Fate and Motivation in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers

Lecture for Reed College Humanities 110, Fall 1999

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INTRODUCTION

My lecture today concerns a great theme and a small puzzle. The great theme is the compatibility of fatalism and the moral significance of human action. The small puzzle is the question of what is going on during the very long scene at Agamemnon’s grave in The Libation Bearers. I’ll try to lay out the great theme, explain how the small puzzle relates to this theme, and then do the best I can to solve the puzzle.

You’ll see in the course of my lecture how the theme and puzzle are related. But let me display one of my pedagogical motives in connecting the two at the outset. The scene at Agamemnon’s grave cries out for explanation. Unfortunately some of the recent candidate explanations betray a deep misunderstanding of the nature of Aeschylus’s tragedy. This is often what happens in an ahistorical reading of Greek texts. I’ll try to give a historical reading – that is, a reading that gives due attention to the cultural attitudes present in the very alien place in which this work was produced. But I don’t think this is worth doing simply in order to recognize the alienness of the culture or the work. No, I think it is worth doing because we have something to learn from the Greeks. It may be that the Greeks were not only different from us, but had advantages we have lost sight of. For the Oresteia offers us a particular account of how to be moral through the telling of a narrative that by all accounts couldn’t have ended any other way – it shows us that a certain kind of inevitability in the outcome of one’s life is no bar to moral heroism. It does this by emphasizing the motives of human action. Thus we find a particular recommendation for what Foucault called "the determination of the ethical substance." And while I will be concerned with Aeschylus’s particular recommendation, it is perhaps more important to get the general idea of what this aspect of morality is.

THE FATALISTIC ATTITUDE

Part of what provides a standing invitation to our mis-reading of Greek literature is its perhaps unfamiliar attitude toward fate, divine power, and human freedom. You will all have noticed something of the peculiar Greek view toward fate and divine power already -- it’s pretty hard to read the Illiad without noticing it. For present purposes I’ll define fatalism as the view that the outcome of a person’s life is, in the long run, inevitable. When Cassandra, standing before Agamemnon’s palace, prophesyes that Orestes will slay his mother to avenge the murder of his father, we have a clear example of this fatalism being expressed [QUOTE 1]. This attitude is very different from the predominant attitude we find in our literature and in ourselves.

I claim that in order to understand Aeschylus rightly, we have to respect the presence of this fatalistic attitude in his work. I do not mean that this was the personal attitude of the author Aeschylus, though it might well have been. I mean that the work manifests this attitude, in that the work presupposes the audience will find it a comprehensible and familiar attitude. The challenge will be to show how a work that presupposes this attitude can be morally instructive. I think the Oresteia is morally instructive, and moreover that the fatalistic attitude is a part of what makes it effective as morally instructive literature.

In so many ways, tragedy is a synthesis of epic and lyric [PAUSE]. We know that Greek tragedy selected its material from traditional myth. The deeds and events of a tragic myth were familiar to tragedy’s original audience, and this fact allowed Aeschylus to place the gross outcomes of the story in the background and to bring into relief something else -- an account of what it was like for the agents who performed these deeds. It is well noticed that the action of tragedy turns inward, to the psychological and religious lives of the characters.

In one way, this turn makes Aeschylus more immediately familiar to us than the psychologically barren poetry of the Illiad. Aeschylus’s writing appears much more modern in the same way the lyric does. But this familiarity tempts us, I fear, to forget how different Greek tragedy remains from our own literature. For the rich portrayal of the characters’ psyches occurs in a context of fated outcomes. The external deeds are inevitable, and if the internal forum influences the external deeds, that can only mean that either the thoughts, emotions, and desires of the internal life are similarly inevitable, or that whatever the thoughts, emotion, and desires were, the outcome they would produce would be in any case the same. The Greeks saw no tension in this implication. I don’t think we should either.

The Greeks accounted for the necessity of outcomes by appeal to supernatural powers, paradigmatically the will of Zeus. We’ve overcome that superstition, but only by replacing it with a structurally similar confidence in naturalistic necessity. The physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological forces we find at work in the world today are natural phenomena – not supernatural. But the necessities they determine on the operations of the natural world, including the human elements of the natural world, are none the less necessary for that. We can no more frustrate the laws of nature than a Greek hero could frustrate the will of Zeus.

In light of this structural analogy between the Greek world view and our own, we can ask how it is possible for there to be moral significance in human actions that are a result of necessity – be it supernatural or natural. To this question Aeschylus has an answer.

Let’s now turn to the text of the Libation Bearers, specifically the Apollonian oracle Orestes receives. Part of the message concerns what would happen to Orestes if he were to fail to kill his father’s murderers. It continues then, with some ambiguity as to whether the coming of the Erinyes [E*rin*ees] is conditional or not, to describe the consequences of familial killing: [#2:]

It should be obvious that in the oracle’s prediction we have a pretty good description of what happens to Orestes after he does kill Clytemnestra -- the Erinyes [E*rin*ees] terrorize Orestes into fleeing his city. It is unclear whether Orestes himself saw the inevitability of facing the Erinyes [E*rin*ees]. But surely Tom Gilchrist is correct to point out that Orestes never assumes that by killing he can put an end to troubles, that he can bring light out of darkness by an act of slaughter. And some of Orestes’s remarks after the killing of Clytemnestra suggest he expected that he himself would fulfil this prohesy.

In any case, by the lights of the story Orestes’s fate was inevitable. That is why I say that the tragedy manifests a fatalistic attitude. The story accepts, and expects the audience to accept, the inevitability of the outcome.

Orestes is caught in unhappy circumstances that dominate the shape of his life. The horror of Orestes’s situation is easily comprehended by us, but the way he deals with that situation reveals an attitude toward fate and divine power that I think is absent from our own literature. We have in Orestes a suffering hero who does not think to flee from his circumstances, to condemn the forces enforcing his suffering, or to collapse into guilt or self-loathing. While part of Orestes’s suffering can be explained by his parents -- and that’s the part of the explanation we can most easily understand -- Orestes’s fate is also determined by the supernatural forces at play in the tragedy. It is the power and reach of the Erinyes [E*rin*ees] that explains why Orestes cannot hope for an easy resolution to his difficulties. And Apollo demands he revenge his father. He’s trapped in a battle between opposed divinities that he cannot escape, nor can he hope to control its outcome. Yet, and this is important, no part of Aeschylus’s work encourages outrage at the workings of these divine forces. This absence can be frustrating to the modern reader. Perhaps you’ve felt this frustration -- shouldn’t the Erinyes [E*rin*ees] be condemned at some point for their harassment of Orestes, or, taking the other side, Apollo condemned for his encouragement of matricide? What we must realize is that this absence is a natural consequence of the broader attitudes presupposed in the work. What controls the lives of characters in Greek tragedy is something that it would be sacrilegious to oppose, and it is difficult to find a force similar to this in our contemporary world-view. In our culture anything non-human that seems to control a human life is something we chafe at. I leave it to you to consider how, if at all, this can be considered wisdom [PAUSE].

MORAL SIGNIFICANCE UNDER INEVITABLE OUTCOME

One response to the presence of the fatalistic attitude in the Orestiea is to admit that Aeschylus offers us something unique, but to condemn what he offers as irrelevant. He is irrelevant, the response goes, because it is morally unacceptable to promote such an attitude; a hero who passively accepts the oppressive weight of Orestes’s circumstance is no hero -- he is just a fool or a moral coward. At best, he is a tool in the morally dubious schemes of Apollo.

Now, I won’t try to defend passive acceptance of oppression, but I will argue against this response as a complete understanding of the significance of Aeschylus. It represents an overly simplistic morality; moreover, it masks something that is, after all, potentially familiar to us about Orestes’s circumstances.

The response is morally simplistic because it assumes that a moral assessment of Orestes is decided purely by the fact that when faced with the option of struggling against his doom or submitting to it, Orestes submits. But matters are not so simple, as is shown by the clear intuition that if one comes to know that one’s fate cannot be escaped, then it is foolish not to accept it. There is nothing morally superior about ignoring the reality of one’s situation when one realizes what is inevitable. If you think about it for yourself you’ll come up with your own cases where someone, perhaps you yourself, were faced with an outcome that was in any case inevitable. The likely candidate is the ending of a personal relationship. It does become clear to from time to time that a relationship is ultimately doomed -- the only things left undetermined are how and when it ends. In such a case, facing that unpleasant fact about the inevitability of the end with honesty is usually much better than trying to ignore it. Unfortunately, we seldom gain this knowledge as soon as we would like. The Greeks, with their greater sympathy for the fatalistic attitude, missed the point less often than we do. It is a fact that sometimes we are faced with inevitable outcomes. Therefore, I think that Orestes’s situation can speak to us in a certain way. Sometimes, the only power a person has is the power to decide why or how she is going to bring something about, something that is ultimately unavoidable. This is a kind of human power under inevitable fate, and, as I hope to bring out in the case of Orestes, how that admittedly limited human power is used can be of moral significance.

Fatalism is often felt to be unpalatable because it is incompatible with human freedom, something we value very highly. But the relation between fatalism and human freedom is not so simple. In the case of Orestes, the inevitability of the fact that he will kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus does not by itself determine why Orestes will decide to act as he does, and why he acts is of as great a moral significance as the external consequences of his action. By what motives, for what reasons, will Orestes act? That question is the heart of the action in the Libation Bearers, and its answer the key to the heroism of Orestes.

The interpretation of the Libation Bearers that I will argue for places this question of motives at the center of the play. This interpretation answers a small puzzle that, in any case, one needs to answer. The puzzle is why the Libation Bearers spends so long at Agamemnon’s grave. Over half the play takes place there, and after all what is accomplished in that time? It is clear from Cassandra’s prophesy what Orestes will do. What is all that wailing for?

One answer would be: well Orestes does after have to decide what he will do. To my surprise, someone has advocated this reading: Bruno Snell [Snell, p.106]. By Snell’s account Orestes at Agamemnon’s grave is like Prince Hamlet; his dramatic role is to deliberate between two claims "almost equal in urgency". Yet this account is directly refuted by the text. From line 18 of The Libation Bearers, where Orestes cries out "O Zeus grant that I may avenge the death of my father," Orestes is resolved in his course of action. The further events at the grave give no indication that Orestes ever re-considers his course of action; he’s continuously resolved to avenge his father. Let me vent a complaint here. The value of Aeschylus to us lies in the fact that he does not present us with preliminary versions of Shakespearean heros. What allows Aeschylus to offer us something so unique is, in part, the fact that the hero never thinks to question whether he will kill his father’s usurpers. He does not deliberate about what to do.

Another, no less anachronistic reading, is offered by Richmond Lattimore. Lattimore claims that one of the two goals to be accomplished at the grave of Agamemenon is that the characters "incite themselves and arm themselves with the anger that will make them do what they must do [Lattimore, p.25]." On this reading, Orestes is not Hamlet, but rather MacBeth, and he must screw his courage to the sticking point before the bloody act.

The compelling objection to this reading is that it obscures one of the most salient features of Orestes’s killing of Clytemnestra, namely the very different psychological state of Orestes in the act of killing when compared to those of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Let’s just review what the plays tell us about the differences among the psyches of the killers, beginning with Agamemnon. At the port of Aulis, Agamemnon receives a prophesy that Artemis will block the sailing winds unless Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphegenia is sacrificed. The Chorus describes Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice of Iphigenia in the following terms: [#3]

When Agamemnon found himself pinched "he put on the yoke-strap of compulsion," and he adopted "a temper of utter ruthlessness" -- he reacted as a Homeric hero would, with a massive emotional response. It is this response that allows Agamemnon to carry out the otherwise impossibly terrible act of binding and slaughtering his daughter.

Clytemnestra herself tells us something of her mind at the killing of Agamemnon: [#4]

Can you imagine the frame of mind necessary for Clytemnestra to take such pleasure in the act? I hope not. That gratuitous third blow, the image of her rejoicing when spattered by the gore -- words like rage, wrath, hate, madness, or delusion don’t seem to be adequate for this level of sickness. I think that one might well relate this portrayal of the psyches of both Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to that of Homer’s Achilleus, when he tells Hektor how much he wishes his fury would drive him to "hack your meat away and eat it raw [Illiad XXII, ll. 345-349]."

Now let’s compare Orestes to these two. He becomes something completely unlike the Homeric model. The fateful meeting of Orestes and Clytemnestra begins with a kind of a debate. The two exchange several questions, and at one point Orestes might even reveal something of a doubt [though the reading is controversial]. Let’s read the end of their long exchange with an eye toward the state of mind of Orestes: [#6]

There can be no question that Orestes is free from the violent emotions of the Homeric killer. The tone of his speech strikes me as what the poet Wallace Stevens called "the music of meet resignation." If anything, his responses are almost excessively cold, too rational. Even if Orestes is killing his mother for the sake of his father, he surely is not killing her in the way his father would have. That, I believe, is a central message of the whole play. Though Orestes cannot escape his doom, he can bring it about in a difterent way.

So there’s our contrast. This contrast explains why it cannot be wholly correct to say, as Lattimore does, that the characters at Agamemnon’s grave "incite themselves and arm themselves with the anger that will make them do what they must do." Indeed, focusing exclusively on the emotional consequences of the graveside scene we should say that the scene is not an incitement at all, that it produces no anger; rather, it exhausts or prevents passionate emotion from Orestes.

The second half of Lattimore’s account is more interesting. He says that the other goal of the actions at the grave is "to enchant actual power out of the spirit and the grave [p. 25]. " There is no doubt that the characters do pray to, and call upon for assistance, the ghost of Agamemnon. That much is clear. But what does it mean to call upon a ghost for assistance? What is the goal, the point of the ritual? It is not the goal of literally raising the dead -- or if it is that, it fails utterly. Neither Agamemnon’s ghost nor any other underworld character arrives to actually help with the killing. One cannot dismiss this absence easily, for Aeschylus was obviously not opposed to having ghosts arrive on stage! So we’re left with the question of how to understand the function and the point of the graveside ritual.

PRESENTATION OF MOTIVES, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS

We’ve examined the emotional state of Orestes at the killing of Clytemnestra, and we know that that has something to do with an answer to our question. Our task now is to explore the kind of power under inevitable fate outlined above, the power to decide why one is going to do something that admittedly cannot in any case be avoided. We account for why one acts by speaking of one’s reasons for acting, by assigning motives. This is how we indicate that we are picking out the elements that explain why one acts as one does. In a psychological explanation, these motives will be desires. There are also religious motives on prominent display in Aeschylus, and the importance of these must be respected. These religious motives manifest themselves as allegiances to and invocations of specific divinities. The relation between the psychological and religious motives is an interesting one, but not one I claim to fully understand.

At the psychological level, Orestes’s offers an explicit picture of his situation. After recounting the prophesy of the oracle, he says: [#9]

Orestes mentions four desires that could motivate him to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. If chooses the first desire, he will act out of loyalty to, or out of fear of, Apollo. If he chooses the second, he will act for the sake of his father. If he chooses the third, he will act because he covets the royal estates and the attendant material wealth. If he chooses the fourth, he will act in the interests of the citizens who now are ruled by a pair of tyrants and deserve better.

Our moral assessment of Orestes’s action depends very much on what he allows to motivate him in his act. Compare just the last two options. If he kills his mother out of greed for the royal estates, we’d surely disapprove of that. If he acts for the sake of the freedom of his citizens, we would tend to approve, though his petty gender antagonism might turn away a few of us. Because four desires that potentially motivate are present in Orestes, he has a genuine power here, even assuming that he has no genuine choice about whether or not to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. It is possible to desire strongly the royal estates and yet to act for the sake of something else altogether.

At first glance the text seems to announce that Orestes’s intention is to act for the sake of his father. Following Orestes’s speech about the oracle, the next five verses of Orestes and Electra are addressed to Agamemnon [LB ll. 315-321, 332-339, 345-353, 363-371, 380-385]. At no point during the lamentation, which lasts until line 509, is there further mention of Apollo, or of the wealth, or of the oppression of the citizenry.

Let me say that it is uncertain whether we are entitled to conclude from the fact that these prayers are addressed to Agamemnon that Orestes’s desire to avenge his father is what motivates him to act. I’m not sure whether we can rely on that relation between psychological motives and religious ones. But that relation does seem very plausible to me.

Now other religious motives are introduced at the grave. After five verses of prayers, Electra calls out for the heads of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and dares to address her prayer to Earth and "honored powers below". The response of the Chorus to this change is negative and cautionary: [#10]

Next, Orestes addresses a prayer to "sovereign powers of the world below" and also to the curses of the dead; "Curses" is the underworld name for the Erinyes [E*rin*ees], as the Erinyes [E*rin*ees] themselves explain in the Eumenides [at line 417]. The Chorus responds very badly to this prayer as well: [#11]

What can we conclude from this material? Well, I think it is plausible to say that Orestes and Electra are meant to resist the urge to align themselves with powers of darkness. Why shouldn’t they, though, since they are out to avenge the murder of a blood relative? Well, one reason is that the style of revenge the Erinyes [E*rin*ees] and other dark powers encourage is an endless chain of blood for blood, bringing "one ruin in another’s wake." That is what the Chorus fears and warns of in their chilly response to the prayers.

From the perspective of the Chorus a better option would be for Orestes and Electra to align themselves with light and Justice. Electra is drawn from the start to Justice, calling for Justice four separate times in ll. 148 and 244 and 398 and 462. Orestes is a bit slow to get the point, but he does eventually characterize the fight with his father’s murderers as "Might shall clash with might, Justice with Justice [l. 461]." In the short verses that complete the lamentation, Orestes and Electra return to prayers addressed to their father. Orestes’s final prayer begins with a call for his father to "send Justice to fight by your dear ones’ side [l. 497]." Electra’s last prayer offers Agamemnon their allegiance: "It is for your sake that such laments are uttered [ll. 508-509]." At last, this seems to be a conclusive choice.

There is more evidence concerning motives to consider, for after each inevitable killing comes the inevitable speech. In Clytemnestra’s speech, her account of the religious motives for her act are particularly interesting. She announces: [#5]

Clytemnestra claims to have sacrificed Agamemnon, no doubt in part because of her desire for the killing to be fit revenge for Agamemnon’s sacrifice. But note the divinities she mentions, Ruin [Ate] and the E*rin*iss [Erinys] -- surely this shows us something. Clytemnestra is unabashed in her allegiance to the very deities that Orestes and Electra dare not mention, and which the Chorus obviously fears will be invoked by the children. And it can hardly be thought to be coincidence that Clytemnestra invokes these dark powers and that her psychological profile of herself in the act of killing is so wrathful, a case of literal blood-lust.

Orestes’s speech after the killing of Clytemnestra shows us how different he is in mind and motive from his mother. [#7]

[Note also:

Far from exhibiting personal exultation, Orestes expresses regret that the deed needed to be done. And a defense of his act is not really attempted; he merely points to the treachery of Clytemnestra, and calls on Apollo to be a future witness to the justice of the act. The contrast between this account and Clytemnestra’s parallel speech could hardly be more vivid.

By the way, the Chorus adds its own interpretation of Orestes’s act, and they do not hesitate to choose a single champion: [#8]

So the Chorus at least wants to see the deed as a deed done with the aid of Justice, and thus presumably done for the sake of justice.

I’ll hazard some conclusions. First, of the multiple desires Orestes mentions as driving him, there is no evidence that any but his desire to avenge his father’s grief motivates him to conspire in the killing. Insofar as he demonstrates his loyalty to his father by participation in the lamentation, we have indirect evidence that this is in fact his psychological motive, and in the final words at the grave loyalty to Agamemnon is the central concern. At the religious level, the choice of allegiances is complicated by the invocation of underworld forces of revenge. The Chorus clearly discourages this, and Electra and Orestes immediately abandon it. Zeus, Earth, and Justice are among the other divinities who receive prayers; among these, allegiance to Justice is the most prominently mentioned. Finally, I suggest that Orestes and Electra mention the underworld forces at the graveside, only to turn away from these allegiances, as a means of emphasizing their shift from the allegiances of the older generation to a new set of allegiances, primarily to a cool-headed Justice. This technique would parallel Orestes’s brief mention of alternative potential motives, only to ignore them.

CONCLUSION

I have tried to make as much sense as possible of the moral significance of what we learn about Orestes in The Libation Bearers. We receive a pretty clear picture of his emotional state at the killing, and some evidence about his motivating desires and religious allegiances. These serve to distinguish him from his parents, even though he is fated to follow their pattern and commit an all too familiar bloody act by virtue of his birth into their house. I’ve relied on your moral intuitions pretty heavily because I know pretty well how they run. We naturally take a person’s emotional state during an act and her motives for that act as of moral significance in our moral judgments. And this natural response by us shows us something important about the content of morality. It shows us why morality is more than a list of prescriptions and prohibitions.

When we think of a code of conduct, we normally assume that it concerns overt behavior: what actions are appropriate and what outcomes are valuable. But these elements underdetermine how one should live in accord with the code. For what reasons should one act in the prescribed way? For whose or what’s sake should right actions be performed? When many longings move toward one end, what should be allowed to motivate? These are questions that one must have answers for if one is to have a fully realized morality. Foucault characterized this part of morality, which was his special interest, as concerned with "the manner in which one ought to form oneself as an ethical subject acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code [p. 26]."

Ultimately I believe it is less important that we understand the content of the Orestean morality than that we see how concerned he was to present Orestes as a hero in virtue of his motives, how and why he acted. After all, the morality of fifth century Athens does not especially recommend itself to us as a paradigm. But the form of tragedy, unique to a single century of the life of Athens, does play a special role in encouraging consideration of these issues. For in Greek tragedy the consequences are never in play. Everyone knows what the major events and acts will be, and there is no effort to pretend that the characters could have done otherwise. Orestes wastes no time either deliberating or resisting his fate, though he is in a situation that, if it occurred in a modern drama, would likely trigger epic bouts of self-examination followed by either existential outrage or despair. It is how and why the hero acts that comes into relief in Aeschylus. It is worth reminding ourselves that these too are of moral significance, and if handled rightly, can earn one a kind of heroism despite inevitable outcomes. Without Greek tragedy, we would be less likely to remember those lessons.

As a final thought, I’ll offer something more challenging. We tend to think that if there are cases in our lives of moral action similar to Orestes’s, they must be rare. More often, we think, moral action consists in using one’s genuine freedom to secure the right outcome from among the many live options. But are you so confident that that is the truth about human life, and not just wishful thinking? I leave with a few words from a contemporary fatalist, Richard Taylor:

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BIBLIOGRAPHY