The Libation Bearers

The second part of the play further develops the major theme of The Dynamics of Power and Familial Loyalty. Having plotted his vengeance in the first part of the play, Orestes now executes his plan. Electra, Orestes’s sister, now fades into the background: The only function she and the Chorus now have is to stay out of the way. It is Orestes who goes to his mother in disguise to infiltrate the palace and confront his Clytaemestra and Aegisthus. The plan is successful: Clytaemestra does not recognize her son at all and immediately believes the claim that Orestes is dead. Part of what makes this scene so noteworthy is the fact that in the first episode, Orestes’s sister Electra needed no more than a lock of Orestes’s hair and one of his footprints to know that he had come back, while his mother Clytaemestra does not recognize him even when he is standing in front of her.

The motif of the wandering hero returning to his home or kingdom in disguise is also important in traditional Greek literature. The most famous example of this motif is Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic the Odyssey, who comes home to his kingdom of Ithaca after 10 years fighting at Troy and another 10 years trying to get back. Odysseus must return in disguise because his palace has been overrun by suitors hoping to marry his wife Penelope and thus win the kingdom of Ithaca for themselves. With the help of his son Telemachus and a few loyal slaves, Odysseus kills all the suitors and only then reclaims his home and his kingdom.

There are many parallels between Odysseus’s story and Orestes’s story that were explored in antiquity. Already in the Odyssey Homer called attention to the contrast between Odysseus’s wife Penelope, who remained faithful to her husband even when he had been away for 20 years, and Agamemnon’s wife Clytaemestra, who took a lover and enlisted his help to murder her husband. Like Agamemnon, Odysseus was a hero who fought at Troy; unlike Agamemnon, his family was more faithful, and so he was able to avoid Agamemnon’s gruesome fate.

Not all of Agamemnon’s family is unfaithful to him, however. Electra loves her father even many years after he is dead, and Orestes is determined to avenge his father’s murder even though doing so means he will have to kill his own mother. There is apparently little love lost between Orestes and his mother. According to Orestes’s nurse Cilissa, even Clytaemestra’s show of grieving her supposedly dead son is insincere:

She put a sad face on

before the servants, to hide the smile inside her eyes

over this work that has been done so happily

for her (737-40).

Even more chillingly, Clytaemestra immediately calls for “an axe to kill a man” (889) when she realizes that Orestes has tricked her: She is as ready to kill her son as she had been to kill her husband. All the same, Orestes’s conscience balks when the time comes to kill his mother, reflecting the conflict of Divine Commands Versus Personal Conscience. When he confronts Clytaemestra, she bares her breast to him to remind him of how she nursed him as a baby (much as Hecuba, in Homer’s Iliad, bares her breasts to her son Hector in an effort to dissuade him from facing the invincible Achilles). Orestes, at the sight, hesitates. He turns to ask himself if he should “[b]e shamed to kill [his] mother” (899).

In the end, however, Orestes is bound by Apollo’s oracle, which commanded him to avenge his father. As Pylades tells Orestes, he must “[c]ount all men hateful to [him] rather than the gods” (902). In the conflict between divine commands and personal conscience, it is divine commands that must win, as Orestes realizes. This does not, however, mean that he does not suffer consequences for killing his mother. Retribution, even when commanded by a god, is not the same as justice, and The Moral Implications of Retribution must be faced. Clytaemestra herself warns Orestes, before he kills her, that his “mother’s curse, like dogs, will drag [him] down” (924). This is exactly what happens at the end of the play, when the Furies, the underworld goddesses whose function was to punish murderers, come to torment Orestes.

As Orestes flees the Furies, it becomes obvious that justice has not yet been done. Orestes’s act of retribution—which led him to kill his own mother in cold blood—has merely continued the endless cycle of bloodshed that has already plagued the family for generations. As the Chorus realizes, there is indeed “more to come” (1020), and it is only in the Eumenides—the final play of the trilogy—that true order will finally be restored.