house again. 

O bright beloved presence, you bring back four lives 

to me.  To call you father is constraint of fact, 

and all the love I could have borne my mother turns 

your way, while she is loathed as she deserves; my love 

for a pitilessly slaughtered sister turns to you. 

And now you were my steadfast brother after all. 

You alone bring me honor; but let Force, and Right, 

And Zeus almighty, third with them, be on your side. (235-45) 

Orestes quite naturally retreats from this easy objectification of his identity, which for him is still a sacred mystery.  His response to these confident, loving appraisals is to repeat the plea to Zeus to guarantee the righteousness of his actions, and he returns to the image of himself and Electra as lost waifs.  He also introduces the image which will become the central paradox of his tragic double bind, the impasse to his initiation into full self-identity:  that of Clytaemestra  being a snake. 

The essential theme of the play thus becomes that Orestes is an orphaned child, outcast, without his rights, properties, position, land and family, and is therefore trying to regain them.  Who he is gives him the right to all of this and, conversely, all of this, together with his sense of principles, makes him who is, and who he is about to become.  What betrays him, both literally and in the sense of his self-image, is his mother, the "viper," Clytaemestra.  Logically, the solution is to do away  with his mother; paradoxically, his murder of his mother is the one act which will guarantee the destruction of his sense of himself. 

Electra unwittingly  reveals the basis of the negation of Orestes' sense of himself--his position, rights, and principles. 

Of what thing can we speak, and strike more close, 

than of the sorrows they who bore us have given? 

So let her fawn if she likes.  It softens not. 

For we are bloody like the wolf 

and savage born from the savage mother. (418-22) 

The paradox in which Orestes is trapped is that in order to be himself, to fully be what his reality dictates, he must avoid being like his mother and, in fact, he must destroy her.  However, in the act of destroying Clytaemestra, Orestes becomes like her.   The double bind is reinforced when the Chorus reveals the nightmare which caused Clytaemestra to order the offering of these libations at the tomb of Agamemnon and Orestes identifies himself as the snake of Clytaemestra's dream. 

If this snake came out of the same place whence I came, 

if she wrapped it in robes, as she wrapped me, and if its jaws gaped wide around the breast that suckled me, 

and if it stained the intimate milk with an outburst 

of blood, so that for fright and pain she cried out aloud, 

it follows then, that as she nursed this hideous thing of prophecy, 

she must be cruelly murdered.  I turn snake to kill her. 

This is what the dream portends. (542-50) 

Orestes interprets the dream as a reaffirmation of his duty/destiny to kill his mother.  However, he has come to identify himself as a snake, which will negate his argument at the end of the play when he attempts to justify his murder of his mother with the statement that she was snake.   “[W]hat does she seem to be?   Some water snake, some viper / whose touch is rot even to him who felt no fang /strike, by that brutal and wrong daring heart” (994-6). 

Whatever images Orestes might have of himself as a moral agent are now dislocated, trapped in contradiction and therefore disallowed.  The double bind boils down to something like this: ‘Orestes is not a snake like his mother and therefore he must kill her because she is a snake.  And if Orestes kills his mother then he is a snake just like her.’ Having committed matricide Orestes is no longer what he was or had hoped to be; he has become the snake of Clytaemestra's dream, but neither image is tenable to him,  neither image can be true.  In short, if Orestes does not kill his mother, he is a snake.  If he kills his mother, he is a snake.  And finally, nothing--not even matricide--is worse than being a snake.  No vision of himself or his actions can be viable.  From Orestes perspective the world as it is simply cannot be. 

In light of the impasse which Orestes must have faced  it is logical to ask how, at the crucial moment, he brought himself to kill his own mother.  The apparent answer is that Orestes obeyed the Oracle of Apollo.   When Clytaemestra begs Orestes to spare her, Orestes asks Pylades, "What shall I do, Pylades?  Be shamed to kill my own mother?"  Pylades answers, speaking for the first and only time of the entire drama:   “What then becomes thereafter of the oracles / declared by Loxias at Pytho?  What of sworn oaths? / Count all men hateful to you rather than the gods” (900-2). 

However, the idea that at the crucial moment Orestes is simply obeying the oracle begs the whole question that the drama sets before us.  Orestes has already questioned the oracle, why does he obey it at the moment of truth.  Orestes responds to Pylades saying, "I judge that you win.  Your advice is good."  However, that Pylades has never spoken before and that he has chosen to speak in rhetorical questions and generalities belie our acceptance that Pylades words have the force to so firmly renew Orestes' conviction. 

In the carrying out of the assassination two features stand out which, I believe, serve to  inform us of the psychological conditions which make the matricide possible.  The first is that the plan requires that Orestes be disguised; the second is that the matricide scene, rather than clarifying the moral dilemma, shows an increase in the falseness,  in the intensity of the double bind, in the contrariness and confusion of the conditions of Orestes' existence.    

Orestes disguises himself as a traveller in order to gain access to Aegisthus and Clytaemestra.  He pretends to bear the message that he, Orestes, is dead.  There is a kind of truth in that announcement.  We should note that it seems a common feature of tragic heroes that they must wear a disguise or in some sense mask themselves--something figuratively or literally akin to what R.D. Laing calls the "false self" necessary in dealing with the alien conditions of existence.   When Clytaemestra points out that Orestes intends to kill his own mother, Orestes attempts to deny it by saying:  "No,/ It will be you who kill yourself.  It will not be I" (924).  Of course, we understand that Orestes is speaking figuratively here, but to what extent does he believe in his own figure of speech?  To what extent is he responsible?  To what extent is he himself at this moment? 

Through his analysis of Clytaemestra's dream and the apparent contradiction between the maid's  (Cilissa's) comments that she nursed Orestes and Clytaemestra's later proffering of her own breasts as those that nursed Orestes, George Devereux, in his book, Dreams in Greek Tragedy , concludes that Orestes as "the son of the unloving, non-nursing, hostile Klytaimestra [Clytaemestra] became not a chronic schizophrenic, but only an intermittent psychotic."  According to Devereux,   "He simply has bouffées délirantes --a psychiatric disorder common amongst primitive and archaic peoples.  He is a ‘borderline’ case." 24 

Devereux contends that since Orestes never grew to know Clytaemestra as his mother in a biological sense, he reacts to her exposing of her breasts to him in sexual rather than in filial/maternal terms. 

An anxiety-arousing sexual reaction on the part of Orestes can be inferred also on the basis of other considerations.  Having been sent abroad early, Orestes had no time to develop a sense of kinship with Kyltaimestra [Clytaemestra],  in fact, the lack of this sense of kinship between mother and son--which is the legal and psychological theme of A. Eum. [ Eumenides ]--no doubt facilitated Orestes' slaying a woman whom, though she is biologically his mother, he apprehends functionally only as a seductive woman:  as his father's sensual, adulterous wife.  In this respect the sending abroad of the child Orestes is a psychologically necessary detail of the plot, for it increases the credibility of the matricide. 28 

Orestes' approaches to his mother do seem to border on the lascivious; for example, he plans that she should die on top of Aegisthus.  Orestes alludes to the sexual favours of Aegisthus she has gained through her betrayal but, rather incongruously, demurs from expressing the idea openly.  There is a sexual overtone to the matricide but it is but one element in an incredible collage of confusing, innervating, disorienting, alienating falsehoods, contradictions, and paradoxes which Orestes encounters in dealing with his mother.  As Devereux has argued she presents her breast to Orestes to remind him that he nursed upon it.  Yet the maid claims to have been Orestes' nursemaid.  Clytaemestra claims to have raised Orestes as a child, but the Maid has already claimed responsibility for that as well.  Clytaemestra reminds Orestes that "a mother has her curse." Orestes tries to escape the threat of the curse with the argument that she is not his mother because she sent him away.  However, Orestes needs to know who he is, he cannot afford to deny parentage.  He cannot escape that Clytaemestra is his mother without giving up a large part of his own existence, including much of his rationale for murdering her.  At this point the logic of the double bind reaches its final aporia. 

Clytaemestra 

Take care.  Your mother's curse, like dogs, will drag you down. 

Orestes 

How shall I escape my father's curse, if I fail? 

No victory is possible; no escape is possible.  Orestes therefore acts not from conviction, or vision, or even prudence, but from emptiness, blindness, from loss of his sense of gravity and connection to the world.  The actual murder is therefore a kind of residual effect of earlier conviction which carries him forward, while he, in his condition of emptiness, uncertainty, and insecurity has no means to resist its flow. He answers Clytaemestra's futile tears quite flatly:  "Yes, this is death, your wages for my father's fate"(927).  However, Clytaemestra, as the play will prove, has the last word in her final words to Orestes:  "You are the snake I gave birth to, and gave the breast"(919). 

As he later struggles to explain his actions, Orestes holds up the robe used in the murder of his father  and, figuratively, becomes entrapped in that same net which captured Agamemnon and Clytaemestra.   

And this thing: what shall I call it and be right, in all eloquence?  Trap for an animal or winding sheet 

for dead man?  Or bath curtain?  Since it is a net, 

robe you could call it, to entangle a man's feet.           (996-1000) 

Orestes shows the signs of his mind weakening.  On one hand, his focus on the robe seems obsessive; on the other his subsequent comments seem so tangential and meandering as to have little directly to do with Clytaemestra and Aegisthus, and worse, are ambiguous enough to be applied as much to Orestes as to his mother.  When Orestes again tries to pick up the robe and his proper demeanour, he meets self-defeat. 

Now I can praise him, now I can stand by to mourn 

and speak before this web that killed my father, yet 

I grieve for the thing done, the death and all our race. 

I have won; but my victory is soiled, and has no pride. 

Chorus 

There  is no mortal man who shall turn 

unhurt his life's course to an end not marred. 

There is trouble here.  There is more to come. 

Orestes 

I would have you know, I see not how this thing will end. 

I am a charioteer whose course is wrenched outside 

the track, for I am beaten, my rebellious senses 

bolt with me headlong . . . (114-24) 

Though the Chorus attempts to console him, at the mention of "snakes" Orestes begins to hallucinate. 

Chorus 

No, what you did was well done.  Do not therefore bind 

your mouth to foul speech.  Keep no evil on your lips. 

You liberated all the Argive city when 

you lopped the heads of these two snakes with one clean 

stroke. 

Orestes 

No! 

Women who serve this house, they come like gorgons, they 

wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in a tangle 

of snakes. I can no longer stay.  (1044-50) 

Orestes' fate is exactly what he was seeking to avoid:  madness and exile.  In the final speech of the play the Chorus reviews the history of the house of Atreus and, fitting of a tragedy, concludes with a  series of questions.    “ . . . where /  is the end?  Where shall the fury of fate / be  stilled to sleep, be done with?  (1074-76). 

At the end of the Eumenides Orestes is acquitted and the Furies are stilled, but as already noted the means by which these ends are accomplished lead us more to question than to celebrate.  Aeschylus follows the rules of what is expected of him in his trilogy, oracles and premonitions are proven true, the gods and the furies act as they are said to act, yet the play directs us away from religious faith.  As Deborah Roberts concludes in Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia , the trilogy brings us to question the god and reconsider obedience to oracles.  “Aeschylus' stress on the god's ambiguity throughout the trilogy produces an association with changefulness of events, with defeated expectation, which goes beyond any single prophecy.  Changing circumstances change perceptions; . . . .” 29 

Though the oracle is fulfilled we cannot feel satisfied.  That dissatisfaction reminds us of the imperfection, the mutability, the finitude and limitations of what we call reality, even if that reality is closely watched over by Apollo.  At the end of the Oresteia , as Roberts observes, "The god's oracle reinforces the ending and helps bring resolution; the god himself is associated with change and doubt." 30 

Notes

4.  J. Herington, Aeschylus  (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1986), p. 125. 

5.  Ibid, p. 125. 

6.  F. Raphael and K. McLeish, trans., The Serpent Son: Aeschylus:  The Oresteia (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. xiii. 

7.  Herington, p. 134. 

8.  P. Vellacott, The Logic of Tragedy  (Durham:  Duke University Press, 1984), p. 36. 

9.  Ibid, p. 36. 

10.  P.M. Smith, On the Hymn to Zeus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon (Ann Arbor:  Scholars Press, 1980), p. vii. 

11.  Ibid, p. 22. 

12.  C. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 46. 

13.  Ibid, p. 41. 

14.  Ibid, p. 46. 

15.  Ibid, p. 47 

16.  Ibid, p. 52. 

17.  Ibid, p. 38. 

18.  Ibid, p. 53-4. 

19.  All quotations of "The Libation Bearers" are from Aeschylus 1:  Oresteia , trans. R. Lattimore, The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1953). 

20.  G. Thomson in The Oresteia of Aeschylus (Amsterdam:  Adolf M. Happert, 1966), p. 125,  identifies the offering of hair as an initiation rite.  see also J.G. Frazer, Pausanias's Descriptions of Greece , (London: MacMillan, 1898) vol. IV, pp. 392-3.  Robert Fagles in the notes to his translation of the Oresteia , entitled Aeschylus, The Oresteia (London:  Wildwood House, 1976), p. 316, confirms the giving of hair as an initiation rite.  The Raphael translation, The Serpent Son , makes the theme of initiation into manhood quite explicit in Orestes' opening speech.     

21.  G.F. Else, The Madness of Antigone  (Heidelburg:  Carl Winter, 1976), pp. 22-3. 

22.  Ibid, p. 23. 

23.  Ibid, p. 31. 

24.  Thomson argues that, although the Chorus is steering her in that direction, Electra doesn't think of Orestes as an avenger (p. 132).  This argument makes the fact that Electra is slow to recognize Orestes less incongruous and therefore less conspicuous.  It seems unlikely to me that the idea of Orestes returning and avenging himself has never crossed her mind, and yet this idea is forefront in the minds of the Chorus.  Furthermore I would surmise that the scene is intended to be incongruous in order to make it conspicuous (a little Brecht in Aeschylus) that Orestes must prove his identity.  In any event whether or not Electra is specifically praying for the arrival of Orestes, he still remains the "prayed-for man."    

25.  Thomson contends that Electra's ability to identify a lock of Orestes' hair and his footprints is knowledge that all primitive peoples possess.  He gives the example of Irish peasant girls discussing family resemblances in feet.   The fact remains she is quick to identify a lock of his hair ("It seems that it must be nobody's hair but his" (178) ) and the family resemblance of his feet, but slow to recognize his face.  This is not to say that the scene is completely unrealistic or nonsensical but it does lead us in the direction I have been indicating. 

26.  Herington, p.126.   

27.  G. Devereux, Dreams in Greek Tragedy  (Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 200. 

28.  Ibid, p. 208. 

29.  D.H. Roberts, Apollo and his Oracle in the Oresteia  (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1984), p. 72. 

30.  Ibid, p. 72.