Euripides

“ In thine adversity, there is not one
Will call thee friend. Nay, that were treasure-trove,
A friend to share, not faltering from love,
Fair days and foul the same. Thy name is gone
Forth to all Argos, as a thing o'erthrown
And dead. Thou hast not left one spark to glow
With hope in one friend's heart! Hear all, and know:
Thou hast God's fortune and thine own right hand,
Naught else, to conquer back thy fatherland.
ORESTES. The deed, the deed! What must we do?
OLD MAN. Strike down
Aegisthus ... and thy mother.
ORESTES. 'Tis the crown
My race is run for. But how find him? ”

“ ELECTRA. A lover weighs
More than a child in any woman's heart.
ORESTES. But what end seeks Aegisthus, by such art
Of shame?
ELECTRA. To make mine unborn children low
And weak, even as my husband.
ORESTES. Lest there grow
From thee the avenger?
ELECTRA. Such his purpose is:
For which may I requite him!
ORESTES. And of this
Thy virgin life—Aegisthus knows it?
ELECTRA. Nay,
We speak it not. It cometh not his way.
ORESTES. These women hear us. Are they friends to thee?
ELECTRA. Aye, friends and true. They will keep faithfully
All words of mine and thine.
ORESTES (trying her) . ”

“ ELECTRA. That ground will take no footprint! All of it
Is bitter stone.... It hath?... And who hath said
There should be likeness in a brother's tread
And sister's? His is stronger every way.
OLD MAN. But hast thou nothing...? If he came this day
And sought to show thee, is there no one sign
Whereby to know him?... Stay; the robe was thine,
Work of thy loom, wherein I wrapt him o'er
That night and stole him through the murderers' door.
ELECTRA. Thou knowest, when Orestes was cast out
I was a child.... ”

“ ORESTES. God, 'tis too much!... To hear of such things done
Even to a stranger, stings a man.... But speak,
Tell of thy life, that I may know, and seek
Thy brother with a tale that must be heard
Howe'er it sicken. If mine eyes be blurred,
Remember, 'tis the fool that feels not. Aye,
Wisdom is full of pity; and thereby
Men pay for too much wisdom with much pain.
LEADER. My heart is moved as this man's. I would fain
Learn all thy tale. Here dwelling on the hills
Little I know of Argos and its ills.
ELECTRA. If I must speak—and at love's call, God knows,
I fear not—I will tell thee all ”

“ He is, as was shown by his later history, a man subject to overpowering impulses and to fits of will-less brooding. Lastly, he is very young, and is swept away by his sister's intenser nature.
That sister is the central figure of the tragedy. A woman shattered in childhood by the shock of an experience too terrible for a girl to bear; a poisoned and a haunted woman, eating her heart in ceaseless broodings of hate and love, alike unsatisfied—hate against her mother and stepfather, love for her dead father and her brother in exile; a woman who has known luxury and state, and cares much for them ”

“ To the world, and struck the open chariot road;
Then on toward the pasture lands, where stood
The great Lord of Mycenae. In a set
Garden beside a channelled rivulet,
Culling a myrtle garland for his brow,
He walked: but hailed us as we passed: "How now,
Strangers! Who are ye? Of what city sprung,
And whither bound?" "Thessalians," answered young
Orestes: "to Alpheüs journeying,
With gifts to Olympian Zeus." Whereat the king:
"This while, beseech you, tarry, and make full
The feast upon my hearth. We slay a bull
Here to the Nymphs. ”

“ And lay thine own hair by that mourner's tress!
A hundred little things make likenesses
In brethren born, and show the father's blood.
ELECTRA (trying to mask her excitement and resist the contagion of his) .
Old heart, old heart, is this a wise man's mood?...
O, not in darkness, not in fear of men,
Shall Argos find him, when he comes again,
Mine own undaunted ... Nay, and if it were,
What likeness could there be? My brother's hair
Is as a prince's and a rover's, strong
With sunlight and with strife: not like the long
Locks that a woman combs.... ”

“ CASTOR. Alas, what would ye? For that cry
Ourselves and all the sons of heaven
Have pity. Yea, our peace is riven
By the strange pain of these that die.
ORESTES. No more to see thee! ELECTRA. Nor thy breath
Be near my face! ORESTES. Ah, so it ends.
ELECTRA. Farewell, dear Argos. All ye friends,
Farewell! ORESTES. O faithful unto death,
Thou goest? ”

“ The door bursts open, and ORESTES and ELECTRA come forth in disorder. Attendants bring out the bodies of CLYTEMNESTRA and AEGISTHUS.
LEADER. Lo, yonder, in their mother's new-spilt gore
Red-garmented and ghastly, from the door
They reel.... O horrible! Was it agony
Like this, she boded in her last wild cry?
There lives no seed of man calamitous,
Nor hath lived, like this seed of Tantalus.
ORESTES. O Dark of the Earth, O God,
Thou to whom all is plain;
Look on my sin, my blood,
This horror of dead things twain ”

“ ORESTES. Enough! She knows what eyes are turned upon
Her passings in the land!
OLD MAN. Aye, all men hate
The unholy woman.
ORESTES. How then can I set
My snare for wife and husband in one breath?
ELECTRA (coming forward) .
Hold! It is I must work our mother's death.
ORESTES. If that be done, I think the other deed
Fortune will guide.
ELECTRA. This man must help our need,
One friend alone for both.
OLD MAN. He will, he will!
Speak on. What cunning hast thou found to fill
Thy purpose?
ELECTRA. Get thee forth, Old Man, and quick
Tell Clytemnestra ... ”

“ Attendants bring in the body of AEGISTHUS on a bier.
Wouldst thou fling
This lord on the rotting earth for beasts to tear?
Or up, where all the vultures of the air
May glut them, pierce and nail him for a sign
Far off? Work all thy will. Now he is thine.
ELECTRA. It shames me; yet, God knows, I hunger sore—
ORESTES. What wouldst thou? Speak; the old fear nevermore
Need touch thee.
ELECTRA. To let loose upon the dead
My hate! Perchance to rouse on mine own head
The sleeping hate of the world?
ORESTES. No man that lives
Shall scathe thee by one word.
ELECTRA. Our city gives
Quick blame ”

“ Somewhat surprisingly, Sophocles, although by his time Electra and Clytemnestra had become leading figures in the story and the mother-murder its essential climax, preserves a very similar atmosphere. His tragedy is enthusiastically praised by Schlegel for "the celestial purity, the fresh breath of life and youth, that is diffused over so dreadful a subject." "Everything dark and ominous is avoided. Orestes enjoys the fulness of health and strength. He is beset neither with doubts nor stings of conscience." ”

“ The mother-murder, even if done by a god's command, is a sin; a sin to be expiated by unfathomable suffering. Yet, since the god cannot have commanded evil, it is a duty also. It is a sin that must be committed.
Euripides, here as often, represents intellectually the thought of Aeschylus carried a step further. He faced the problem just as Aeschylus did, and as Sophocles did not. But the solution offered by Aeschylus did not satisfy him. It cannot, in its actual details, satisfy any one. To him the mother-murder—like most acts of revenge, but more than most—was a sin and a horror. ”

“ Each believes what she is saying, and neither understands the whole truth. It is clear that Clytemnestra, being left for ten years utterly alone, and having perhaps something of Helen's temperament about her, naturally fell in love with the Lord of a neighbouring castle; and having once committed herself, had no way of saving her life except by killing her husband, and afterwards either killing or keeping strict watch upon Orestes and Electra. Aegisthus, of course, was deliberately plotting to carry out his blood-feud and to win a great kingdom. ”

“ It is interesting, though not surprising, to hear that men had little love for Electra. The wonderful speech that follows, though to a conventional Greek perhaps the most outrageous thing of which she is guilty, shows best the inherent nobility of her character before years of misery had "killed her soul within." ”

“ So is the self-conscious recognition of her "bitter burning brain" that interprets all things in a sort of distortion.—Observe, too, how instinctively she turns to the peasant for sympathy in the strain of her emotion. It is his entrance, perhaps, which prevents Orestes from being swept away and revealing himself. The peasant's courage towards two armed men is striking, as well as his courtesy and his sanity. He is the one character in the play not somehow tainted with blood-madness. ”

“ It narrates how the son and daughter of the murdered king, Agamemnon, slew, in due course of revenge, and by Apollo's express command, their guilty mother and her paramour.
Homer had long since told the story, as he tells so many, simply and grandly, without moral questioning and without intensity. The atmosphere is heroic. It is all a blood-feud between chieftains, in which Orestes, after seven years, succeeds in slaying his foe Aegisthus, who had killed his father. ”

“ So, indeed, is the tragedy of The Trojan Women; but on very different lines. The Electra has none of the imaginative splendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It is a close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragic conventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its psychology reminds one of Browning, or even of Ibsen.
To a fifth-century Greek all history came in the form of legend ”

“ In this wonderful outbreak, observe the mixture of all sorts of personal resentments and jealousies with the devotion of the lonely woman to her father and her brother. "So men say," is an interesting touch; perhaps conscience tells her midway that she does not quite believe what she is saying. ”

“ We know the majestic murderess of Aeschylus, so strong as to be actually beautiful, so fearless and unrepentant that one almost feels her to be right. One can imagine also another figure that would be theatrically effective—a 'sympathetic' sinner, beautiful and penitent, eager to redeem her sin by self-sacrifice. But Euripides gives us neither. ”

“ The reaction has already begun in Orestes. In the excitement and danger of killing his enemy he has shown coolness and courage, but now a work lies before him vastly more horrible, a little more treacherous, and with no element of daring to redeem it. Electra, on the other hand, has done nothing yet; she has merely tried, not very successfully, to revile the dead body, and her hate is unsatisfied. Besides, one sees all through the play that Aegisthus was a kind of odious stranger to her ”

“ She is fighting tremulously, with all her flagging strength, against the thing she longs for. The whole point of the scene requires that one ray of hope after another should be shown to Electra, and that she should passionately, blindly, reject them all. That is what Euripides wanted the signs for.
But why, it may be asked, did he adopt Aeschylus' signs, and even his peculiar word? Because, whether invented by Aeschylus or not, these signs were a canonical part of the story by the time Euripides wrote. Every one who knew the story of Orestes' return at all, knew of the hair and the footprint. ”

“ He is no god of light; he is only a demon of old superstition, acting, among other influences, upon a sore-beset man, and driving him towards a miscalled duty, the horror of which, when done, will unseat his reason. ”

“ As these, I care for riches, to make gifts
To friends, or lead a sick man back to health
With ease and plenty. Else small aid is wealth
For daily gladness; once a man be done
With hunger, rich and poor are all as one. ”

“ In Aeschylus' Libation-Bearers, which deals with the same subject as the Electra, the scene is at Agamemnon's tomb. Orestes lays his tress there in the prologue. Electra comes bringing libations, sees the hair, compares it with her own, finds that it is similar "wing for wing" ( [Greek: homopteros] —the same word as here) , and guesses that it belongs to Orestes. She then measures the footprints, and finds one that is like her own, one not; evidently Orestes and a fellow-traveller! Orestes enters and announces himself ”

“ Less moving, because the slaying of Aegisthus has little moral interest; it is merely a daring and dangerous exploit. Less sympathetic, because even here, in the first and comparatively blameless step of the blood-vengeance, Euripides makes us feel the treacherous side of it. A [Greek: dolophonia] , a "slaying by guile," even at its best, remains rather an ugly thing.
P. 53, l. 793, Then quickly spake Orestes.] —If Orestes had washed with Aegisthus, he would have become his xenos, or guest, as much as if he had eaten his bread and salt. ”

“ But another problem interests Euripides even more than this. What kind of man was it—above all, what kind of woman can it have been, who would do this deed of mother-murder, not in sudden fury but deliberately, as an act of "justice," after many years? A "sympathetic" hero and heroine are out of the question; and Euripides does not deal in stage villains. He seeks real people. And few attentive readers of this play can doubt that he has found them. ”

“ The Greek fleet assembled for Troy was held by contrary winds at Aulis, in the Straits of Euboea, and the whole expedition was in danger of breaking up. The prophets demanded a human sacrifice, and Agamemnon gave his own daughter, Iphigenîa. He induced Clytemnestra to send her to him, by the pretext that Achilles had asked for her in marriage. ”

“ Up, gird thee now to the steep Isthmian way,
Seeking Athena's blessèd rock; one day,
Thy doom of blood fulfilled and this long stress
Of penance past, thou shalt have happiness.
LEADER (looking up) .
Is it for us, O Seed of Zeus,
To speak and hear your words again!
CASTOR. Speak: of this blood ye bear no stain.
ELECTRA. I also, sons of Tyndareus,
My kinsmen ”

“ The two main Choric songs of this play are markedly what Aristotle calls [Greek: embolima] "things thrown in." They have no effect upon the action, and form little more than musical "relief." Not that they are positively irrelevant. Agamemnon is in our minds all through the play, and Agamemnon's glory is of course enhanced by the mention of Troy and the praises of his subordinate king, Achilles. ”

“ The story is told that originally Castor was mortal and Polydeuces immortal; but when Castor was fatally wounded Polydeuces prayed that he might be allowed to give him half his immortality. The prayer was granted; and the two live as immortals, yet, in some mysterious way, knowing the taste of death. Unlike the common sinners and punishers of the rest of the play, these Heroes find their "glory" in saving men from peril and suffering, especially at sea, where they appear as the globes of light, called St. ”