The Libation Bearers

The Libation Bearers

By Aeschylus.

Translated by Gilbert Murray.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Preface
4. Dramatis Personae
5. Half-Titlepage
   1. The Libation Bearers
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Preface

The Choëphoroe, or Libation-Bearers, is the second play in the only trilogy preserved to us from the Athenian stage: Agamemnon, Choëphoroe, Eumenides. The first gives the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aigisthos; the second the vengeance of Orestes, helped by his sister Electra; the third deals with the ultimate solution of the problem of Sin and Punishment, the purification of Orestes from the murder of his mother and the conversion of the spirits of Punishment from Furies to Beneficent Beings, from “Erinyes” to “Eumenides.”

The vengeance of Orestes was made the subject of plays by all three tragedians. All the plays are in their ways masterpieces, and each highly characteristic of its writer. Euripides realizes and psychologizes the horror of the story; Sophocles, apparently from a deliberate adoption of the “Homeric” tone, suppresses the religious problem and concentrates on the elements of direct passion. Aeschylus, as I have said elsewhere, “though steeped in the glory of the world of legend, would not lightly accept its judgment upon religious and moral questions, and above all would not, in that region, play at make-believe. He would not elude the horror of this story by simply not mentioning it, like Homer, or by pretending that an evil act was a good one, like Sophocles. He faces the horror; realizes it; and tries to surmount it on the sweep of a great wave of religious emotion. The mother-murder, even if done by a god’s command, is a sin; a sin to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet, since the god cannot have commanded evil, it is a duty also. It is a sin that must be committed.” The crucial difference is that the Choëphoroe is not self-contained, while the other plays are. They are concerned with a particular story; it is part of a trilogy dealing with the great problem which lies at the centre of Greek religion⁠—Hubris, Dike, Soteria or Crime, Punishment and Deliverance. (I may refer the reader to my introductions to the Agamemnon and to Euripides’ Electra.)

Thus, though to the Greek student this is perhaps, of all extant tragedies, the most obscure in detail of language, to the English reader it is not hard to understand. The atmosphere indeed is very ancient: it demands imaginative effort: but the sympathy goes as we would wish it to go and the story tells itself. Only two points call for special comment.

The first is the name of the play.1 The other two plays are called Electra, after the chief character: this is called Choëpheroe, or Libation-Bearers, after the Chorus. For in truth the subjects are not, artistically speaking, quite the same. The main interest of the other plays is to describe how the woman Electra felt and acted with regard to the murder of her mother and stepfather; in this play it is to narrate how Agamemnon, the long dead, was awakened to help his children to avenge him. The ghosts in Homer could not speak till they had drunk the blood of sacrifice. Somewhat in the same way the dead Agamemnon here cannot gather his dim senses till the drink-offerings have sunk into his grave. The wine and milk and honey reach his parched lips. He stirs in his sleep, and in that one moment of hesitating consciousness there are crowded upon him all those appeals that have most power to rouse and sting. The first words spoken in prayer at his neglected tomb; the call for vengeance sent, as it were, unknowingly by the murderess; the repeated story of his old wrongs and the outrage done upon his body; above all, the voices of his desolate children crying to him for that which he himself craves. There is no visible apparition from the tomb, as there is, for instance, in the Persae. But as the great litany grows in intensity of longing, the dead seem to draw nearer to the living, and conviction comes to the mourners, one after another, that he who was once King of Kings is in power among them. Where in all literature, except Aeschylus, could one find this union of primitive ghostliness with high intellectual passion? One hand seems to reach out to the African or Polynesian, while the other clasps that of Milton or Goethe.

Another point which the hasty reader might overlook is the psychological treatment of Orestes. At the end of the play, of course, he goes mad. That is in the legend. But from quite