Free The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers & the Furies by Aeschylus Page B

/And those that build them again are gay’. Aeschylus is often swept off his feet by his own creative exultation, but he never loses grip on his faith that ‘good wins out in glory in the end’. His exultation and his faith combine with enormous impact. We must surrender to him, let him sweep us on like a storm at sea, often violating our intellectual bent for precision and lucidity, often baffling when his genius seems to burst upon the majestic flow of his dramatic theme. At the end his violence will have brought us to a time and place of brightness and resilient peace, ‘gaiety transfiguring all that dread’.

THE LIBATION BEARERS
    The Libation Bearers is the crux of the Oresteia. After the killing of the king we have a rite of spring, like the Anthesteria sacred to Dionysus and performed when the god is struggling for rebirth, when winter yields to March. Memory and desire, dread and expectation mix, and the Anthesteria celebrates them both. It was a festival of libations which summoned the spring by summoning the great ancestral dead as the source of all new life. It was a festival of reincarnation, and to dramatize it Aeschylus re-created Agamemnon’s son. In the Odyssey Orestes hungers for his patrimony, he travels home from exile, kills his father’s assassins - his mother and her lover - and without a qualm of conscience ‘proclaim[s] the funeral day’, as Robert Fitzgerald translates it, ‘a festal day for all the Argive people’. Orestes is completely successful and completely in the right. But in The Libation Bearers he is right and wrong, his father’s avenger and a guilty matricide and more, the vortex where the Furies and the gods converge with fresh intensity and effect.
    If the Oresteia is a rite of passage from savagery to civilization, Orestes’ step from youth to maturity is the rite of transition in the trilogy. Because of its inwardness, its privacy, this ritual often excludes the anthropologist in the field, but it may inspire the dramatist, especially if he wants to probe the relationship between suffering and regeneration. For what happens in the secret chamber or the wilderness, or the grave to which Orestes is exposed, may be some sort of creative agony, some radical humanization of the ruder past, as preparation for the more communal life that awaits the young initiate. Somewhere within him, we may say, his innocence dies and his experience is born, and he must be deeply wounded in the process. The Libation Bearers allows us to feel that wounding as only drama can - as an ordeal of recognition. And Orestes’ ordeal will carry us through torment towards awareness and renewal and the light.
    After years of his mother’s usurpation he has broken out of exile and returned to avenge his father. That is Apollo’s command, as we shall learn, though here at the outset, as Orestes takes his stand at Agamemnon’s grave, what stirs him seems more personal, a deep tie between the living and the dead, reflected in his words that weave between the shadows and a sense of exhilaration. He prays to Hermes, the Escort of the Dead, to be his living comrade, then he drifts to thoughts of mourning. He combines two separate rites; he lays two locks of hair on the grave, one for his father’s death and one for a local stream that gave him manhood. There may be ties between mourning and maturity, the debts he owes his father and his mother. No sooner does he place the locks than a procession of her women appears, and they are dressed in black, and bear libations. Like the watchman he prays for help and sees a sign, but Orestes’ sign is human, and either way he interprets the women - as mourning a new wound to the house or appeasing his father’s spirit - he is right and he is strengthened. He sees his sister Electra, and her sorrow makes him cry to Zeus for revenge, intensifying his first appeal to Hermes. There may be ties among the living, among men and women, vengeance and affection. Orestes’