The Bucket List Book Adventure - The Libation Bearers - Aeschylus

The Bucket List Book Adventure: Book 4 — The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus

By a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures

 Dear Henry,

Book Four of the Bucket List Book Adventure, Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers, is complete! Let me tell you all about it.

This story might be best described as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus finally getting their comeuppance.

Set seven years after the events of Agamemnon, Orestes, guided by the oracle of Apollo, returns from exile to Mycenae to honor his father’s memory and avenge his death. At his father’s grave, he encounters his sister Electra, and the two soon recognize each other. Together, they grieve their father’s murder and plot retribution.

Orestes then enters the palace disguised, deceives his mother with false tidings, and kills Aegisthus. Torn by duty and guilt, he hesitates to kill Clytemnestra,  but Apollo’s oracle reminds him that disobedience would bring a curse. In anguish, he strikes her down.

But divine justice is not so simple. “What can wash off the blood once spilled upon the ground?” Aeschylus asks. Orestes, though fulfilling one command, incurs another curse. The Furies rise to torment him for the sin of matricide, driving him from Mycenae toward Delphi in desperate search of purification.

I understood Orestes’s rage, after all, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus robbed him of both father and inheritance. Yet Electra’s fury puzzled me at first. As children, she and Orestes could barely have remembered Agamemnon, who left for Troy when they were young. Raised in her mother’s household, Electra might have been expected to sympathize with Clytemnestra, who killed Agamemnon after he sacrificed Iphigenia.

Then I reread the graveyard scene and began to see her side. In ancient Greece, a child’s honor was tied entirely to the father’s name. Agamemnon’s murder not only destroyed his glory but stripped his children of rank. Electra faced a lifetime of servitude, and her resentment burned as fiercely as Orestes’s grief.

“Count all men hateful to you rather than the gods,” Aeschylus warns, a chilling line that captures the play’s sense of divine order and vengeance.

Apollo’s role in all this still baffles me. He had little cause to defend Agamemnon, who once offended the god by seizing Chryses’s daughter, yet he commands Orestes to avenge him. Perhaps it was Cassandra’s death, the prophetess and priestess of Apollo, that kindled his wrath. Regardless, divine will prevails, even when mortals suffer its contradictions.

As the story closes, Orestes is king, but haunted. His victory is hollow; Electra’s fate is uncertain. Clytemnestra lies dead, and the Furies are stirring.

And as Aeschylus reminds us, “Time brings all things to pass.”

We will see what becomes of Orestes next — in The Eumenides.

Until then,
xoxo, a.d. elliott

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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life

She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.

You can also browse her online photography gallery at shop.takethebackroads.com.

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