Revenge Theme Analysis

As is also true of its “prequel” Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers centers on a series of acts of revenge. Having returned home from exile, Orestes (along with his sister Electra) is determined to murder his mother Clytemnestra (and her lover Aegisthus) for her role in the murder of his father Agamemnon—a murder that was itself an act of vengeance for Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his and Clytemnestra’s oldest daughter, Iphigenia, in order to gain favorable winds to sail to and make war upon Troy. Of course, the Trojan War itself took its roots in revenge as well—it began when a Trojan prince (Paris) “stole” a Greek princess (Helen of Troy, wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus), and Agamemnon and Menelaus sailed with an army to avenge this slight. This convoluted explanation already illustrates the complexity and inevitability of revenge within the world of the play (and Greek mythology in general). Revenge is a force unto itself, able to control the characters’ actions and to create a sense of inexorable momentum as the play moves towards its bloody climax.

The Libation Bearers illustrates the power of revenge by showing over and over how each of the characters’ arcs is motivated by a desperate need for, or fear of, retaliation. Orestes and Electra are the characters most obviously driven by revenge, seeking to make their mother suffer the same fate that she enacted upon their father. Aegisthus, too, remains motivated by revenge; having killed Agamemnon in part because Agamemnon’s father (Atreus) once tortured and humiliated his own father (Thyestes), Aegisthus now hopes to kill Orestes as well in order to destroy the Atrean line—and to make sure that Orestes will never return to enact vengeance against him, Aegisthus. Clytemnestra, perhaps the most obviously vengeful character within Agamemnon, now has a far more complicated relationship with revenge. When she is eventually threatened with death by an enraged Orestes, she attempts to convince her son that their familial bond is more important than his thirst for her blood—an argument that did not sway her from killing Agamemnon, and ultimately proves unsuccessful here as well.

Perhaps the strongest argument for the complex, double-edged nature of revenge comes at the end of the play. Throughout the plot, Orestes has been urged on by the god Apollo to kill his mother in order to restore honor to his father. That Apollo is the god of foresight has essentially convinced Orestes that murdering Clytemnestra (and thus taking revenge) is inevitable and divinely ordained. After taking his revenge, however, Orestes is confronted by the Furies, goddesses who take vengeance upon children who have dishonored their parents. Despite Orestes’s revenge having been sanctioned by a god, he is now going to be punished for it by different gods. The cycle of vengeance, Aeschylus seems to imply, is at once morally necessary and morally abhorrent, making it both inevitable and self-destructive, with far-reaching consequences for all involved.