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
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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