The Libation Bearers is also about vengeance, but with a difference in focus. Apollo has given to Orestes the task of avenging his father by killing Agamemnon’s murderer. Orestes, as the head of the Atreides oikos, must enact the justice of the family. It’s the family feud, Greek style. Apollo gives Orestes the choice of avenging his father or being pursued by the Furies of his father’s blood.

Some ten years have elapsed since the murder of Agamemnon and usurpation of Aegisthus. Orestes returns to Argos and visits the grave of his father, and there discovers his sister Electra. He is reunited with the only real family that he has left. It is here that Orestes discovers that his target is not Aegisthus, whom he believed to be the murderer of his father, but his own mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes goes to the palace and kills, first Aegisthus and then his mother. Orestes and the chorus believe that the double killings will restore the order of the gods over both the house of Atreus and the city of Argos. As the Chorus puts it:

In killing his own mother, he violates one of the oldest and most potent laws of man — the injunction against matricide. His act, meant to put at rest the spirit of his father and to bring justice to the house of Atreus, instead brings a new curse down upon Orestes. In fact, Orestes, as the heir to a family in which mother has slaughtered father, is already in an accursed dilemma. It falls to him as the legitimate head of the household to punish the killer of his father or else invite the Furies of an unavenged patriarch down upon himself and his oikos. In this case, however, to bring about a just retribution, Orestes must commit an act of paramount outrage — matricide. To do the right thing, he must do a very wrong thing indeed!

After he has finished off his mother, Orestes rushes from the scene of carnage, pursued by a vision of the furies that have arisen from his mother’s blood to take vengeance upon him. He runs away to the great temple at Delphi and the protection that Apollo has promised him. The play ends with the chorus lamenting the sinful history of the Atreides house.

The Libation Bearers is less popular than the other two plays in the trilogy. Usually the second play in a Greek tragic trilogy is the most dramatic. But, this is not the case here. The play is a necessary part of the whole, but for the most part only because it provides the stimulus for the conclusion and grand message of the last play — The Eumenides.

Lex Talionis

In Dark Age (c. 1100-750 B.C.) and Early Archaic (c. 750-650 B.C.) Greece, before the polis became the predominate political institution in the Aegean World, the central unit of Greek society was the oikos, the household. Most Greeks lived either in isolated farmsteads or in small settlements. Law was customary and most disputes were resolved either by the wronged family, by the village chieftain (basileus) or by a council of elders. Murder was a private affair with settlement through blood feud, material compensation or exile. Under these primitive social conditions, the prevailing law in the Aegean was the lex talionis. The earliest human legal systems were almost universally forms of lex talionis, or "the law (lex) of retaliation." The lex talionis is a law of equal and direct retribution: in the words of the Hebrew scriptures, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, a life for a life.” In this early period of Greek civilization, as often as not it was administered by the family of the victim. This is the law that requires that Orestes punish with death the murderers of his father.  Since the state (Argos) cannot punish the usurpers, and since murder is a “family matter,” Apollo requires Orestes to act, to invoke the lex talionis, and to execute the murderers of his father. Sadly for Orestes, his task is more legally and morally complicated than he knows when he sets out to exact family vengeance. In order to revenge one family member, he must kill another. That other is his mother; he must commit one of the most repellent crimes imaginable. In avoiding Apollo’s curse of allowing his fathers killers to go free, Orestes will commit an act that is sure to call forth the furies of his mother’s blood. He can’t win for losing. Aeschylus uses the complex and horrid Atreides family history, that cycle of family murder, retribution and punishment to illustrate the flawed nature of the lex talionis. The playwright argues that the law of family retribution or family justice only creates a cycle of injustice in which the necessities of a more civilized society — order, cooperation among citizens, trust within the politics of the state — cannot stand. As we shall see, in the next play in the trilogy, Aeschylus will offer an alternative venue to the Athenians from which to obtain justice.

The Furies

The Furies are chthonic deities, dark and ancient. They are goddesses of vengeance, the personification of the anger of the murdered dead. They are most often associated with the punishers of those who break oaths and those who have committed acts that violate blood relationships, both acts that were unpardonable in the earliest Iron Age Greek community. Oaths bound families and communities together in a society that had no legal means of creating agreements and securing cooperation. Murder or other taboo acts (such as incest) within a family threatened the basic social order of the whole community. Similarly, the Furies protected those within society who had no power to protect themselves. They defended beggars and strangers. Along with Zeus Xenios the Furies enforced the institution of xenia; the rules of hospitality that allowed strangers to receive shelter, courtesy and protection from harm when they were far from home.

Orestes stabs Aegisthus; a horrified Clytemnestra looks on.