The Libation Bearers

The moral implications of retribution and the relationship between retribution and justice are important themes throughout the Oresteia trilogy. In Agamemnon, Clytaemestra kills her husband Agamemnon in retribution for his earlier killing of their daughter Iphigenia. Clytaemestra’s act of retribution only leads to further retribution when Orestes grows up and decides to avenge his father by killing her, causing the cycle of bloodshed to keep spinning out of control.

From the very beginning of Libation Bearers, Orestes and the other characters cast retribution in a positive light. Since Clytaemestra was unjust in her murder of Agamemnon, killing her to avenge Agamemnon must surely be just and even pious. Orestes thus prays to Zeus to “grant [him] vengeance for [his] father’s / murder” (17-18) upon first arriving in Argos, while Electra beseeches her father’s ghost to send an avenger to Argos so that “they / who kill [him] shall be killed in turn, as they deserve” (143-44).

Similarly, Orestes is confident throughout the play that his retribution is right because the god Apollo himself has commanded him to avenge his father, and one must always obey the gods. It is taken for granted in the first part of the play that Clytaemestra and Aegisthus must die, with Electra hoping for “one to kill them, for the life they took” (121).