Aeschylus,
The Oresteia, Part II: Choephoroi (The Libation Bearers
Reading Libation Bearers would give you an excellent opportunity to practice your Greek, not ordering ouzo in the Plaka or Old Town of Athens, of course, but those key value terms on the sheet posted to GoucherLearn. Look for repeated advice and capitalized terms that reoccur, especially "Justice." When characters are told to "control themselves," so as not to reveal the plot to Clytemnestra and Aethisthos, that is a reference to sophrosyne. When characters appear to be losing their minds due to stress or anger or fear, that is mania. Play around with these concepts as they appear to move or threaten the characters. It's as if you are looking beneath the surface of the play and seeing mighty powers battling for control of the action. Why would Aeschylus subject the people of Athens to three plays depicting the spectacular melt-down of the family of one of the Greek Homeric heroes? The plays are said to have won the prize in the Dionysian festival competition. Why? Before class, take a look at the Web page where I cribbed Aristotle's stages of Greek tragedy so that you have some vocabulary for describing the play's major dramatic parts in terms a Greek would understand: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/greek_terms_for_the_progress_of_tragedy.htm
Study Questions
1) Why is this play called Libation Bearers?
When you have finished reading the whole play, consider what else
might be a good name for it, and
how might that name change your reading?
2) What kind of justice does
Electra appeal to?
3) How do Electra's "libations" to
Agamemnon compare with those
referred to by Clytemnestra in the previous play?
4) When Electra fits her footprint
into Orestes', what kind
of test is she applying? What does
that imply about her expectations
of the maker of that print?
5) Orestes says that Apollo told
him he must avenge his father's
murder or suffer diseases and madness "springing from [his]
father's blood."
How could a modern politician
interpret this? A psychologist?
A family sociologist
specializing in family violence?
How do their views differ from what
Orestes means when he says it?
6) When characters answer each
others' lines in rapid back and
forth succession, one following out the line of the other's
interrupted statement or answering the other's question, the
process is called "stichomythia."
What does the stichomythic
passage between Electra, Orestes, the Chorus, and the Leader of
the Chorus dramatize?
The passage is meant to be
chanted, faster and faster, with increasingly heavy stress.
7) What dream wakes Clytemnestra to
send the libation bearers out?
Why is it ironic that this is so?
8) In Strophe 3 , the
Chorus turns from its examples of
bad women to Clytemnestra's marriage to Agamemnon.
What is their prescription
for a proper marriage? What is the
core of the Orestia's
horror for Aeschylus and his contemporary audience?
9) How might you interpret Orestes'
lie to Clytemnestra that "he is
dead"? Is there a sense in which he
tells her the truth about himself?
10) What essential function is
served by the description of
Orestes' infancy offered by Cilissa, his Nurse?
Is it appropriate?
Where else is this period in his life alluded to
and why does Aeschylus bring it up, so explicitly, here?
11)
Is Clytemnestra's response to the threat of death "heroic"?
12) What are the ironies in the Servant's report "The dead, I tell you‑‑now‑‑the living, kill"? Clytemnestra calls this a riddle, and quickly solves it. What about her dream's riddle of the snake-child? Why has she not remembered it (yet)? This will tell you something about her pride in self-control and perception.
13) What propositions guide the
moral reasoning of Agamemnon's
avengers? What is Clytemnestra's
defense of her actions?