The Electra of Euripides

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Title: The Electra of Euripides
Author: Euripides
Release Date: December 10, 2004 [EBook #14322]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
? START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ELECTRA OF EURIPIDES ***
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THE
ELECTRA
OF
EURIPIDES
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE?WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
GILBERT MURRAY, LL.D., D.LITT.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FORTY-SECOND THOUSAND
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD?RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1
_First Edition, November_ 1905?_Reprinted, November_ 1906
" _February_ 1908?" _March_ 1910?" _December_ 1910?" _February_ 1913?" _April_ 1914?" _June_ 1916?" _November_ 1919?" _April_ 1921?" _January_ 1923?" _May_ 1925?" _August_ 1927?" _January_ 1929
_(All rights reserved)_
PERFORMED AT?THE COURT THEATRE, LONDON?IN 1907
_Printed in Great Britain by?Unwin Brothers Ltd., Woking_
Introduction[1]
The _Electra_ of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the best abused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies. "A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;" "the very worst of all his pieces;" are, for instance, the phrases applied to it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of conventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any different conclusion. For it is essentially, and perhaps consciously, a protest against those standards. 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; and no less than three extant tragedies, Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_ (456 B.C.), Euripides' _Electra_ (413 B.C.), and Sophocles' _Electra_ (date unknown: but perhaps the latest of the three) are based on the particular piece of legend or history now before us. 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. He probably killed his mother also; but we are not directly told so. His sister may have helped him, and he may possibly have gone mad afterwards; but these painful issues are kept determinedly in the shade.
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." Especially laudable is the "austerity" with which Aegisthus is driven into the house to receive, according to Schlegel, a specially ignominious death!
This combination of matricide and good spirits, however satisfactory to the determined classicist, will probably strike most intelligent readers as a little curious, and even, if one may use the word at all in connection with so powerful a play, undramatic. It becomes intelligible as soon as we observe that Sophocles was deliberately seeking what he regarded as an archaic or "Homeric" style (cf. Jebb, Introd. p. xli.); and this archaism, in its turn, seems to me best explained as a conscious reaction against Euripides' searching and unconventional treatment of the same subject (cf. Wilamowitz in _Hermes_, xviii. pp. 214 ff.). In the result Sophocles is not only more "classical" than Euripides; he is more primitive by far than Aeschylus.
For Aeschylus, though steeped in the glory of the world of legend, would not lightly accept its judgment upon religious and moral questions, and above all would not, in that region, play at make-believe. He would not elude the horror of this story by simply not mentioning it, like Homer, or by pretending that an evil act was a good one, like Sophocles. He faces the horror; realises it; and tries to surmount it on the sweep of a great wave of religious emotion. 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