Libation Bearers (224-335)

Am I then to address you as Orestes in truth?

Now, even though you see him in me, you are slow to learn. Yet at the sight of this tress cut in mourning, and when you were scrutinizing the footprints of my tracks, your thought took wings and you knew you had found me.

Put the lock of hair, your own brother’s, in the spot it was cut from and observe how it matches the hair on my head. And see this piece of weaving, your handiwork, the strokes of the batten and the beasts in the design. Control yourself! Do not go mad with joy! For I know that our nearest kin are bitter foes to us both.

O best beloved darling of your father’s house, its hope of a saving seed longed for with tears, trust in your prowess and you will win back your father’s house. O delightful eyes that have four parts of love for me: for I must call you father;

and to you falls the love I should bear my mother, whom I most rightly hate; and the love I bore my sister, victim of a pitiless sacrifice; and you were my faithful brother, bringing me your reverence. May Might and Justice,

with Zeus, supreme over all, in the third place, lend you their aid!

O Zeus, O Zeus, regard our cause! Behold the orphaned brood of a father eagle that perished in the meshes, in the coils of a fierce viper. They are utterly orphaned, gripped by the famine of hunger:

for they are not grown to full strength to bring their father’s quarry to the nest. So you see both me and poor Electra here, children bereft of their father, both outcasts alike from our home.

If you destroy these nestlings of a father who made sacrifice and revered you greatly, from what like hand will you receive the homage of rich feasts? Destroy the brood of the eagle and you cannot again send tokens that mortals will trust;

nor, if this royal stock should wither utterly away, will it serve your altars on days when oxen are sacrificed. Oh foster it, and you may raise our house from low estate to great, though now it seems utterly overthrown.

O children, O saviors of your father’s hearth,

speak not so loud, dear children, in case someone should overhear and report all this to our masters merely for the sake of rumor. May I some day see them dead in the ooze of flaming pitch!

Surely he will not abandon me, the mighty oracle of Loxias,

who urged me to brave this peril to the end and loudly proclaims calamities that chill the warmth of my heart, if I do not take vengeance on my father’s murderers. He said that,

I should pay the debt myself with my own life, after many grievous sufferings. For he spoke revealing to mortals the wrath of malignant powers from underneath the earth, and telling of plagues:

leprous ulcers that mount with fierce fangs on the flesh and eat away its primal nature; and how a white down[*] should sprout up on the diseased place. And he spoke of other assaults of the Furies that are destined to be brought to pass from paternal blood.

For the dark bolt of the infernal powers, who are stirred by kindred victims calling for vengeance, and madness, and groundless terrors out of the night, torment and harass a man, and he sees clearly, though he moves his eyebrows in the dark.[*] And with his body marred by the brazen scourge,

he is even chased in exile from his country. And the god declared that to such as these it is not allowed to have a part either in the ceremonial cup or in the cordial libation; his father’s wrath, though unseen, bars him from the altar; no one receives him or lodges with him;

and at last, despised by all, friendless, he perishes, shrivelled pitifully by a death that wastes him utterly away. Must I not put my trust in oracles such as these? Yet even if I do not trust them, the deed must still be done. For many impulses conspire to one conclusion.

Besides the god’s command, my keen grief for my father, and also the pinch of poverty—that my countrymen, the most renowned of mortals, who overthrew Troy in the spirit of glory, should not be subjected so to a pair of women.

For he has a woman’s mind, or if not, it will soon be found out.