The Electra of Euripides | Page 2

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 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