Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Aeschylus’s *Libation Bearers*, the palace has been shaken by cries from the women’s quarters: Clytemnestra dreamed a dream that interpreters and the chorus treat as a charge from the dead. When Orestes, already at the tomb with Pylades, asks what the vision was, he learns—through the report that has driven the libation-bearing women out—that the queen dreamed she bore a serpent and laid it in swaddling clothes as if it were a child. When she offered it her breast, it bit so that in the milk ran blood. She woke screaming; lamps were lit; and, on the seers’ word that the dream meant those responsible for Agamemnon’s death would pay, she sent appeasing offerings to his grave. Orestes reads the dream without hesitation: the serpent is himself; the place of the nursing child is his; the blood-mingled milk is the murder he will inflict on her who bore him. He prays that the vision be fulfilled and proceeds to the recognition with Electra and the plot against Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. The serpent-dream thus supplies the Oresteia’s emblem of matricide—offspring as viper, nurture turned to wound—before the sword-stroke in the house. Sophocles’ later scepter-dream (03/169) is a separate tragic invention; here the classical Aeschylean image stands alone.