The Electra of Euripides | Page 2

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. Therefore it should not have been committed; and the god who enjoined it _did_ command evil, as he had done in a hundred other cases! 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.
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 son is an exile, bred in the desperate hopes and wild schemes of exile; he is a prince without a kingdom, always dreaming of his wrongs and his restoration; and driven by the old savage doctrine, which an oracle has confirmed, of the duty and manliness of revenge. 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; who is intolerant of poverty, and who feels her youth passing away. And meantime there is her name, on which all legend, if I am not mistaken, insists; she is _A-lektra_, "the Unmated."
There is, perhaps, no woman's character in the range of Greek tragedy so profoundly studied. Not Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, not Phaedra nor Medea. One's thoughts can only wander towards two great heroines of "lost" plays, Althaea in the _Meleager_, and Stheneboea in the _Bellerophon_.
G.M.
[Footnote 1: Most of this introduction is reprinted, by the kind permission of the Editors, from an article in the _Independent Review_ vol. i. No. 4.]
ELECTRA
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
CLYTEMNESTRA, _Queen of Argos and Mycenae; widow of Agamemnon_.
ELECTRA, _daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra_.
ORESTES, _son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, now in banishment_.
A PEASANT, _husband of Electra_.
AN OLD MAN, _formerly servant to Agamemnon_.
PYLADES, _son of Strophios, King of Phocis; friend to Orestes_.
AEGISTHUS, _usurping King of Argos and Mycenae, now husband of Clytemnestra_.
The Heroes CASTOR and POLYDEUCES.
CHORUS of Argive Women, with their LEADER.
FOLLOWERS of ORESTES; HANDMAIDS of CLYTEMNESTRA.
_The Scene is laid in the mountains of Argos. The play was first produced between the years_ 414 _and_ 412 B.C.
ELECTRA
_The scene represents a hut on a desolate mountain side; the river Inachus is visible in the distance. The time is the dusk of early dawn, before sunrise. The_ PEASANT _is discovered in front of the hut_.
PEASANT.
Old gleam on the face of the world, I give thee hail,?River of Argos land, where sail on sail?The long ships met, a thousand, near and far,?When Agamemnon walked the seas in war;?Who smote King Priam in the dust, and burned?The storied streets of Ilion, and returned?Above all conquerors, heaping tower and fane?Of Argos high with spoils of Eastern slain.
So in far lands he prospered; and at home?His own wife trapped and slew him. 'Twas the doom?Aegisthus wrought, son of his father's foe.
Gone is that King, and the old spear laid low?That Tantalus wielded when the world was young.?Aegisthus hath his queen, and reigns among?His people. And the children here alone,?Orestes and Electra, buds unblown?Of man and womanhood, when forth to Troy?He shook his sail and left them--lo, the boy?Orestes, ere Aegisthus' hand could fall,?Was stolen from Argos--borne by one old thrall,?Who served his father's boyhood, over seas?Far off, and laid upon King Strophios' knees?In Phocis, for the old king's sake. But here?The maid Electra waited, year by year,?Alone, till the warm days of womanhood?Drew nigh and suitors came of gentle blood?In Hellas. Then Aegisthus was in fear?Lest she be wed in some great house, and bear?A son to