The Libation Bearers — Kommos

The Kommos is the most sustained piece of lyric exchange in surviving Greek tragedy: Orestes, Electra, and the chorus of captive women, taking turns over many verses, address the dead Agamemnon below the ground. The ritual purpose is clear: they are calling the ghost up, asking it to lend its weight and authority to what they are about to do. But the exchange is also an outpouring of grief — years of suppressed mourning being finally spoken aloud at the grave where they could never be spoken before.

Orestes names what he lacked — he was not there at his father's burial; he was sent away like an object of shame; the murderers feasted while the dead man lay unlamented. Electra names what has been done to her in the eight years since the murder — kept in a condition of mourning and servility, used by her mother as an instrument, denied the name of daughter by the woman who called herself queen. Both of them name Clytemnestra, and both stop short of the specific word for what must be done to her.

The chorus names the justice in what they are contemplating. They have lived in the house of Atreus through eight years of Clytemnestra's rule; they know what is being preserved and what is being destroyed. They give their voices to the call on the dead. The Kommos ends not with a plan but with a decision: both the desire and the authority to act. Then they begin to plot.