The Electra of Euripides Part 18

Their troth shall fill their hearts.--But on: Dread feet are near thee, hounds of prey, Snake-handed, midnight-visaged, yea, And bitter pains their fruit! Begone!

[ORESTES _departs to the right_.

But hark, the far Sicilian sea Calls, and a noise of men and ships That labour sunken to the lips In bitter billows; forth go we,

Through the long leagues of fiery blue, With saving; not to souls unshriven; But whoso in his life hath striven To love things holy and be true,

Through toil and storm we guard him; we Save, and he shall not die!--Therefore, O praise the lying man no more, Nor with oath-breakers sail the sea: Farewell, ye walkers on the sh.o.r.e Of death! A G.o.d hath counselled ye.

[CASTOR _and_ POLYDEUCES _disappear_.

CHORUS.

Farewell, farewell!--But he who can so fare, And stumbleth not on mischief anywhere, Blessed on earth is he!

NOTES TO THE ELECTRA

The chief characters in the play belong to one family, as is shown by the two genealogies:--

I.

TANTALUS | Pelops __________|__________________ | | Atreus Thyestes _________|__________ | | | | Agamemnon Menelaus Aegisthus (=Clytemnestra) (=Helen) (=Clytemnestra) _____|________________________ | | | Iphigenia Electra Orestes

(Also, a sister of Agamemnon, name variously given, married Strophios, and was the mother of Pylades.)

II.

Tyndareus = Leda = Zeus ____________________| ____|_________________________ | | | | Clytemnestra Castor Polydeuces Helen

P. 1, l. 10, Son of his father's foe.]--Both foe and brother. Atreus and Thyestes became enemies after the theft of the Golden Lamb. See pp. 47 ff.

P. 2, l. 34, Must wed with me.]--In Aeschylus and Sophocles Electra is unmarried. This story of her peasant husband is found only in Euripides, but is not likely to have been wantonly invented by him. It was no doubt an existing legend--an [Greek: on logos], to use the phrase attributed to Euripides in the _Frogs_ (l. 1052). He may have chosen to adopt it for several reasons. First, to marry Electra to a peasant was a likely step for Aegisthus to take, since any child born to her afterwards would bear a stigma, calculated to damage him fatally as a pretender to the throne.

Again, it seemed to explain the name "A-lektra" (as if from [Greek: lektron] "bed;" cf. Schol. _Orestes_, 71, Soph. _El_. 962, _Ant_. 917) more pointedly than the commoner version. And it helps in the working out of Electra's character (cf. pp. 17, 22, &c.). Also it gives an opportunity of introducing the fine character of the peasant. He is an [Greek: Autourgos] literally "self-worker," a man who works his own land, far from the city, neither a slave nor a slave-master; "the men," as Euripides says in the _Orestes_ (920), "who alone save a nation." (Cf, _Bac_., p. 115 foot, and below, p. 26, ll. 367-390.) As Euripides became more and more alienated from the town democracy he tended, like Tolstoy and others, to idealise the workers of the soil.

P. 6, l. 62, Children to our enemy.]--Cf. 626. Soph. _El_. 589. They do not seem to be in existence at the time of the play.

Pp. 5-6.]--Electra's first two speeches are admirable as expositions of her character--the morbid nursing of hatred as a duty, the deliberate posing, the impulsiveness, the quick response to kindness.

P. 7, l. 82, Pylades.]--Pylades is a _persona muta_ both here and in Sophocles' _Electra_, a fixed traditional figure, possessing no quality but devotion to Orestes. In Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_ he speaks only once, with tremendous effect, at the crisis of the play, to rebuke Orestes when his heart fails him. In the _Iphigenia in Tauris_, however, and still more in the _Orestes_, he is a fully studied character.

P. 10, l. 151, A swan crying alone.]--Cf. _Bacchae_, p. 152, "As yearns the milk-white swan when old swans die."

P. 11, ll. 169 ff., The Watcher hath cried this day.]--Hera was an old Pelasgian G.o.ddess, whose worship was kept in part a mystery from the invading Achaeans or Dorians. There seems to have been a priest born "of the ancient folk," _i.e._, a Pelasgian or aboriginal Mycenaean, who, by some secret lore--probably some ancient and superseded method of calculating the year--knew when Hera's festival was due, and walked round the country three days beforehand to announce it. He drank "the milk of the flock" and avoided wine, either from some religious taboo, or because he represented the religion of the milk-drinking mountain shepherds.

P. 13, ll. 220 ff.]--Observe Electra's cowardice when surprised; contrast her courage, p. 47, when sending Orestes off, and again her quick drop to despair when the news does not come soon enough.

P. 16, ll. 247 ff., I am a wife.... O better dead!]--Rather ungenerous, when compared with her words on p. 6. (Cf. also her words on pp. 24 and 26.) But she feels this herself, almost immediately. Orestes naturally takes her to mean that her husband is one of Aegisthus' friends. This would have ruined his plot. (Cf. above, p. 8, l. 98.)

P. 22, l. 312, Castor.]--I know no other mention of Electra's betrothal to Castor. He was her kinsman: see below on l. 990.

Pp. 22-23, ll. 300-337.]--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. 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.

P. 27, ll. 403, 409.]--Why does Electra send her husband to the Old Man?

Not, I think, really for want of the food. It would have been easier to borrow (p. 12, l. 191) from the Chorus; and, besides, what the peasant says is no doubt true, that, if she liked, she could find "many a pleasant thing" in the house. I think she sends for the Old Man because he is the only person who would know Orestes (p. 21, l. 285). She is already, like the Leader (p. 26, l. 401), excited by hopes which she will not confess.

This reading makes the next scene clearer also.

Pp. 28-30, ll. 432-487, O for the Ships of Troy.]--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.

Thetis, the Nereid, or sea-maiden, was won to wife by Peleus. (He wrestled with her on the seash.o.r.e, and never loosed hold, though she turned into divers strange beings--a lion, and fire, and water, and sea-beasts.) She bore him Achilles, and then, unable permanently to live with a mortal, went back beneath the sea. When Achilles was about to sail to Troy, she and her sister Nereids brought him divine armour, and guided his ships across the Aegean. The designs on Achilles' armour, as on Heracles'

shield, form a fairly common topic of poetry.

The descriptions of the designs are mostly clear. Perseus with the Gorgon's head, guided by Hermes; the Sun on a winged chariot, and stars about him; two Sphinxes, holding as victims the men who had failed to answer the riddles which they sang; and, on the breastplate, the Chimaera attacking Bellerophon's winged horse, Pegasus. The name Pegasus suggested to a Greek [Greek: pege], "fountain;" and the great spring of Pirene, near Corinth, was made by Pegasus stamping on the rock.

Pp. 30-47.]--The Old Man, like other old family servants in Euripides--the extreme case is in the _Ion_--is absolutely and even morbidly devoted to his masters. Delightful in this first scene, he becomes a little horrible in the next, where they plot the murders; not only ferocious himself, but, what seems worse, inclined to pet and enjoy the bloodthirstiness of his "little mistress."

Pp. 30-33, ll. 510-545.]--The Signs of Orestes. This scene, I think, has been greatly misunderstood by critics. 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: h.o.m.opteros]--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; she refuses to believe, until he shows her a "woven thing," perhaps the robe which he is wearing, which she recognises as the work of her own hand.

The same signs, described in one case by the same peculiar word, occur here. The Old Man mentions one after the other, and Electra refutes or rejects them. It has been thought therefore that this scene was meant as an attack--a very weak and undignified attack--on Euripides' great master.

No parallel for such an artistically ruinous proceeding is quoted from any Greek tragedy. And, apart from the improbability _a priori_, I do not think it even possible to read the scene in this sense. To my mind, Electra here rejects the signs not from reason, but from a sort of nervous terror. She dares not believe that Orestes has come; because, if it prove otherwise, the disappointment will be so terrible. As to both signs, the lock of hair and the footprints, her arguments may be good; but observe that she is afraid to make the comparison at all. And as to the footprint, she says there cannot be one, when the Old Man has just seen it! And, anyhow, she will not go to see it! Similarly as to the robe, she does her best to deny that she ever wove it, though she and the Old Man both remember it perfectly. 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 pa.s.sionately, 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. Aristophanes in the _Clouds_ (534 ff.) uses them proverbially, when he speaks of his comedy "recognising its brother's tress." It would have been frivolous to invent new ones. As a matter of fact, it seems probable that the signs are older than Aeschylus; neither they nor the word [Greek: h.o.m.opteros] particularly suit Aeschylus' purpose. (Cf. Dr.

Verrall's introduction to the _Libation-Bearers_.) They probably come from the old lyric poet, Stesichorus.

P. 43, l. 652, New-mothered of a Man-Child.]--Her true Man-Child, the Avenger whom they had sought to rob her of! This pitiless plan was suggested apparently by the sacrifice to the Nymphs (p. 40). "Weep my babe's low station" is of course ironical. The babe would set a seal on Electra's degradation to the peasant cla.s.s, and so end the blood-feud, as far as she was concerned. Clytemnestra, longing for peace, must rejoice in Electra's degradation. Yet she has motherly feelings too, and in fact hardly knows what to think or do till she can consult Aegisthus (p. 71).

Electra, it would seem, actually calculates upon these feelings, while despising them.

P. 45, l. 669, If but some man will guide me.]--A suggestion of the irresolution or melancholia that beset Orestes afterwards, alternating with furious action. (Cf. Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_, Euripides'

_Andromache_ and _Orestes_.)

P. 45, l. 671, Zeus of my sires, &c]--In this invocation, short and comparatively unmoving, one can see perhaps an effect of Aeschylus' play.

In the _Libation-Bearers_ the invocation of Agamemnon comprises 200 lines of extraordinarily eloquent poetry.

P. 47 ff., ll. 699 ff.]--The Golden Lamb. The theft of the Golden Lamb is treated as a story of the First Sin, after which all the world was changed and became the poor place that it now is. It was at least the First Sin in the blood-feud of this drama.

The story is not explicitly told. Apparently the magic lamb was brought by Pan from the G.o.ds, and given to Atreus as a special grace and a sign that he was the true king. His younger brother, Thyestes, helped by Atreus'

wife, stole it and claimed to be king himself. So good was turned into evil, and love into hatred, and the stars shaken in their courses.

[It is rather curious that the Lamb should have such a special effect upon the heavens and the weather. It is the same in Plato (_Polit._ 268 ff.), and more definitely so in the treatise _De Astrologia,_ attributed to Lucian, which says that the Golden Lamb is the constellation Aries, "The Ram." Hugo Winckler (_Weltanschauung des alten Orients_, pp. 30, 31) suggests that the story is a piece of Babylonian astronomy misunderstood.

It seems that the vernal equinox, which is now moving from the Ram into the Fish, was in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. moving from the Bull into the Ram. Now the Bull, Marduk, was the special G.o.d of Babylon, and the time when he yielded his place to the Ram was also, as a matter of fact, the time of the decline of Babylon. The gradual advance of the Ram not only upset the calendar, and made all the seasons wrong; but seemed, since it coincided with the fall of the Great City, to upset the world in general! Of course Euripides would know nothing of this. He was apparently attracted to the Golden Lamb merely by the quaint beauty of the story.]

P. 50, l. 746, Thy brethren even now.]--Castor and Polydeuces, who were received into the stars after their death. See below, on l. 990.