Libation Bearers Memory and the Past

Here Orestes shows that he has a romanticized view of the past. He thinks things would have been much better for Agamemnon if only he had died gloriously in battle at Troy. But does what he's saying really make any sense? If she wanted to, Clytemnestra could have still shacked up with Aegisthus if Agamemnon died in battle; in fact, it would have saved her the trouble of killing him. In this way, Orestes's nostalgia for the Trojan War (which he was certainly too young to experience) might show how out conceptions of the past can be misleading.

These lines from the Chorus come right after the words of Orestes in the previous quotation. They continue the same thought: everything would have been fine and dandy if only Agamemnon had died at Troy instead of being killed by his wife upon his return. Does this idea make any more sense the second time around? We're not convinced.

Here we see how the past can be used to influence the present. The Chorus plays up the horrible details of Agamemnon's death in order to make Orestes more enraged and get him all fired up for revenge. Can you think of any examples from history or current affairs in which the memory of past wrongs is used to enflame passions in the present?

Electra continues taking the same tack as the Chorus in the previous quotation. She emphasizes to Orestes the way she herself was mistreated by Clytemnestra. Once again, the point is to make Orestes fixated on revenge. The metaphor Electra uses when she tells Orestes to "write" these things in his mind is a forceful reminder of the role that the writing of history can play in inspiring action – for good or ill.

Now it's the Chorus's turn. They continue to emphasize the importance of Orestes writing down the things he's being told in his mind. By writing them down, the horrors of the past will remain forever present to him, goading him on until he carries out his revenge.

The Nurse's descriptions of Orestes as a baby make him sound like a little hell-raiser, don't they? But she's still heartbroken to hear that he has died. In fact, it's almost as if her memory of hardship has now changed to nostalgia.

Here is another attempt to use the past as a way of changing the present. In this case, however, it is more like a manipulation of the past. Did Clytemnestra really breastfeed Orestes? Well, we just heard a long speech from Orestes's Nurse, which suggests that she was the one who did it. Whose word do you accept? We think that Clytemnestra is probably exploiting the fact that Orestes has no memory of his earliest days (he was a baby then, after all), in a last-ditch bid for sympathy.

Here, we see the Chorus using their experience of the past as a basis for predicting the future. Does Aeschylus's trilogy suggest that this is a reasonable basis for predicting the future? If so, does this really say anything about the nature of justice, or is it simply the case that revenge breeds revenge? Couldn't you almost say that the curse of cycles of revenge is that it makes people always either live in the past, or replicate the past in the present by repeating old acts of violence?

Just after killing his mother, Orestes is confronted with a fundamental problem about the past: uncertainty. He wasn't around when Agamemnon was killed, so how does he know that Clytemnestra, his mother, really did it? Of course, he has already been given instructions by the oracle of Apollo (before the beginning of the play), and has heard reports from other characters like Electra and the Chorus. (But do Electra and the Chorus have direct knowledge of what happened?) Here, though, he is left to contemplate physical evidence – the bloody robe that was thrown over Agamemnon before he was stabbed to death. But this evidence requires interpretation. To paraphrase the poet W. H. Auden (who remarked that "The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living" (source), you could say that the events of the past are modified in the minds in the present.

These are the final words of the play. They summarize the problem of revenge, which is always backward looking, and tends to replicate the past in the present. What hope does this leave for the future? Will there really be no end of the cycle of violence? In this way, the theme of Memory and the Past dovetails clearly with the play's main themes of Revenge and Justice. This paves the way for Part 3 of the trilogy, Eumenides, but we won't spoil your fun in learning about (and reading) it now.