Author: Rush Rehm; Thomas Harrison
Date: 2020-12-10 02:08:50+00:00
Keywords: Drama; Ancient & Classical; Literary Collections; Literary Criticism
Description: This new introduction to Euripides' fascinating interpretation of the story of Electra and her brother Orestes emphasizes its theatricality, showing how captivating the play remains to this day. Electra poses many challenges for those drawn to Greek tragedy – students, scholars, actors, directors, stage designers, readers and audiences. Rush Rehm addresses the most important questions about the play: its shift in tone between tragedy and humour; why Euripides arranged the plot as he did; issues of class and gender; the credibility of the gods and heroes, and the power of the myths that keep th
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Euripides: Electra
i

COMPANIONS TO GREEK AND ROMAN TRAGEDY

Series Editor: Th
omas Harrison

Aeschylus: Agamemnon , Barbara Goward

Aeschylus: Eumenides , Robin Mitchell-Boyask

Aeschylus: Libation Bearers , C. W. Marshall

Aeschylus: Persians , David Rosenbloom

Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound , I. A. Ruff ell

Aeschylus: Seven Against Th
ebes

, Isabelle Torrance

Aeschylus: Suppliants , Th
alia Papadopoulou

Euripides: Alcestis , Niall W. Slater

Euripides: Bacchae , Sophie Mills

Euripides: Children of Heracles , Florence Yoon

Euripides: Cyclops , Carl A. Shaw

Euripides: Hecuba , Helene P. Foley

Euripides: Heracles , Emma Griffi
ths

Euripides: Hippolytus , Sophie Mills

Euripides: Ion , Laura Swift

Euripides: Iphigenia at Aulis , Pantelis Michelakis Euripides: Medea , William Allan

Euripides: Orestes , Matthew Wright

Euripides: Phoenician Women , Th
alia Papadopoulou

Euripides: Suppliant Women , Ian Storey

Euripides: Trojan Women , Barbara Goff

Seneca: Hercules Furens , Neil W. Bernstein

Seneca: Medea , Helen Slaney

Seneca: Oedipus , Susanna Braund

Seneca: Phaedra , Roland Mayer

Seneca: Th
yestes

, Peter Davis

Sophocles: Antigone , Douglas Cairns

Sophocles: Ajax , Jon Hesk

Sophocles: Electra , Michael Lloyd

Sophocles: Oedipus at Colonus , Adrian Kelly

Sophocles: Philoctetes , Hanna Roisman

Sophocles: Women of Trachis , Brad Levett
ii

Euripides: Electra

Rush Rehm
iii

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA

BLOOMSBURY , BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright © Rush Rehm, 2021

Rush Rehm has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.

Cover image: Òrestes and Electra’, 2nd century BC. Archaeological Museum of Amphipolis, Serres, Macedonia, Greece. Photograph by Rush Rehm.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third- party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rehm, Rush, author. Title: Euripides, Electra / Rush Rehm.

Other titles: Companions to Greek and Roman tragedy. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: Companions to Greek and Roman tragedy | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This new introduction to Euripides’ fascinating interpretation of the story of Electra and her brother Orestes emphasizes its theatricality, showing how captivating the play remains to this day. Electra poses many challenges for those drawn to Greek tragedy – students, scholars, actors, directors, stage designers, readers and audiences. Rush Rehm addresses the most important questions about the play: its shift in tone between tragedy and humour; why Euripides arranged the plot as he did; issues of class and gender; the credibility of the gods and heroes, and the power of the myths that keep their stories alive. A series of concise and engaging chapters explore the functions of the characters and chorus, and how their roles change over the course of the play; the language and imagery that affects the audience’s response to the events on stage; the themes at work in the tragedy, and how Euripides forges them into a coherent theatrical experience; the later reception of the play, and how an array of writers, directors and fi lmmakers have interpreted the original. Euripides’ Electra has much to say to us in our contemporary world. This thorough, richly informed introduction challenges our understanding of what Greek tragedy was and what it can offer modern theatre, perhaps its most valuable legacy”– Provided by publisher. Identifi ers: LCCN 2020023633 (print) |

LCCN 2020023634 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350095670 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781350095687 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350095694 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Euripides.

Electra. | Greek drama (Tragedy)—History and criticism. Classifi cation: LCC PA3973.E53

R44 2020 (print) | LCC PA3973.E53 (ebook) | DDC 882/.01—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023633

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023634

ISBN :

HB : 978-1-3500-9567-0

e

PDF : 978-1-3500-9568-7

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978-1-3500-9569-4

Series: Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy

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iv

Contents

List of Figures vi

Introduction

1

1

Th
eatrical Background

5

2

What Happens and How

17

3

Euripides’ Electra and Myth: Refl ecting and Re- fashioning

Tradition

33

4

In Order of Appearance: Characters (and Actors) in Electra

45

5

Language

65

6

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

79

7

Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles: Maleness, Mothers
and Off spring

91

8

Highs and Lows in Electra : Rich and Poor, Gods
and Mortals, Sky and Earth

101

9

Electra through the Looking Glass

115

Notes 129

References 165

Index

181
v

Figures

1

Th
eatre of Dionysus in Athens, late nineteenth century.

Courtesy of Deutsches Arch ä ologisches Institut-Athen.

6

2

Elektra (Lydia Koniordou) and Chorus, from Elektra

(1989), directed by Kostas Tsianos, Municipal Regional

Th
eatre of Larissa, Th
essaliko Th
eatro. Courtesy of

Th
essaliko Th
eatro.

20

3

Elektra (Irene Pappas), Clytemnestra (Aleka Katseli),

Chorus, and Trojan slaves, from Elektra (1962), directed by

Michael Cacoyannis. Courtesy of the Michael Cacoyannis

Foundation. 29

4

Elektra (Irene Pappas) and Chorus, from Elektra (1962),
directed by Michael Cacoyannis. Courtesy of the Michael

Cacoyannis Foundation.

83

5

Electra (Roxanne Hart) with the head of Aegisthus, Chorus
members, from the 1973 Th
eatre Intime production of

Electra , translated and directed by Rush Rehm. Photograph:

John Coventry.

88

6

Elektra (Irene Pappas) and Peasant (Notis Periyalis), from

Elektra (1962), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. Courtesy
of the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation.

102

7

Chorus member, Oreste (Christophe Montenez), and

É lectre (Suliane Brahim), with corpse of Clytemnestre

(Elsa Lepoivre), Chorus in background, from the 2019

Com é die-Fran ç aise production É lectre/Oreste , directed by

Ivan van Hove. Courtesy of Com é die Fran ç aise.

119
vi

Introduction

Although conceived with accessibility in mind, this introduction to Euripides’ Electra assumes that the reader has (at some point) read or seen Euripides’ play. If you haven’t, let me urge you to do so – you can download my translation (free) at
https://stanfordreptheater.com/
electratranslation , or consult one of the versions found in References at the end of the book. 1

Most useful responses to a great play – whether criticism,
interpretation, or theatrical production – take us back to the original with renewed interest. If we allow summation, analysis, interpretation, or ‘theory’ to replace what we’re trying to understand, then we’ve put the cart before the horse. By the logic of the image, this leads to a dead halt, all the more so the higher we pile the cart with things the horse could never pull. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says it best: ‘Th
e play’s the thing’.

As you read what follows, keep the play in mind and use it as a touchstone – this is what I have tried to do.

In Chapter 1, I discuss fi ft h- century Athenian theatre production and the theatrical conventions in which Euripides worked, and which he helped to shape. When possible, I draw on events and passages from Electra to illustrate the point in question. In the following seven chapters, I deal more directly with the play itself. Chapter 2 off ers a summary of what happens, focusing on its structure and how the story unfolds in performance. Chapter 3 deals with the mythic and dramatic tradition that Euripides’ Electra drew on and transformed. If we fail to consider the many ways his play refl ects (and oft en rejects) inherited accounts of the myth, we have severely limited our understanding what Euripides accomplishes in his tragedy.

Chapter 4 examines the dramatic characters and some of the
challenges they pose for the actors who play them. Acknowledging the 1

2

Euripides: Electra
power of mythic fi gures to capture the contemporary imagination, I off er what I hope are helpful insights for those readers drawn to characters more than to plot or to the tragic tradition. In Chapter 5, we shift our focus from the mythic macrocosm to the microcosm of
language, style, and poetic imagery. In Greek tragedy, language matters in a way that diff erentiates it from much of our contemporary drama.

By attending to the diction of tragic speech, the rhetoric of argument, the imaginative sweep of lyric, and the power of narrative description, we enhance our appreciation of Euripides’ play.

Chapter 6 focuses on costumes, props, bodies, and corpses in Electra , physical elements that ground dramatic character and language in the materiality of production. Th
e next two chapters deal with important
thematic issues in the play. Chapter 7 explores the interrelated themes of gender, sex, children, and childbirth, topics of great interest today as they were in fi ft h- century bc Athens. Chapter 8 examines the social and economic class diff erences scrutinized in Electra , as well as the complex relationship between earth and sky, and between gods and mortals, subjects of special concern to Euripides. In Chapter 9, we leave ancient Athens and turn our attention to the aft erlife of Electra , looking at signifi
cant productions, adaptations, and transformations of

Euripides’ play.

I fi rst met Euripides’ Electra many years ago as an undergraduate learning ancient Greek. I found the play so compelling that I translated and directed it, and over the past several decades I have returned to the play time and again. I am deeply grateful to the series editor Tom Harrison for inviting me to write this Companion, and to the anonymous reader for Bloomsbury Academic, whose close reading
and sound advice saved me from several errors. I also thank the American School of Classical Studies, Athens, where I spent several months working on the book, with special appreciation to the ASCSA Director, Professor Jenifer Neils for her kind hospitality; Jo
ë
lle

Chambon, Associate Ma î tre de conf é rence, Universit é Paul-Val é ry Montpellier 3, for advice on French versions of Electra ; the Michael

Introduction

3

Cacoyannis Foundation, Athens, Greece, for their generous help with photographs from Cacoyannis’s Elektra ; P.E. Easterling, Regius Professor of Greek (emerita), University of Cambridge, for last- minute email assistance on a textual question when I was marooned (happily, but without a library) on Kythira during the COVID -19 quarantine; and the actors, designers, and production staff with whom I have worked on theatrical productions of Electra over the years. It has been a pleasure to engage the thoughts and responses of scholars and theatre artists who have spent time and energy on this challenging, provocative, and quintessentially Euripidean tragedy. 2

4

1

Th
eatrical Background

To understand an ancient play like Electra , we need to know what we can about the theatrical environment that brought it into being.

Following the establishment of democracy in 508–507 bc , the city of Athens celebrated theatrical performances at the City Dionysia, a weeklong festival dedicated to the god Dionysus. Held each spring in the open- air theatre on the south slope of the Acropolis (site of the famous Parthenon), the performances attracted large crowds and were open to all who could aff ord a ticket. 1 Th
e festival featured competitions
in tragedy (three playwrights entered three tragedies and a satyr- play each), comedy (fi ve playwrights entered one play each), and dithyramb (ten adult male choruses and ten boys’ choruses sang and danced narrative poems dedicated to Dionysus). 2 Sometime between 422 and 413 bc , Euripides’ Electra premiered at the City Dionysia. Although the titles of the two other tragedies and the satyr play Euripides entered that year are unknown, seventeen additional plays of his survive, as well as the names of many more. 3

Shielded from the north wind, the theatre of Dionysus took its shape from the curve of the hillside that formed a natural theatron ,‘a place for seeing’. From where the audience gathered, a panorama opened up over the southern part of the city of Athens, with Mt. Hymettus and the Ilissos river to the east, the city and lowlands leading down to the Bay of Phaleron to the south (with the peaked island of Aegina rising in the distance in the Saronic Gulf), and the Hill of the Muses and the Pnyx (where the Athenian Assembly met) to the west – all visible from various points in the theatre.

As well as providing distant vistas, the theatre of Dionysus drew the audience’s attention to the performance area, called the orch ê stra . Th is

5

6

Euripides: Electra

Fig. 1 Th
eatre of Dionysus in Athens, late nineteenth century. Courtesy of

Deutsches Arch ä ologisches Institut-Athen.

fl attened surface of beaten earth followed the contours of the slope where the audience sat, bounded by the retaining wall built behind and just below the orch ê stra to keep it from eroding down the hillside. 4

Although a few stone seating blocks from the fi ft h century have come to light, we know from the comic playwright Aristophanes that some audience members sat on wooden benches. Archaeologists recently have found indications that scaff olding for seats was erected for the festival and removed aft erwards. Th
e rest of the audience sat (or stood)

on the hillside rising above the temporary seating banks. Even in Euripides’ day, the theatre of Dionysus had a makeshift quality to it.

Th
e same applies to the sk ê n ê fa ç ade, a temporary wooden structure that represented the play’s setting – a temple, a palace, or in the case of Electra a poor farmer’s cottage in the country. A central opening in the fa ç ade allowed actors to enter and exit the playing area, providing access to the stage building behind the orch ê stra , where the actors could

Th
eatrical Background

7
change masks and costumes without being seen. When a playwright wished to reveal the body of someone (usually dead) inside, the doorway opened and a wheeled cart ( ekkukl ê ma ) rolled out with the corpse on it. Near the end of Electra , Euripides turns the Farmer’s cottage ‘inside out’ by using the ekkukl ê ma to reveal the corpses of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. 5

Th
e stage building also could support actors on its roof, an area known as the theologeion (‘place where the gods speak’) because stage divinities oft en appeared there. At the end of

Electra

, Castor and

Polydeuces (the semi-
divine brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen)

arrive on the roof by means of the m ê chan ê (‘machine’), from whence we get the Latin phrase deus ex machina , ‘god from the machine’. A lever- and-fulcrum apparatus located behind the sk ê n ê raised the actors above the roof and then lowered them onto it, where they spoke from

‘on high’. 6 Euripides’ Chorus convey their amazement, even incredulity, at the twin gods’ arrival: ‘But look, high, high above the house / some mighty spirits or heavenly gods / are coming our way. Th
is is not the
path / that humans walk. Why do they appear / so plainly to our mortal eyes?’ (Eur. El . 1233–37).

Human characters who came from far away normally arrived and
departed through one of the two parodoi (‘side roads’, also called eisodoi ,

‘roads in’), formed by the gap between the ends of the sk ê n ê fa ç ade and the front row of seats. Choruses almost always made their initial entrance through one of the parodoi (giving their entry song the name parodos ), indicating that they – like the Chorus of Electra – had to travel some distance to reach the location where the play is set. Th
ese side
entrances were wide enough to allow horse- drawn carts to drive into the orch ê stra , as Clytemnestra does (accompanied by her Trojan slaves) when she visits Electra’s cottage.

Because the audience could see a character approaching from the distance, either that character or someone onstage would announce the arrival with lines that ‘covered’ the entrance. Th
is helps account
for the Old Man’s self- description as he makes his way into the orch ê stra through an eisodos :

8

Euripides: Electra

Where, where is the young princess, my dear mistress
and child of Agamemnon, whom I reared so long ago?

What a steep approach she has to her house, diffi
cult for this tired,
bent old man to walk up, putting one foot in front of the other.

Still, for the sake of my friends I must drag myself along,
stooped over, weak- kneed, wavering, but still walking.

Oh daughter, now I see you coming from the house . . .

El . 487–93

During his long entrance, the Old Man provides the audience with important information: decades before, he raised the young Agamemnon; he knows Agamemnon’s daughter Electra well; her cottage lies on a steep hill, hard to reach for someone old and frail like himself; he remains devoted to the family, in spite of the eff ort it costs him.

Th
e size of the open- air theatre, the public nature of the festival, and the scale of the tragic myths help account for conventions of ancient Greek performance. To provide some perspective, actors and audiences in fi ft h- century Athens would not have known what to make of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler . Written for an actress in the title role, the play imagines an audience that looked through the ‘fourth wall’ into a private room, where characters used everyday conversation and behaviour to reveal (or hide) the truth of their inner lives. By contrast, Euripides wrote for male performers (both actors and Chorus members), all of whom wore masks that fully covered their face and hair. 7 How could a masked male performer credibly portray a complex heroine like Electra? How could he bring her character to life, if the spectators could not see his facial expressions, the glint in his eye, the smile and snarl of his mouth, his fl aring nostrils and furrowed brows?

Far from hindering the tragic actor, the mask helped project his character- persona out to a large audience. Familiarity with the text, facility with language, control over rhythm and infl ection, vocal projection, mastery of movement and gesture mattered more for the actor than ‘identifi cation’ with the imaginary inner life of the character he was playing. To be sure, tragedy seethes with emotions, but in the

Th
eatrical Background

9
ancient theatre these feelings were ‘externalized’. Whatever an actor wished to convey needed to fi nd a scale that matched the theatre and the ‘larger than life’ nature of the dramatized myths.

8 Tragedians
composed their plays with these criteria in mind.

At the opening of Electra , the Farmer comes out of his cottage to give the background of the story ( El . 1–53). 9 With no one else onstage, to whom is the Farmer speaking? If he were voicing aloud his private thoughts, would he continue talking for fi ft y lines without interruption?

Orestes delivers what amounts to a second prologue (

El . 82–106),
explaining his cautious return from exile. He cannot be sharing the information for the benefi t of his companion Pylades; the pair has been travelling together for days.

We need to understand that ‘Greek drama was not simply played
before an audience (whose existence is tacitly ignored in modern realistic drama), but to an audience which was directly addressed so oft en that its presence was taken for granted by the actors throughout the performance’. 10 All the speeches in Electra demand an outward, front- footed, audience- orientated acting style, in which the truth (or what passes for it) depends on its public disclosure. Th
is applies to long
speeches like the two prologues, and also to dialogue between two characters, which oft en takes the form of rapid alternating lines called stichomythia . Unspoken feelings, sotto voce asides, and muted inner monologues would have made no impact on an audience at the theatre of Dionysus. 11

By enabling the performer to play diff erent ages and genders, masks help explain the so- called ‘three- actor rule’ that operated at the City Dionysia. Th
e city of Athens provided each playwright with three
actors who performed all the (non-
choral) speaking roles, and in

449 bc the festival instituted a prize for the best actor. In Electra , the protagonist (‘fi rst competitor’) played Electra, the second actor played Orestes, and the third actor took on the remaining roles – the Farmer, the old Tutor, the Messenger, Clytemnestra, and Castor – changing his mask, costume, vocal register, and physical demeanour with speed and dexterity. 12

10

Euripides: Electra

A tragic convention even more challenging for modern audiences is the Chorus. Like all Greek tragedies, Electra alternates scenes of spoken verse with lyric sections sung and danced by a fi ft een- member ensemble. 13

In Euripides’ play, this group represents girlfriends of Electra who come to invite her to a festival in Argos. Th
eir motivation quickly drops away,
however, for the Chorus performs a far more important function.

Combining movement, music, and sung (or chanted) poetry, they gather various mythic strands of the story, singing of the Trojan War, the shield of Achilles, the murder of Agamemnon, and the changing fortunes of the house of Atreus. Th
e Chorus recreate signifi cant events that at fi rst may
seem disconnected from the plot (the Greek armada crossing the Aegean, the golden lamb brought to the palace in Argos), but that ultimately serve the drama. Aff ecting the mood in the theatre, the Chorus close off one event, prepare for the next, and open up the play in unexpected ways. As we see in Electra , their choral lyric moves freely over space and time, not bound to the constraints of the Chorus’s character or the demands of the plot.

Chorus in Greek means ‘dance’; our word ‘choreography’ literally means ‘dance writing’. Tragic playwrights did just that, for they not only wrote and staged their plays, but they also came up with the movement for the Chorus and composed the music that accompanied it. Th
e

Greek term for ‘directing a play’ – didaskein choron – translates ‘to teach a chorus’, indicating the importance of the ensemble and their lyric mode in tragedy. Aft er their initial entry (the parodos ), the Chorus remain onstage for the duration of the play, providing continuity while the other characters come and go. 14 Once established in the orch ê stra , they perform odes called stasima (‘standing songs’), lyric passages of great poetic and rhythmic variety. Positioned near the Chorus, a solo musician called an aul ê t ê s (‘player of the aulos ’, a reed instrument somewhat like a clarinet) accompanied the choral performance. 15

Th
e metres of tragic lyric can be extremely complicated, all the more so because the rhythmic pattern in one stanza (called a stroph ê or ‘turn’) is oft en repeated exactly in the next (
antistroph ê , ‘counter- turn’).

Classicists call this lyric structure ‘responsion’, because one stanza

Th
eatrical Background

11

‘responds’ exactly to another. Th
e playwright can then introduce a new
metrical pattern in the third stanza (a second stroph ê ), closely matched in its corresponding fourth stanza (second
antistroph ê ). Euripides
follows this basic choral structure in Electra , although the Chorus end their fi rst stasimon with a fi ft h ‘stand- alone’ stanza (without responsion), called an epode (‘aft er song’). In addition to these full- fl edged lyrics, the Chorus sing a brief interlude (without responsion) following the reunion of Orestes and Electra, and they introduce the unexpected arrival of Castor and Polydeuces with a short passage of anapests, a metre closer to normal speech than most lyric.

Sometimes a character in tragedy will adopt the lyric mode,
performing a ‘monody’ or ‘solo song’. Famous in antiquity for his use of singing actors, Euripides has Electra sing just such a monody when she returns from the spring ( El . 112–66). Urging herself to keep moving, she laments her brother’s exile and her father’s murder: ‘Hurry, time is ripe, rouse your step – oh gods! / Walk on, walk on, but always weeping, / me, me alone’ ( El . 112–14, repeated at 127–29). Aft er they kill Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes join the Chorus in a shared lyric called a kommos , the Greek term for ‘beating ones breast in mourning’, associated with funeral lament. By adopting the choral mode, the forlorn brother and sister express in a more musical way their horror at what they have done, and what it means for their future.

For all his theatrical ingenuity, Euripides (480–406
bc

) met stiff
competition at the City Dionysia. Th
e great tragedian Aeschylus

(525–456 bc ) died the year before Euripides made his premiere at the festival, but Sophocles (496–405 bc ) already had established himself as a formidable rival. His plays (roughly 123 in all, including an Electra ) won about half the time he competed at the City Dionysia, eighteen victories over Sophocles’ long career. Th
is compares with
fi ve victories for Euripides, including his posthumous prize in 405 bc for Bacchae , Iphigenia in Aulis , and Alcmaeon in Corinth , probably staged by his son (or nephew) Euripides the Younger, also a tragic playwright. 16

12

Euripides: Electra

In spite of Euripides’ relatively few fi rst prizes, the fact that the city consistently produced his plays testifi es to his continued popularity over a span of fi ve decades. Aristophanes exploits this fact in his comedy Th
e Frogs , staged in 404 bc . In a contest in the underworld organized by Dionysus (the god of theatre, played as a comic character), the newly deceased Euripides competes with the long- dead Aeschylus for the honour of returning to Athens to save the city with a performance of one of his tragedies. Although Euripides pulls out all the stops, Dionysus chooses Aeschylus. As he leaves for Athens, Aeschylus hands over his poetic ‘chair’ in Hades to Sophocles, insisting that Euripides never gets to sit there, even by accident.

Two years before his death in 456 bc , Aeschylus presented his Oresteia at the City Dionysia, and the 22-year- old Euripides may well have been in the audience. In his dramatization of the fortunes of the house of Atreus, Aeschylus tells roughly the same story that Euripides tells forty years later in his Electra , and that Sophocles also presents in his tragedy of the same name. Aeschylus’s trilogy covers Agamemnon’s homecoming from Troy and murder by his wife Clytemnestra; the
subsequent return of their exiled son Orestes, who reunites with his sister Electra and takes revenge on his mother and her husband

Aegisthus; and the suff ering that Orestes endures as a matricide, until a trial in Athens sets him free.

Sophocles and Euripides re- worked Aeschylus’s version of the story, focusing on Orestes’ sister Electra and her role in keeping the fl ame burning until Orestes can exact vengeance for his father’s murder. In his Electra , Euripides refers explicitly to passages in the Oresteia , exposing what might seem like Aeschylean incompetence to serve his own
dramatic ends. We will discuss the relationship of these three versions further in Chapter 3, where we also address the relative dates of Euripides’ and Sophocles’ Electra ’s.

Th
e tragedians drew on many earlier sources for myths connected to the house of Atreus, but none were more important than the Iliad and Odyssey , the Homeric epics that deal with the Trojan War and its aft ermath. At the great Panathenaia (the festival procession is represented

Th
eatrical Background

13
on the Parthenon frieze), Athenians attended public recitations of these poems by rhapsodes who competed for prizes. Th
ese ‘stitchers of song’

(the literal meaning of ‘rhapsodes’) resembled tragic actors, for more than half the lines they recited quote the direct speech of characters in Homer’s poems – Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax, Menelaus, Helen, Hector, Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, Philoctetes, all of whom reappear in Greek tragedy.

Th
e Homeric poems also include extended narrative passages, which seem to have infl uenced another convention of Greek tragedy, the Messenger speech. An unnamed character, oft en only tangentially connected to the action, narrates an off stage event that usually involves violent death. To establish credibility and enhance the impact on the audience, the Messenger quotes the direct speech of those on the scene, verbally recreating the ‘mini play’ he witnessed off stage. Recounting the murder of Aegisthus in Electra , for example, the Messenger describes the setting of Aegisthus’s feast, the arrival of the newcomers, the sacrifi ce that precedes the banquet, Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus, and his recognition by loyal palace retainers. In laying out what transpired, the Messenger quotes Aegisthus and Orestes a total of seven times, a technique examined further in Chapter 4.

Euripides developed the possibilities of the Messenger speech with a passion: the horrifi c immolation of Creusa and Creon in Medea , the gut-wrenching dismemberment of Pentheus in

Bacchae , the brutal
smashing of Aegisthus’s backbone in Electra . Descriptions such as these stood out so vividly that they inspired Greek vase painters, who depicted the scenes as if they actually had taken place onstage. 17 Vase painters did what ancient audiences were encouraged to do: allow the words of the Messenger to spark their imagination until they visualized the off stage events for themselves. We might contrast this process with our current addiction to cinematic overkill, with rivers of (fake) blood, chain- sawed limbs, and special eff ects that overwhelm the spectators rather than engage their imaginations. We return to this issue in the fi nal chapter.

In Sophocles’ Electra , the Messenger exploits the power of verbal description in a new way, for the purposes of deception. Agamemnon’s

14

Euripides: Electra
old Tutor (in disguise) spins out a riveting account of Orestes’ supposed death in a chariot race at the Pythian games in Delphi, a fabrication designed to gain Orestes access to the palace. Aware of the deceit, the audience watch the contrasting reactions of Clytemnestra and Electra to the news. Th
e tripartite audience of his speech – the crowd at the
imaginary games, the dramatic characters and Chorus onstage, and the spectators in the theatre – experience the excitement of athletic competition, even as they respond to Orestes’ ‘death’ in diff erent ways.

Athletic events in ancient Greece attracted large crowds and produced celebrity victors, for whom choral performances of
epinician odes

(‘songs aft er victory’) were commissioned, especially at great Panhellenic games. Th
is performance genre fi nds its way into Euripides’ Electra .

Orestes and Pylades pretend to be athletes on their way to the Olympic games, and the unsuspecting Aegisthus invites them to join his sacrifi ce and feast. Aft er Orestes murders Aegisthus, the Chorus sing a short lyric that praises him, modelled on an epinician ode ( El . 860–65, 874–79).

Electra then crowns her brother and Pylades for winning a far greater contest than a sporting event, analysed further in Chapter 5.

Music and choral performances occurred in other celebratory
contexts in ancient Greece, including festivals and weddings. Th e

Chorus invite Electra to join them at the festival for new brides and unwed maidens, who will dance before the temple of Hera, the goddess of marriage. Ashamed of her liminal status, Electra prefers ‘not to take my place in a chorus / with Argive brides, my whirling feet / striking the ground’ ( El . 178–80). 18 Time and again Electra laments the wedding she never had, having been forced into a union with the Farmer, one that remains unconsummated. Aft er her mother’s murder, the bloodstained Electra thinks again about the wedding ritual that has eluded her: ‘Ah, me, me. Where can I go? What choral dance? / What marriage? What husband would lead me / to a bridal bed? ( El . 1198–1200). Denied a proper nuptial ceremony, with its music, dance, and public festivity, Electra feels deprived of a full life.

As noted above, an
aulos
player accompanied tragedy, comedy,
dithyramb, and other choral performances. Th
e instrument also set

Th
eatrical Background

15
the rhythm for military marches and for the rowers in the Athenian navy. 19 In Electra , the Chorus imagine the naval expedition to Troy as a kind of dance, the Greek ships escorted by ‘a chorus ( choreumata ) of Nereids [sea nymphs] / and aulos -loving dolphins / that moved in consort / with the dark blue prows’ ( El . 434–37). In a self- refl exive gesture analysed further in Chapter 4, Electra’s friends perform a lyric chorus in which the scene they describe resembles their own
performance onstage.

In addition to theatre, athletic games, wedding rituals, and festival choruses, public events of a diff erent sort helped distinguish Athens from other Greek cities. Th
e democratic Assembly and the people’s law
courts placed a premium on public speaking and mastery of verbal strategies that could move an audience. Not surprisingly, tragedians drew on these political and judicial practices, and their plays bristle with rhetorical tropes, legal language, argumentative exchanges, and trial- like scenarios. Euripides oft en pairs speakers making contradictory cases, like a plaintiff and defendant at a trial, or a debate between opposing parties in the Assembly. Th
e confrontation between Electra
and Clytemnestra follows this pattern, a balanced exchange in which each delivers a speech of thirty- nine lines, refl ecting the equal time-allotments for speeches at jury trials in Athens ( El . 1011–50, 1060–99). 20

In the Athenian law courts, professional speechwriters usually wrote the words delivered by the plaintiff s and defendants, turning litigants into quasi-performers acting out a scripted role. Greek tragedians
found role-
playing an endless fascination, and tragic characters
frequently use deceit, deception, and even false identities to further their plans. In Electra , Euripides has Orestes arrive incognito to the Argive countryside, where he hides his identity from his sister (Sophocles uses the same strategy in his Electra ). Only the relentless inquisitiveness of the old Tutor forces Orestes to drop his disguise and admit who he is. When invited to Aegisthus’s feast, Orestes and Pylades claim to be Th
essalians headed for the Olympic games, a subterfuge
that leads to Aegisthus’s murder. Th
e most disturbing deception of all
involves Electra’s claim that she has just given birth to a son, a fi ction

16

Euripides: Electra
that lures her mother from the palace to the countryside. When she enters the cottage, instead of a new- born grandchild Clytemnestra fi nds her grown- up son, who cuts her down with the help of his sister.

From wedding ritual to the law courts, from epic recitations to victory odes, from athletic competitions to political debates,
performance played an essential role in the Athens of Euripides’ day.

Th
e various performance elements found their way into tragedy,
merging ancient myth with contemporary practice and grounding the plays in a recognizable fi ft h- century context. Th
e engaging power of
this double vision – mythic tradition and the ‘now’ of the audience –
made tragic performances like that of Electra a touchstone for Athenian society.

2

What Happens and How

In his Poetics , Aristotle famously considers ‘plot’ ( muthos ) as ‘the soul ( psych ê ,“animating principle”) of tragedy’, 1 meaning that the shaping of events takes precedence over the characters who get caught up in them.

Whether one agrees with Aristotle or not, a solid grasp of the dramatic architecture of Electra will allow us to understand better how Euripides re- works elements of the myth found in earlier versions (Chapter 3), and to appreciate the interaction of characters with one another (Chapter 4), the power of language and imagery (Chapter 5), and important themes and their development (Chapters 6 through 8).

When discussing tragic structure, scholars tend to apply generic categories across Greek tragedy, using terms like ‘prologue’ (everything that takes place before the fi rst choral ode), parodos (the fi rst choral ode, usually an entry song), epeisodion (‘episode’ or ‘act’, what takes place between each choral ode), stasimon (‘standing chorus’, sometimes called an ‘act- dividing’ song), and exodos (everything that happens aft er the fi nal choral stasimon ).

While using these terms when helpful, I off er a more theatrical approach to the plot of Electra , the way a stage director might break down the play into manageable sections for rehearsal. Important issues include who enters, who else is onstage, what expressive mode they employ (spoken or lyric metres, the latter accompanied by the aulos ), what happens between or among them, when they depart, where they go, and how what has transpired feeds into what happens next. As playwright and director, Euripides addressed these questions when he prepared his tragedy for the City Dionysia.

Th
e following outline lays out fi ve broad ‘movements’ in Electra , 2
each separated by a signifi cant arrival or departure, a shift from dialogue 17

18

Euripides: Electra
into speech, or a change from speech into lyric. Within each movement, I identify the sequence of important events, listing line numbers and speakers (I leave out the Chorus leader when delivering short interstitial passages). 3 Characters in brackets are present but do not speak; aft er their entrance in the parodos , the Chorus remain onstage throughout.

To clarify the basic action or focus of each section, I give short titles to each one, following the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s method in his Lehrst ü cke (‘learning plays’). 4 By suggesting a name for each section (you can come up with your own), one can better understand why

Euripides builds Electra the way he does, and how these smaller units cohere into the tragedy as a whole.

First movement (1–431)

1. Th
e set up (1–81)

(a) Myth and marriage (Farmer 1–53)

As noted in Chapter 1, Euripides begins most of his tragedies with a prologue, in which a character explains the background to the story.

Electra needs such an introduction, because Euripides changes several key elements in the myth – most importantly, he moves the location from the palace in Argos to a cottage in the Argive hills, and he has Electra ‘married off ’ to the Farmer who lives there.

Summarizing signifi cant events from the past, the Farmer contrasts Agamemnon’s victory as the Greek commander at Troy with his
disastrous homecoming, killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Aft er seizing power, Aegisthus drove Agamemnon’s son Orestes into exile with a price on his head, and then he married Orestes’ sister Electra to the Farmer. Because of his low social and economic status, the Farmer cannot father claimants to the throne, but he has no desire to take advantage of his wife, and Electra remains a virgin. Th
e Farmer insists that this will prove the wiser course in the
end.

(b) Black night (Electra 54–63)

Without noticing her husband, Electra enters from the cottage with a jug to fetch water. Addressing the night sky, she laments her father’s death, admitting that she goes to the nearby spring not because she has

What Happens and How

19
to, but to show the gods how Aegisthus has destroyed her life. Her mother Clytemnestra bears his children, threatening Electra and Orestes’ rightful claim to the palace. Electra’s reference to the night and the Farmer’s mention of daybreak (line 79) indicate that they are both caught up in the working rhythms of farm life. 5

(c) Collaboration (Electra, Farmer 64–76)

Making his presence known, the Farmer off ers to get the water for his wife, having told her before not to demean herself on his account.

Electra insists that she performs these chores happily to lighten her husband’s burdens, and she exits with her jug out of the theatre.

Although most editors think Electra exits with the Farmer at line 81, it makes more sense to end the scene as it began, with the Farmer alone onstage, a pattern repeated with the Farmer’s fi nal exit from the play (line 431).

(d) Work, not prayers (Farmer 77–81)

Noting that the spring does not lie far from the house, the Farmer ends the scene with what sounds like a folk saying: ‘Work, not prayers, puts food on the table’. He leaves to begin the spring ploughing and sowing, using the same eisodos from which Electra exited a few lines before.

2. Cautious return (Orestes [Pylades; two servants] 82–111) Orestes, Pylades, and servants enter the now- empty orch ê stra through the opposite eisodos . 6 In what amounts to a second prologue, Orestes explains his furtive return to the Argive border, fearing Aegisthus, whom he has come to kill. Aft er consulting Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, Orestes off ered sacrifi ce at his father’s tomb, located far from the palace. He has heard that his sister is married, and here in the countryside he hopes to learn more about what has happened. When Electra returns from the spring, Orestes mistakes her for a slave woman, and he and his men hide to fi nd out what they can, without being found out themselves.

3. Waters of grief (Electra 112–66)

Carrying the pitcher fi lled with fresh water on her head, Electra enters through the same eisodos from which she left . She performs a solo lyric (monody), in which she laments her life as child of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. She cannot forget her father’s fate, murdered in the bath

20

Euripides: Electra
by her mother, and she longs to take revenge or die. Th
e audience
knows that Orestes watches in hiding, now fully aware that the
farmwoman is his sister Electra.

4. Th
e (non) festival (Chorus, Electra 167–219)

Unexpectedly, a Chorus of excited young women arrive through a side entrance. Th
ey have come to invite Electra to a festival honouring Hera, goddess of brides and marriage.

7 Having just fi nished her
monody, Electra responds in lyric, in eff ect joining the Chorus’s entry song. Lacking clothes and adornments befi tting a princess, she tells them that festivals and dances hold no interest for her, and she rejects their off er to loan her their robes and jewellery. She repeats a litany of grief for her father, for Orestes, and for her own impoverished life.

Moving into dialogue meter, the Chorus leader expresses their
sympathy. 8 Suddenly Electra sees men in hiding whom she takes for criminals, and she tells the Chorus to fl ee. By shift ing from lyric into the normal metre for speech, Euripides signals the return to what we assume is the business at hand: the impending reunion of Orestes and Electra. No one in the play mentions the festival of Hera again.

Fig. 2 Elektra (Lydia Koniordou) and Chorus, from Elektra (1989),
directed by Kostas Tsianos, Municipal Regional Th
eatre of Larissa,

Th
essaliko Th
eatro. Courtesy of Th
essaliko Th
eatro.

What Happens and How

21

5. First encounters

(Orestes, Electra, Farmer [Chorus, Pylades,
servants] 220–338)

(a) Keep your distance (Orestes, Electra 220–89)

Initiating a dialogue of alternating single lines ( stichomythia , or ‘line-speech’), Orestes allays Electra’s fears by claiming he brings news from her brother. Tragedians oft en use stichomythia to forge a link between two characters that leads to concerted action. Here, however, the exchange dramatizes a failed connection, for it does not deliver the recognition that we would expect. 9 Orestes learns of Electra’s ‘death-like marriage’ (247), and also of his sister’s virginity, which he attributes to the Farmer’s fear of her brother’s return. Electra corrects him: her husband respects her and her lineage (257–61). Assuring the stranger of the Chorus’s loyalty, Electra boasts of her readiness to kill her mother ‘with the same axe that took my father’s life’ (279). She wonders at Orestes’ long absence and admits that she would not know him if she saw him. Only the old Tutor of Agamemnon, who helped Orestes escape into exile, could recognize her brother now.

(b) Say more (Orestes, Chorus 290–99)

Following the long stichomythic exchange, Orestes and the Chorus ask Electra to elaborate her hardships. Th
e Chorus leader’s lines

(bland and repetitive) mark the transition to a new speaker and to a diff erent expressive mode, shift ing from dialogue to the monologue (uninterrupted speech) of Electra.

(c) My wretched life (Electra 300–38)

Electra describes her forced marriage, poverty, endless labour, and ragged clothes, a life ‘deprived of festivals and choral dance’ (310).

She contrasts her impoverished existence with her mother’s luxurious life in the palace, and she recounts the crass excesses of Aegisthus.

Lording it over the city, he brandishes the royal sceptre in his bloodstained hands; drunk, he abuses Agamemnon’s grave and
hurls taunts at the long-
absent Orestes. Electra begs the stranger
to report all this to her brother, whose failure to return and take revenge disgraces his father’s name and legacy. For all its lively detail, Electra’s speech represents the third time the audience has heard her litany of woe; Orestes heard the second instalment while in hiding. 10

22

Euripides: Electra

6. Hospitality (Farmer, Electra, Orestes [Chorus, Pylades, servants]

339–431)

(a) Open house (Farmer, Electra 339–63)

Announced by the Chorus, the Farmer returns from his fi elds, shocked at the sight of his wife talking to strange men. Once he learns that these strangers bring news of Orestes, the Farmer changes his tune, opening his doors with eff usive generosity. Most commentators think that the Farmer remains onstage during Orestes’ long speech. But it makes more sense for the Farmer to enter the cottage aft er his welcome (363) as if to make things ready, and then return to the stage near the end of Orestes’ refl ections, prompting the young man to accept the invitation and go into the cottage.

(b) Fallen signposts (Orestes 364–90)

Having met Electra’s husband (364–66), Orestes works through this conundrum: how can such nobility spring from a poor farmer? He
considers the gap between appearance and reality: what external signs should we focus on, and how should we read them, to arrive at the truth? How can we diff erentiate inherited privilege from true nobility?

Th
ese questions resonate throughout the play; here, they deliver an implicit judgement on the speaker, for Orestes seems oblivious to what his conclusions might say about himself.

(c) In we go (Orestes 391–400; also Pylades and servants enter the cottage)

Concluding his refl ection, Orestes fi nally accepts the invitation to enter the house: ‘Well, since we are your worthy guests / . . . / let us accept what hospitality there is’ (391–93). His insistence that his entourage must go in (393–94) suggests that the prospect has limited appeal. As we shall see, Orestes’ entrance marks the beginning of a major shift in the play, the gradual transformation of the Farmer’s cottage into a makeshift house of Atreus, more appropriate for deceit, betrayal, and bloodshed than for fresh water brought back from the spring.

(d) How could you ? (Electra, Farmer 401–25)

Th
e Chorus leader delivers a few lines to cover the exit of Orestes and his entourage, signalling the start of a new dialogue. Deaf to Orestes’

praise of the Farmer’s generosity, Electra rails at her husband as a

‘thoughtless fool’ (404) for inviting such noble visitors into their poor dwelling. She commands him to go fi nd the old Tutor of her father,

What Happens and How

23
now a shepherd in the country, and ask him to bring proper provisions for the guests. Agreeing to fetch the old man, the Farmer tells Electra to go inside and prepare something, a task he insists she can manage.

(e) Last thoughts (Farmer 426–31)

Following Electra’s exit into the cottage, the Farmer remains onstage, as was probably the case aft er Electra left to fetch water earlier (line 77). Th
e Farmer’s coda on the value (and limits) of wealth marks the
last we hear from him. Aft er his exit, the actor soon returns as the Old Man, tutor of Agamemnon, who moves the play towards recognition and revenge.

Second movement (432–698)

7. Th
e armour of Achilles (Chorus 432–86)

In their fi rst stasimon , the Chorus begin the transition from the relative innocence of the opening movement to the bloodshed that lies ahead.

Going back one generation, they imagine an idyllic scene of the Greek ships sailing off to the Trojan War, accompanied by a joyful dance of Nereids (sea- nymphs) and aulos -loving dolphins ( stroph ê ‘a’, 432–41).

Th
ey then move further back in time, before the armada ( antistroph ê

‘a’, 442–51), singing of the Nereids who brought armour to the Greek hero Achilles in the uplands of Mt. Pelion, where the young man received his education from the centaur Chiron.

Th
e Chorus’ tone darkens in the second stanza, when they recount
the myths illustrated on the armour. 11 Th
e stories etched into the shield
fi ll the Trojans with terror, especially the image of Perseus holding the severed head of the gorgon, whose gaze could turn a man to stone ( stroph ê ‘b’, 452–63). Achilles’ helmet shows sphinxes tearing apart their victims, and the breastplate depicts Bellerophon’s battle against the monstrous Chimaera ( antistroph ê ‘b’, 464–75).

In the epode (476–86), the Chorus describe Achilles’ sword, its handle engraved with galloping horses that seem to raise black dust from the metal surface. Th
e young women abruptly shift their focus to
the adulterous Clytemnestra, who killed Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks at Troy. One day they hope to see her neck dripping with gore, as if the sword of Achilles had been forged to slit her throat.

Forsaking the lyrical tone of the opening section, the Chorus end the fi rst stasimon with violence and bloodshed.

24

Euripides: Electra

8. Signs of Orestes (Old Man, Electra [Chorus] 487–548) Complaining of the steep approach, the Old Man enters through an eisodos , bringing supplies to welcome Electra’s guests. In spite of the occasion, he has been weeping, and he dries his tears on his tattered clothes. On the way he paid a visit to the grave of Agamemnon to pour a libation in his honour. Th
ere he noticed that someone else had
sacrifi ced a black lamb and left a lock of hair at the tomb. Convinced that the off erings came from Orestes, he asks Electra to compare the lock of hair to her own, an idea she ridicules. 12 Th
e Old Man then tells
her to compare her footprints with those left by the visitor at the gravesite. Electra rejects this idea as equally absurd, along with the Old Man’s suggestion that the cloth she wove for the young Orestes might help her recognize her brother. Electra doubts the Old Man’s sanity, but he remains undeterred and wants to take stock of the strangers.

9. Who am I? (Old Man, Electra, Orestes [Pylades, servants, Chorus]

549–84)

Th
e drive towards the recognition moves into high gear with the
entrance of Orestes, Pylades, and servants from the cottage. Orestes wonders who this ‘ancient relic’ (554) might be, and Electra informs him that the Old Man was once Agamemnon’s Tutor, who saved Orestes from Aegisthus. Inspecting the stranger at close range, the Old Man announces to the incredulous Electra that he is Orestes. Th
e scar over
her brother’s eye, the sign of a childhood fall, proves it. A swift eight-line recognition follows, including three lines of shared stichomythia between Orestes and Electra, each speaking half a line each. Th is rapid-fi re dialogue brings to fulfi lment their earlier stichomythic exchange (lines 230–89), which failed to lead to recognition. Reunited at last, the siblings embrace. 13

10. You have come! (Chorus 585–95)

A brief choral celebration (a single stanza) helps eff ect the transition from recognition to revenge. Comparing Orestes to a torch that dispels the darkness, the Chorus praise the gods for bringing Electra’s brother home, signalling victory for his father’s house. 14

11. Planning revenge (Orestes, Old Man, Electra [Pylades, servants, Chorus] 596–698)

What Happens and How

25

Releasing his embrace of Electra, Orestes poses a series of questions to the Old Man: How can I take revenge? Will anyone in Argos help? Am I bankrupt in friends as well as fortune? What path should I take against my enemies? In the stichomythia that follows, the Old Man guides Orestes towards vengeance. Knowing that Aegisthus is off ering sacrifi ce to the Nymphs in the fi elds, the Old Man instructs Orestes on how he might confront his mortal enemy without having to risk entry into the palace.

When Orestes asks how he can kill Clytemnestra, who did not
accompany her husband, Electra suddenly speaks aft er sixty lines of silence: ‘I myself will handle the murder of my mother’ (647).

Replacing Orestes in the stichomythic exchange, she tells the Old Man to bring the (false) news to Clytemnestra that her daughter has given birth to a son. 15 When the queen comes to the cottage to help with the postpartum ritual and ‘mourn the low status of my child’ (658), Electra will kill her.

Brother and sister pray for help, calling on Zeus (the father of their mythic ancestor Tantalus), on Hera (patron goddess of Argos), on their murdered father Agamemnon, and on the Earth (who will gather the spirits of the Greeks who died at Troy). Encouraging her brother in his fi ght against Aegisthus, Electra tells the Chorus to report news of the outcome ‘with beacon clarity’ (694). If Orestes fails, she vows to kill herself to keep her enemies from ‘raping my body’ (698). Orestes, Pylades, the servants, and the Old Man exit via an eisodos ; Electra enters the cottage.

Th
ird movement (699–961)

12. Myth of the golden lamb (Chorus 699–746)

Left alone in the orch ê stra , the Chorus perform the second stasimon .

Similar to the previous ode, they turn to a mythic subject, this time from the generation before the Trojan War. Th
e Chorus sing of a
magical golden lamb that Pan endowed with regal signifi cance for the house of Atreus (699–712). Th
yestes seduced his brother Atreus’s wife

Aerope, stole the lamb, and seized political power (713–26). In the second stroph ê , the Chorus describe the gods’ reaction to the lamb’s theft , when an angry Zeus reversed the path of the stars and the sun

26

Euripides: Electra

(which formerly had moved west to east across the sky), bringing rain to the northern lands and parching the south (727–36).

In the antistroph ê (737–46), the Chorus question the myth they have just invoked, doubting that the gods care enough about mortal folly to unleash such a cosmic upheaval. Th
ey conclude that, although
untrue, such tales encourage humans to behave morally out of fear for the repercussions. As in the previous stasimon , the Chorus end their lyric by suddenly shift ing focus, condemning Clytemnestra for
murdering her husband (745–46).

13. Where is the Messenger ? (Chorus, Electra, Messenger 747–73) Shouts heard in the distance prompt the Chorus to call Electra from the cottage. Fearing the worst, she threatens to kill herself. ‘Where are the messengers?’ she cries (759), referring to the convention of the messenger speech discussed in Chapter 1. Th
e Messenger arrives two
lines later with news of Orestes’ victory, but Electra fails to recognize him: ‘How can I trust what you report?’ (765). In no other Greek tragedy does a character question a Messenger’s arrival or reliability. 16

Orestes’ servant quickly establishes his identity and reports his master’s triumph over Aegisthus.

14. Aegisthus’s murder (Messenger [Electra, Chorus] 774–858) In the longest speech in the play, the Messenger tells how Orestes and Pylades gained Aegisthus’s confi dence and killed him. Claiming to be Th
essalians on their way to the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, they accept Aegisthus’s invitation to join his sacrifi ce and feast. Th e

Messenger describes the ritual preparations: the purifying lustrations (which Orestes and Pylades avoid, claiming they had just washed in the fl owing river), the bowl to catch the victim’s blood, the baskets with barley to sprinkle on the altar, the blazing fi re and cauldrons, the sacrifi cial knife.

Praying that his enemies suff er, Aegisthus dedicates a lock of the bullock’s hair on the altar and slits the animal’s throat. He asks the stranger to fl ay the hide, which Orestes does with impressive dispatch.

Aegisthus then examines the entrails, a form of prophetic inquiry (‘haruspicy’) where the appearance of the animal’s organs can predict the future. Horrifi ed at the deformed innards, Aegisthus confesses his

What Happens and How

27
fear of Agamemnon’s son, but Orestes reassures the king. Asking for a cleaver, Orestes smashes the animal’s breastbone. When Aegisthus inspects the newly exposed viscera, Orestes brings the cleaver down on the tyrant’s back: ‘His entire body, from head to toe, / convulsed in a bloody agony of death’ (842–43). Identifying himself as Agamemnon’s son, Orestes wins over Aegisthus’s slaves, who welcome his return. Th e

Messenger announces that Orestes is on his way, bringing not the gorgon’s head, but Aegisthus. Orestes’ servant then leaves the way he entered, through an eisodos .

15. Celebration (Chorus, Electra 859–79)

In a short lyric section, the Chorus praise Orestes for winning a victory greater than the Olympic games. Between the stroph ê and antistroph ê , Electra invokes the sun, the earth, and the night in celebration, recalling her earlier prayer to the night sky (lines 54–63). She leaves the stage to bring garlands from the cottage to crown Orestes with a victory wreath, while the Chorus continue their joyful dance.

16. Orestes the victor (Electra, Orestes [Pylades, servants, perhaps one of Aegisthus’s men who now supports Orestes, Chorus] 880–906)

As Electra returns with the wreaths, Orestes, Pylades, and servants enter through an eisodos , bearing the corpse of Aegisthus. Electra lauds her brother for his victory, garlanding his head, and she does the same for Pylades. Crediting the gods for his triumph, Orestes
announces that he has brought back Aegisthus’s body as proof of his success. He encourages Electra to revile the corpse, to throw it out for wild beasts to devour, to treat it however she pleases, for she is now Aegisthus’s master.

17. Vaunting over the corpse

(Electra, Orestes [Pylades, Chorus,
servants] 907–61)

Aft er a moment’s hesitation, Electra unleashes a vicious diatribe over the body of Aegisthus, and possibly to his decapitated head. 17 She blames him for destroying her life, orphaning her of her father and her brother. She reviles him as the cowardly butcher of her father, a dangerous seducer of women, a lady’s man too handsome for his own good, an eff eminate pretender whose fame depended on his wife, and whose sons were ‘momma’s boys’. Marrying above his station (even

28

Euripides: Electra
though his wife was a whore), Aegisthus foolishly believed that wealth could buy good character, the sort of unmanly man Electra would never consider for her own husband (948–51). Electra proclaims
justice the ultimate victor, a view echoed in the two lines of the Chorus.

Orestes tells Pylades and servants to hide Aegisthus’s corpse inside the cottage, and they do so, bringing the third movement to a close.

Fourth movement (962 – 1146)

18. Up next: Clytemnestra (Electra, Orestes [Chorus] 962–87) As if on cue, Electra spies Clytemnestra approaching from a distance.

Expressing his reservations about killing ‘the woman who bore and raised me’ (969), Orestes questions the wisdom of Apollo’s prophecy that commanded the matricide. Defending the Delphic oracle and
accusing her brother of cowardice, Electra shames him into entering the cottage, where he lies in wait for their unsuspecting mother.

19. Mother and daughter

(Chorus, Clytemnestra, Electra [male
attendants, Trojan slave women] 988–1146)

Clytemnestra arrives in the orch ê stra on a horse- drawn wagon, driven or led by two male servants, and accompanied by her Trojan slaves.

Th
e Chorus off er a darkly ironic welcome (988–97), praising the
queen for her wealth and good fortune. When Clytemnestra asks her slaves to help her from the carriage, Electra off ers her hand instead.

She claims she is no less a slave than the Trojan women in her mother’s entourage.

Clytemnestra then delivers a thirty- nine-line speech, explaining why she killed Agamemnon. He had lured their daughter Iphigenia to Aulis for a purported marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifi ce her so the Greeks could sail for Troy and recover the unfaithful Helen. Coming home from the war, he ‘installed’ (1033) the Trojan prophetess

Cassandra in their marriage bed, prompting Clytemnestra to look elsewhere for comfort. Had the situation been reversed – if Menelaus had been abducted and Clytemnestra had sacrifi ced Orestes to get her brother- in-law back from Troy – Agamemnon would have killed her on the spot. Resting her case, Clytemnestra invites Electra to respond.

To mark the change in speakers, the Chorus leader off ers a brief comment, claiming that a wife must always defer to her husband.

What Happens and How

29

Fig. 3 Elektra (Irene Pappas), Clytemnestra (Aleka Katseli), Chorus,
and Trojan slaves, from Elektra (1962), directed by Michael Cacoyannis.

Courtesy of the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation.

Electra then launches a thirty- nine-line rebuttal of her mother. As noted in Chapter 1, the equal lengths suggest the equally timed speeches of plaintiff and defendant in fi ft h- century Athenian law courts. Electra assails the moral failings of Clytemnestra and compares her to her sister Helen, who brought shame on their brothers Castor and Polydeuces. She accuses her mother of dolling herself up when Agamemnon left for Troy, and of rejoicing when the news from Troy looked bad for the Greeks, because she preferred the lightweight Aegisthus to her warrior husband. Even if she had valid reasons for hating Agamemnon, Clytemnestra had no right to take it out on

Electra and Orestes. If she were justifi ed in murdering Agamemnon, then Electra and Orestes have every right to kill her in return.

30

Euripides: Electra

In a brief dialogue, Clytemnestra understands why Electra sides with Agamemnon: ‘Some children prefer the male, / others love their mother more than their father’ (1103–4), a subject we will explore in Chapter 7. Expressing regret at killing her husband, Clytemnestra confesses that her fear of Orestes made her defend Aegisthus’s harsh measures against her son. Unmoved, Electra denounces the tyrant for supplanting her and Orestes. In a chilling double- entendre , she tells her mother that ‘even now he dwells in my house’ (1120), reminding the audience that his corpse lies hidden inside the cottage.

Clytemnestra enquires about her (ostensible) grandchild, whom

Electra claims she delivered without a midwife. Ignorant of the appropriate birth rituals, she asks her mother to enter the cottage and help. Th
e queen tells her slaves to take the carriage away and feed the horses. Aft er the rituals here, she will join Aegisthus at his sacrifi ce to the Nymphs. Th
e Trojan slaves and attendants exit via an eisodos with the horses and wagon.

As Clytemnestra enters the cottage, Electra warns her not to soil her beautiful clothes on the soot-stained walls. Referring to the
sacrifi ce ahead, Electra invokes the knife sharpened not for a calf but for her human victim. She recalls her own ‘wedding to death’ (line 247) by condemning her mother to a similar fate: ‘You will lie beside the man you slept with [Aegisthus] as his bride / in the house of Hades’

(1144–45). Electra exits into the cottage, ending the longest scene in the play.

Fift h movement (1147–1359)

20. Th
e ebb and fl ow of justice (Chorus, Clytemnestra from off stage 1147–76)

Aft er Electra’s exit, the Chorus perform their third stasimon , addressing the changing fortunes of the house of Atreus. In the stroph ê they sing of Agamemnon’s death in the bath, his cries echoing through the palace; the antistroph ê describes Clytemnestra’s lioness- like cruelty in slaying him, and the justice that lies ahead. Clytemnestra’s off stage cries follow: ‘My children, before the gods, don’t kill your mother!’

(1165). While pitying her fate, the Chorus see divine justice at work, and they announce the appearance of the corpses of Aegisthus and

What Happens and How

31

Clytemnestra on the ekkukl ê ma : ‘Th
ere is not now, nor ever has there
been / a house more wretched than the race of Tantalus’ (1175–76). 18

21. Revulsion (Orestes, Electra, Chorus [Pylades, corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra] 1177–232)

Along with the bodies of their victims, the bloodstained brother and sister enter from the cottage, accompanied by the silent Pylades. In a kommos (shared lyric), they recreate the matricide, somewhat like messengers in lyric mode, following this pattern: Orestes, Electra, Chorus (fi rst strophic pair); Orestes, Chorus (second strophic pair); Orestes, Electra (third strophic pair). Appalled by the deed and the oracle that commanded it, Orestes fears that the matricide will make him a pariah. Repenting her hatred of her mother, Electra grieves that no husband will take her as a wife. Th
e Chorus claim justice has been
done, but they fault Electra for driving her brother to murder. Orestes describes how Clytemnestra begged for mercy, baring her breast and exposing ‘the limbs that gave me birth’ (1209). Only by covering his eyes could he drive his sword into her neck. Electra confesses that she urged her brother on, putting her own hand to the blade. Th
ey cover
their mother with a robe, part of the ritual preparation for her burial.

22. Gods on high

(Chorus, Castor, [Polydeuces], Orestes, Electra,

[Pylades, corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra] 1233–91)

Th
e Chorus announce the unexpected arrival of two divinities (1233–

37), the deifi ed brothers of Clytemnestra, Castor and Polydeuces. Th ey
descend via the m ê chan ê onto the roof of the cottage (i.e. the sk ê n ê building). Addressing Orestes in a monologue (the same number of lines as the Farmer’s opening prologue), Castor tries to bring comfort and closure. He proclaims that Clytemnestra’s fate was just, but that the matricide was not, blaming ‘wise’ Apollo’s ‘unwise’ oracle (1246). He instructs Orestes to give Electra to Pylades in marriage and then fl ee to Athens, driven mad by the Furies, chthonic spirits who avenge kindred bloodshed. Th
e goddess Athena will protect Orestes from these spirits
with her gorgon shield, when he stands trial for murder on the

Areopagus (the ‘Hill of Ares’, close to the Acropolis). Because Apollo takes responsibility for the matricide, the jury’s votes will divide equally, setting the precedent that a split verdict guarantees the

32

Euripides: Electra
defendant’s acquittal. Th
e angry Furies will sink into a chasm,
establishing an oracle near the Hill of Ares, and Orestes will leave to found an eponymous city in Arcadia. 19

Castor announces that the citizens of Argos will bury Aegisthus.

Clytemnestra will receive funeral rites from Menelaus (just back aft er the sack of Troy) and his wife Helen (who lived in Egypt throughout the war). Helen never went to Troy. Zeus sent a false image of her to Priam’s city in order to unleash ‘strife and the slaughter of mortals’

(1282). Following this revelation, Castor tells Orestes to let Pylades return to his home in Phocis with Electra ‘as virgin and wife’ (1284).

Th
e new couple will take the Farmer with them, and make him a
wealthy man. Ending his monologue, Castor reminds Orestes that he must fl ee to Athens, stand trial, and then fi nd happiness.

23. Mortal and immortal perspectives (Orestes, Castor, Electra, Chorus

[Polydeuces, Pylades, corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra]

1292–359)

Orestes and Electra challenge the happy ending outlined by their star- dwelling uncle. Why would the gods allow – and in the case of Apollo, encourage – the murder of their mother? Castor responds that the troubles of the house stem from their ancestors, making their own fate inescapable. Brother and sister embrace in grief, lamenting their separation, their exile from Argos, and loss of their family home.

Castor encourages a more positive view, but admits to feeling pity for struggling mortals. Announcing the imminent approach of the Furies who will hound Orestes, Castor takes his leave with his brother on the m ê chan ê , heading for the sea around Sicily to rescue ships and to help those ‘who love / piety and justice’ (1351–52). Th
e Chorus bid the gods
farewell, and the play ends with everyone exiting out the two eisodoi .

3

Euripides’ Electra and Myth

Refl ecting and Re- fashioning Tradition

Tragic myths like those of Electra and Orestes tap into a deep reservoir of archetypal behaviour, delivering larger- than-life stories of passion, error, triumph, grief, and other ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet puts it. Strong external forces – gods, fate, circumstance – can play a decisive role in these stories, exposing human limitations and testing human endurance. Manifest in almost all aspects of ancient Greek culture – epic, tragedy, lyric poetry, philosophy, history, architectural sculpture, vase painting – myths provide guidance, insight, and warning. Although deeply rooted in tradition, their power lies in their fl exibility rather than their allegiance to an ideal or perfected version. With a remarkable capacity to incorporate new elements and manipulate old ones, myths thrive on variation, from subtle changes in detail to major twists in their plots. We fi nd this combination of tradition and invention at work in Euripides’ Electra . 1

Th
e saga of the house of Atreus makes its earliest appearance in

Homeric epic. 2 We meet Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Helen in the Iliad , and we hear of Orestes, Electra, Aegisthus, and Clytemnestra in the Odyssey . In the later poem, Aegisthus’s murder of Agamemnon angers the gods on Olympus, for it epitomizes the refusal of mortals to obey divine commands. Odysseus encounters the spirit of Agamemnon in the underworld, where the murdered Greek leader recounts his death at the hands of Aegisthus, cheered on by Clytemnestra, who ignores her husband’s cries for mercy. By avenging Agamemnon’s
murder, Orestes provides a model for Odysseus’s son Telemachus, who faces a horde of suitors that have occupied his father’s palace 33

34

Euripides: Electra
on Ithaca and are plotting Odysseus’s death, should he ever return from Troy. 3

Th
e story also appears in the Epic Cycle, an assortment of shorter epic poems known primarily through later prose summaries. Th
e

Cypria

(‘stories connected to Aphrodite’) includes the sacrifi ce of Iphigenia, a signifi cant addition to the Homeric account, and one used later by all the tragedians to justify Clytemnestra’s hatred of her husband. Another poem in the Epic Cycle, Nostoi (‘Homecomings’), credits both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra for killing Agamemnon, and also introduces Pylades as Orestes’ ally. Th
e lyric poet Xanthus ( c . 600 bc ) explains that the name Laodik
ê

(mentioned in the

Iliad
as one of Agamemnon and

Clytemnestra’s daughters) was changed to ‘Electra’ because Aegisthus and Clytemnestra prevented her from marrying. An ageing virgin, she was ‘without a marriage bed’, a [ ê ] + lektron , or Ê lektra , an etymology that Euripides exploits in his play. 4

Th
e early sixth- century lyric poet Stesichorus wrote an Oresteia (also lost), which referred to the sacrifi ce of Iphigenia and to Clytemnestra’s role in the murder of Agamemnon. Th
e poem also
mentioned Orestes’ return from exile, his recognition by Electra (involving a lock of his hair), Clytemnestra’s nightmare that precedes her murder, the pursuit of Orestes by the Furies, and Apollo’s help in releasing him from their curse. In one of his epinician odes ( Pythian 11.15–37), Pindar approaches the story through the character of Pylades. His father Strophius took in Orestes when a nurse saved the young boy from Clytemnestra, aft er she had murdered Agamemnon
and Cassandra. Like the tragedians, Pindar (a younger contemporary of Aeschylus) ponders Clytemnestra’s motivation: was it the sacrifi ce of Iphigenia that drove her to kill her husband, or her desire for Aegisthus?

In his Oresteia , which competed at the City Dionysia in 458 bc , Aeschylus weaves these elements together in an integrated trilogy. Th e
fi rst play, Agamemnon , describes Agamemnon’s sacrifi ce of Iphigenia, an off ering demanded by the goddess Artemis if the Greeks were to capture Troy. Aft er the war, Clytemnestra welcomes her husband home,

Euripides’ Electra and Myth

35
laying out the woven wealth of the house for him to trample as he enters the palace. Clytemnestra then murders Agamemnon in the bath, and she also kills Cassandra, his war- prize from Troy. Altering the Homeric account, Aeschylus makes Clytemnestra the sole killer; Aegisthus appears only aft er the fact, celebrating Agamemnon’s death as belated justice for his father Th
yestes and his brothers. Th
yestes unknowingly
ate his children (all save Aegisthus) in a horrifi c feast prepared by his brother Atreus, the father of Agamemnon.

Th
e second play of the trilogy, Choephori ( Libation Bearers ), deals directly with the subject of Euripides’

Electra . Th
e play opens at

Agamemnon’s tomb, where the exiled Orestes has returned to make off erings and plan his revenge. Electra and the Chorus approach with libations sent by Clytemnestra to placate Agamemnon’s spirit, following a terrifying nightmare in which she gave birth to a snake that sucked blood from her breast. Orestes reveals himself, proving his identity to Electra by the similarity of their hair and feet, and by a woven garment she gave him in his youth. Prompted by Apollo’s oracle, he lays out his plan. Sending Electra back to the palace (she never appears again), he and Pylades arrive disguised as messengers bringing news of

Orestes’ death. Clytemnestra welcomes them and sends for Aegisthus, whom Orestes kills without diffi
culty. When he confronts Clytemnestra
onstage, however, she bares her breast and begs for life. Orestes hesitates, until Pylades (silent up to this point) tells him to obey Apollo, no matter what. Aft er the off stage matricide, Orestes appears on the ekkukl ê ma with the corpses of his two victims. At the sight of the Furies, whom only he can see, he fl ees in terror out of the theatre.

Th
e fi nal play, Eumenides , begins with Orestes at the omphalos (the

‘navel of the earth’) in Apollo’s temple at Delphi, where he seeks asylum from the Furies. Apollo sends him to Athens to stand trial for matricide at a new civic court established by Athena. Apollo appears on Orestes’

behalf, and half the jurors vote for acquittal, half for conviction. Athena provides the casting vote, freeing Orestes to return to Argos. Th e irate

Furies threaten the city with destruction, until Athena convinces them to take up residence in Athens with full ritual honours.

36

Euripides: Electra

Many in the original audience of Euripides’ Electra would have known the Oresteia , which exerted a pronounced infl uence on the artistic life of Athens, 5 and it left its impact on Euripides and Sophocles. Each wrote an Electra that incorporated important elements from Aeschylus’s trilogy. 6

However, they chose to put Electra centre- stage and view the story from her perspective: the murder of her father, her mother’s betrayal of Agamemnon and marriage to Aegisthus, the tyrant’s despotic control over her life, the absence and eventual return of her brother Orestes, her role in the matricide, and her reactions aft er the murder.

We cannot understand Euripides’ Electra if we fail to take Aeschylus’s Oresteia into account. For a start, the recognition scene in Euripides ( El . 518–78), discussed in Chapter 2, consciously parodies the scene in Choephori . 7 Th
e evidence of Orestes’ return – a lock of hair, footprints,
childhood weaving 8 – strike Electra as nonsensical. She thinks the Old Man has lost his mind, until she, too, sees the scar above her brother’s eye. 9 Why does Euripides give us this odd, roundabout recognition scene? Is he indulging in an insider’s theatre joke about Aeschylus’s dramaturgy, or is something more at stake?

Th
e mismatch between the Old Man’s enthusiastic certainty and

Electra’s growing incredulity looks like the stuff of comedy, and on more than one occasion (in this scene, and elsewhere) Euripides encourages his audience to laugh. 10 For all the humour, however, the Old Man gets it right – Orestes left tokens at Agamemnon’s grave, he has returned from exile, he is standing in front of his sister. Th e forced
recognition speaks volumes about Orestes, who could have identifi ed himself in his fi rst scene with Electra, when he learns that she longs to avenge their father, and that the Farmer and Chorus are on her side. For her part, Electra holds such an idealized image of her brother – a man’s man, trained in wrestling schools, a warrior who would never return in secret – that she fails to recognize the person with whom she shares the stage for some 200 lines (the Old Man identifi es Orestes almost on sight). In the recognition scene, Euripides exposes how far his two main characters have grown apart, failing to fi ll the heroic contours of their Aeschylean predecessors.

Euripides’ Electra and Myth

37

As noted above, Euripides departs from tradition by moving his play to an isolated mountain farm far from the palace of Argos. Electra lives there with her husband, wedded in name only, caught in limbo between virgin and wife. In Aeschylus’s Choephori , Electra hints at her limited nuptial prospects (A. Ch . 132–35, 445–49), and Sophocles in his Electra goes further. His Aegisthus will not allow Electra or her sister Chrysothemis to marry, fearing they might give birth to a potential avenger (S. El . 959–66). Running with this idea, Euripides has Aegisthus marry Electra to a poor farmer, guaranteeing that no child from their union could possess the status to make a claim on the throne.

Electra remembers the palace as the home she has lost and as the place of her father’s murder: ‘Destroyed in a meshed web / of deceit . . .

/ . . . / you bathed yourself for the last time’ (Eur. El . 154–57). In both Aeschylus and Sophocles, Orestes avenges his father’s murder by slaying Clytemnestra (and Aegisthus) within those same palace walls. But Euripides alters the scenario, moving the assassination of Aegisthus to the meadow where he pastures his horses, and the murder of

Clytemnestra to the Farmer’s cottage. As Orestes prepares for the matricide, the Chorus recall how Agamemnon ‘fell slain / in the bath’, his death cries ‘resounding from the ceiling, and the stone cornices of the palace’ (1148–50). Moments later they hear Clytemnestra’s death cries emanating from within the cottage (1165, 1167). Although juxtaposed verbally, the two murders – Agamemnon’s and Clytemnestra’s – take place in completely diff erent contexts. By shift ing the matricide to the country, Euripides attenuates the sense of natural justice that might arise if Clytemnestra were killed in the same place where she had killed her husband. 11

Th
e continuity of the murder scenes in Aeschylus and Sophocles
emphasizes the importance of genealogy, political power, and dynastic inheritance. Aft er the trial in Aeschylus’s Eumenides , Orestes leaves for Argos knowing that he will return as king and master of his house. At the end of Sophocles’ Electra , Orestes returns to the palace in Argos and restores his rightful rule. In Euripides’ Electra , however, Orestes never gets near the palace, even aft er the matricide. Castor informs him that

38

Euripides: Electra
he must accept permanent exile from Argos and found a new city in Arcadia. Electra, too, never returns home, departing for Phocis with her new husband Pylades. Th
e initial ‘displacement’ of the setting away
from the palace mirrors the banishment of Electra and Orestes at the end of the play. Euripides denies the restoration of political rule and dynastic line found in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. In their place, loss, remorse, and exile are all that remain of an ancient legacy. 12

By looking at scenes of arrival and welcome, we can appreciate other ways that Euripides has re- shaped the tradition. Tragedy knows no more memorable scene than Clytemnestra’s homecoming for her
husband in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon , with the blood- red fabrics spread out before him, leading into the palace. Aeschylus slyly refers back to this scene in Choephori, when Clytemnestra welcomes Orestes and Pylades with the promise of a warm bath and appropriate hospitality (A. Cho . 707–15). In similar fashion, Clytemnestra in Sophocles’ Electra welcomes the unrecognized Tutor (S. El . 800–3), convinced by his fi ctitious account of Orestes’ death. Th
en Orestes and Pylades (both
unrecognized) bring the funeral urn with the dead man’s ashes into the palace, where they dispatch Clytemnestra with ease. In both Aeschylus and Sophocles’ versions, Orestes manoeuvres a welcome into the
palace through the ruse of his own death. Nothing like this happens in Euripides’ play.

Working intricate variations on his predecessors, Euripides presents four welcoming scenes in Electra . When the Farmer returns from his fi elds and learns that the strangers talking to his wife bring word from Orestes, he greets them warmly: ‘Why weren’t the doors [literally ‘gates’]

opened long ago? / Go inside, please . . . / Accept what hospitality my house can off er’ (Eur. El . 357–59). Th
e disguised Orestes reluctantly
accepts the Farmer’s invitation, but he wishes he were in one of the other versions of his story: ‘I wish that your brother, fl ush with prosperity, /
were leading me into his more prosperous home’ (397–98). 13

Th
e second welcoming scene (reported by the Messenger) involves

Aegisthus’s spontaneous invitation that Orestes and Pylades join his sacrifi ce and feast (Eur. El . 779–89). A bullock is brought in, prepared,

Euripides’ Electra and Myth

39
slaughtered, and fl ayed, this last action performed by Orestes at his host’s behest. Only aft er the animal’s death does the murder of the unsuspecting Aegisthus take place, while he bends over the entrails to examine the omens. Th
e sacrifi cial context of this scene recalls

Clytemnestra’s ‘welcome’ to Cassandra in Aeschylus’s

Agamemnon :

‘You, too, Cassandra, come inside . . . / and stand with the other slaves /
when we sacrifi ce at the altar . . . / Th
e beasts stand ready . . . / the altar
fi res burn’ (A. Ag . 1035–38, 1056–57). In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra’s sacrifi ce provides the cover for murdering those she has welcomed.

Euripides gives us a full- scale sacrifi ce, but one where the host meets his death at the hands of his guest.

Th
e third welcome takes place onstage when Electra celebrates

Orestes’ return as a conquering hero (Eur. El . 880–89). She crowns her brother and Pylades with garlands ( stephanoi ), a ritual associated with victory at the Panhellenic games, and repeated on the athlete’s return to his home city. Electra’s welcome of her brother recalls the greeting Agamemnon should have received when he returned from Troy: ‘It was not with a crown or victory wreaths ( stephanoi ) / that your wife welcomed you home, / but with a two- edged sword’ (162–64). In Aeschylus’s

Agamemnon

, the Argive king returns bringing visible
evidence of his Trojan victory, namely the Trojan princess Cassandra.

In Euripides’ Electra , Orestes also brings a token of his conquest, the mangled body of Aegisthus.

In the fi nal welcoming scene, Electra greets her mother on her arrival at the Farmer’s cottage. Again Euripides evokes the homecoming
sequence in Aeschylus’s

Agamemnon

, but it is Clytemnestra (not

Agamemnon) who arrives in a carriage accompanied by Trojan slaves, and it is her daughter, dressed in rags, who welcomes her. Rather than a path of richly dyed textiles leading to the palace, Clytemnestra must tread cautiously to protect her own garments as she walks into the cottage: ‘Be careful / not to stain your royal clothes on the soot- covered walls’ (Eur. El .

1139–40). As in Aeschylus’s play, sacrifi ce provides the smokescreen for what lies ahead. Clytemnestra exits to perform the purifi cation ritual as her daughter intones, ‘You will make the sacrifi ce you must to the gods. /

40

Euripides: Electra

Th
e sacred basket is raised; sharp is the knife / that stabbed the bull . . .’

(1141–43).

At the end of the play, Euripides refers to – and transforms – other elements from the Oresteia . In the onstage encounter between mother and son in Libation Bearers , Clytemnestra bares her breast to remind Orestes that she gave him life. He hesitates, and cries out ‘What shall I do?’ ( ti dras ô ; A. Cho. 899), the question that Vernant identifi es as ‘the fundamental problem of tragedy’. 14 Silent to that point, Pylades tells his friend to obey Apollo’s oracle (A. Cho . 900–2), and Orestes forces his mother into the palace to kill her. In his Electra , Euripides denies Orestes an onstage scene with his mother. But he does ask the same

‘tragic question’ as his Aeschylean predecessor, only earlier, in the decisive scene with his sister: ‘What shall we do ( ti . . . dr ô men )? Shall we kill our mother?’ (Eur. El . 967). Pylades says nothing; it is Electra who tells Orestes to follow the oracle: ‘If Apollo is foolish, then who is wise?’ (972). Bowing to his sister’s will, Orestes utters the tragic words,

‘So I will do something terrible’ ( kai deina dras ô , 986).

Following the matricide, brother and sister appear with the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus on the ekkukl ê ma , recalling the end of Aeschylus’s

Libation Bearers

. In that play, Orestes focuses on the
righteousness of his action, laying out the net that Clytemnestra used to trap Agamemnon for all to see. In Euripides’ version, the killers express horror and regret at what they have done, covering their mother’s corpse with Orestes’ cloak to hide it from sight. Suddenly, Castor appears ex machina , speaking ambiguously of the god whose oracle had pressed for the matricide: ‘What she [your mother] received was just, but what you did was not. / Apollo, Apollo . . . No, he is my lord, and I will keep silent.

/ Although a wise ( sophos ) god, his oracle was not wise ( ouk . . . sopha )’

(Eur. El . 1244–46). Castor then explains what lies ahead for Orestes, summarizing the action of Aeschylus’s Eumenides in only twenty lines (Eur. El . 1252–72), as if he were on amphetamines.

By incorporating so many elements from Eumenides in his account of Orestes’ trial in Athens, Euripides encourages us to compare the ending he gives his play to that of Aeschylus. Aft er Athena’s vote frees

Euripides’ Electra and Myth

41

Orestes in Eumenides , the Furies threaten to devastate Athens, spreading plague on the land, blasting the crops and animals, destroying the earth’s productivity (A.

Eum

. 778–92, 808–22). Athena persuades
them to calm their anger and make their home in Athens, honoured by ritual off erings at marriage and childbirth. Aeschylus has the now-transformed Eumenides (‘Kindly Spirits’) sing a blessing over the city they had planned to ruin: ‘May no fi erce blast destroy the trees, / . . . /
no blazing heat blind the fl owers / . . . / Let fl ocks fatten / and the earth swell, / . . . . / a rich yield that honors the gods’ (A. Eum . 938–48).

At the end of Euripides’ Electra , Castor makes several eff orts to brighten the mood, but he can off er nothing like the uplift ing vision of fertility that brings

Eumenides
to a close

. We do fi nd a thematic
resonance, however, in Euripides’ decision to set Electra on a rural farm. Recall that the play opens with the Farmer addressing the land –

‘O ancient plain of Pelasgian land ( g ê s ), watered by the river Inachus . . .’

( El . 1), and variations of the word ‘earth’ ( g ê ) occur frequently. 15 At the end of his prologue the Farmer re- asserts his connection to the soil:

‘When day breaks, / I’ll drive the oxen to the fi elds to plow and sow my crops. / For a loafer soon learns: prayers to the gods may fi ll / your mouth, but it’s work that fi lls your stomach’ (78–81).

Th
e Farmer’s dependence on the earth’s productivity suggests an
implicit relationship to the blessings sung by the Furies at the end of Eumenides . Euripides scatters references to harvests, crops, livestock, and fertility across the play. Reaching his home ‘aft er ten harvests’

( deketesin sporaisin , El . 1152–53), 16 Agamemnon is cut down in his bath. We see the land’s productivity when the Old Man arrives with a lamb, cheese, and wine to feed the visitors (493–99). Aegisthus sacrifi ces to the Nymphs (nature goddesses linked to water and fertility) in the meadows where he pastures his horses (623–27). Clytemnestra enters the orch ê stra in a horse- drawn wagon (965, 998–99), and she instructs her slaves to graze the animals while she helps Electra with her ritual (1135–38). Orestes sacrifi ces a lamb to honour Agamemnon’s tomb (90–92, 513–14), and we hear of the bullock that Aegisthus off ers to the Nymphs (625–27, 785–86, 811). 17

42

Euripides: Electra

While calling attention to the importance of animals, agriculture, and the earth, Euripides foregoes the grand benefi cence that ends Aeschylus’s Eumenides . Unlike the earthbound Furies who guarantee the prosperity of Athens, Castor (who dwells in the stars) makes little reference to the city of Argos and its wellbeing. However, he does inform Orestes that the Furies will deliver a ‘harvest of sharp pain’

( dein ô n odun ô n karpon , El . 1346). As for the soil and its productivity, the play ends with two corpses in front of a soon- to-be- abandoned farmhouse. We can only imagine what the Farmer would make of his cottage should he return, fi nding it spattered with a mother’s blood spilled by his virgin wife and by the guest he had welcomed so graciously into his home.

We have focused on the interconnections between Aeschylus’s

Oresteia and Electra because of the obvious impact of the trilogy on Euripides’ play. But Euripides also drew on other versions of the myth –

Homer, the epic cycle, Stesichorus, and possibly Sophocles, whose Electra may have premiered at the City Dionysia around the time of Euripides’ play. Given the uncertainty in dating the two Electra ’s, we cannot be sure which way the infl uences fl owed. But let us assume for the moment that Sophocles’

Electra
preceded Euripides’ play and
consider how the younger playwright might have exploited the more original elements in Sophocles’ tragedy. 18

Unlike Aeschylus, whose interest lies in Orestes, Sophocles focuses on Electra (onstage for all but a hundred lines), living a tortured existence under the same roof as her father’s assassins. Hoping for Orestes’ return, Electra refuses to join her sister Chrysothemis (a Sophoclean innovation), who compromises with the powers that be.

When the Messenger brings the (false) news of Orestes’ death in a chariot race (discussed in Chapter 1), Electra learns of the loss of her brother. Arriving with the urn ostensibly containing the ashes of the dead hero, Orestes reveals himself to Electra. Once inside the palace, he kills Clytemnestra and then brings her covered corpse onstage to trick Aegisthus, who thinks the body is that of Orestes. When the tyrant learns the truth, Orestes and Pylades force him into the palace to kill

Euripides’ Electra and Myth

43
him, urged on by a gleefully vindictive Electra, who wants Orestes to expose Aegisthus’s corpse rather than bury it. Th
e play ends with no
mention of the Furies haunting Orestes for matricide, or of his trial and acquittal in Athens.

Th
e recognition scene in Sophocles off ers a useful point of
comparison with Euripides’ version. When Orestes and Pylades arrive with the urn, Electra clings to it in grief and will not let go. Only by producing his father’s signet ring can Orestes persuade her of his identity. Electra’s joy knows no bounds, and the Tutor must quiet her so as not to jeopardize their plan. In contrast to Sophocles’ exuberant scene, the recognition in Euripides is muted and occurs against Orestes’

will. Th
e proof of his identity does not depend on any link to his father (no signet ring) but on a childhood accident. No urn fi gures in the process, although Euripides does introduce its visual echo in the water jar that Electra carries earlier in the play. Rather than the ritual vessel her Sophoclean counterpart refuses to relinquish, Electra insists on putting down her water jug so that she can mourn her father’s fate (Eur.

El . 140–42), a lamentation that her brother observes in hiding. 19

Sophocles’ Orestes appears cold-
blooded, effi
cient, and without
regret, the polar opposite of Euripides’ character, so cautious and unsure of the matricide. Both playwrights focus on the psychic damage done to their heroine, but Sophocles’ Electra torments her mother with her aggravating presence. Mired in the countryside, Euripides’ Electra never sees her mother and longs for her former palace life. She must invent a reason for Clytemnestra to visit her, and when she arrives, we meet both a vain Queen and an apologetic mother, who feels regret for her actions. By contrast, Sophocles’ Clytemnestra rails at her daughter:

‘You godless, hateful thing! Are you the only person / whose father has died? Does no other human being / feel grief? Go to hell and suff er, /
and may the gods below never free you from your lamentations’ (S. El .

289–92). As for the matricide, the heart of Aeschylus’s

Choephori ,

Sophocles defangs it, making the death of Aegisthus the climax of his play. Euripides does the reverse, emphasizing the horror of Clytemnestra’s killing and her children’s appalled reaction to what they did.

44

Euripides: Electra

We have looked at important sources for Euripides’ Electra and seen how the playwright incorporates, undermines, and transforms earlier treatments of the story. In Chapter 8 we will return to his apparent assault on the mythical foundations of the story. As his Electra amply demonstrates, Euripides was a master of the tragic tradition, and he shaped it in ways that would be hard to imagine without his plays to show us how it’s done.

4

In Order of Appearance

Characters (and Actors) in Electra

‘As a drama of character, Electra is supreme

. . . undoubtedly Euripides’ masterpiece ’. 1

As noted in Chapter 2, Aristotle emphasizes the primacy of plot in Greek tragedy. Th
e tendency in contemporary theatre to focus on
characters and their idiosyncrasies at the expense of dramatic structure fi ts well with the late- capitalist celebration of the ‘individual’ as a locus of consumption and narcissistic self-interest. Other contemporary
performance practices – ‘post-
dramatic’ theatre, performance art,
endurance art, and the like – oft en eliminate plot and dramatic roles altogether. Replacing fi ctional characters with the performer who ‘plays’

him or her self, these performance pieces follow Aristotle’s sensible formula of ‘beginning, middle and end’ 2 only in the loosest temporal sense: something wasn’t happening (or no one was there to see it); then it was happening (or someone came to witness it); and then it wasn’t happening any longer (or whoever came, left ). 3

Ancient Greek playwrights worked in a very diff erent environment, where mythical stories helped shape the political and ethical life of the polis

. As we saw in the previous chapter, the tragedians approached
legendary heroes and heroines from diff erent angles and directed their narratives towards diff erent ends. In Electra , Euripides alters the contours and motivations of those characters that appear in Aeschylus and Sophocles (Electra, Orestes, Pylades, the old Tutor, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus) and introduces others (the Farmer, Castor) to serve the tale he wants to tell.

Following Aristotle, if the soul of tragedy lies not in the characters per se but in their story as structured by the playwright, then to what extent 45

46

Euripides: Electra
do tragic characters have internal lives independent of the situation in which we fi nd them? As audience members attending Euripides’ play, we listen to what Electra says, watch what she does, observe how other characters treat her, and note what they say about her. Th
is information
helps us understand what is happening and why, but it does not mean that Electra has a life that can be discovered or analysed apart from the play. Th
e masked male actor who performed Electra at the City Dionysia
surely considered the emotions, mood, and motivations of this
complicated dramatic fi gure. However, his performance also would have refl ected his knowledge of the play’s relationship to prior tradition (Chapter 2), and his mastery of Euripides’ language and modes of expression (the subject of our next chapter).

Th
e Greek term charakt ê r – a ‘mark’ or ‘stamp’ that establishes the real thing (such as a coin) from an imitation (a counterfeit) – may help us understand Euripides’ approach to dramatic character. Disturbed by the Old Man’s scrutiny, Orestes asks his sister, ‘Why is he staring at me, as if looking for / the mark ( charakt ê r ) of true silver?’ ( El . 558–59). 4

When the Old Man announces that the stranger is really Orestes, Electra responds, ‘What mark ( charakt ê r ) have you seen that might persuade me?’ (572). In spite of Orestes’ desire to remain unrecognized, the scar above his eyebrow proves that he is, in fact, himself, and he can no longer pretend otherwise.

Of course, a tragic character cannot be read as easily as an engraved hallmark on a piece of silver. As Goldhill observes, ‘ Electra returns again and again to the question of how to evaluate character, a theme that is constructed specifi cally through an interplay of heroic expectations and human shortcomings’.

5 When the poor Farmer
welcomes him into his home, Orestes considers the diffi
culty of fi nding
a clear way to evaluate nobility of character ( tous eugeneis , 385). 6

Poverty, wealth, bravery in battle, social status, physical appearance, and ancestry prove inadequate for predicting admirable behaviour. Th e
proof of character lies in what a character does. With this in mind, let us look more closely at the dramatis personae and what we learn about them over the course of the play.

In Order of Appearance

47

Th
e Farmer

Th
e Farmer begins the play by discussing signifi cant events in the life of Electra and her family. Only later does he turn to his own background, born of good Mycenaean stock but now reduced to poverty ( El . 35–

38). 7 Although wedded to Electra, he respects her lineage and her virginity, given that Aegisthus forced the marriage on them. Th e Farmer
conveys all the information the audience needs to follow the story – the mythic ‘givens’, the innovations of a rural setting and a wedded Electra, and a glimpse at the economic and social disparities that will emerge as the play unfolds.

If this were a modern drama, we might expect ‘down-
home’

vocabulary and rough manners from this man of the soil, but the Farmer only occasionally demonstrates such behaviour. He utters twelve proper names in his fi rst ten lines, and a total of thirty- fi ve in the prologue. He invokes the ancient Pelasgians, the early inhabitants of the plain of Argos, drained by the river Inachos; the great fi gures of the Trojan War, Agamemnon (named four times) and Priam; Aegisthus

(named seven times, and once more as ‘son of Th
yestes’); Clytemnestra

(once by name, once as ‘child of Tyndareus’); and of course the principal players, Electra and Orestes (each named three times). Th
e Farmer
never names himself, nor does anyone else in the play.

Th
e list of characters (probably not by Euripides) found in the oldest surviving manuscript identifi es the Farmer as Autourgos , ‘a man who works [the land] by himself ’. Th
e Farmer talks about the ploughing and
the sowing he must undertake, and Electra refers to him as a ‘toiler’ (75) and their home as ‘a day- labourer’s cottage’ (207). On his arrival at this rough Argive hillside, Orestes expects a ‘ploughman’ (104) to pass by, and he views the cottage as fi t for a ‘ditch digger or cowherd’ (252).

Electra describes her husband as ‘a poor but noble man’ ( pen ê s an ê r gennaios , 253); the Farmer uses similar language of himself: ‘Although a poor man ( pen ê s ), / I am not ignoble by nature’ ( ê thos dusgenes , 362–63). 8

Portrayed as modest and virtuous, the Farmer comes across as
a principled ‘good guy’. We see this in his sexual abstinence, his

48

Euripides: Electra
recognition that farm drudgery does not suit his wife, his generosity and hospitality, and his regret that he cannot off er more to his guests.

He occasionally utters aphorisms of folk wisdom that give us a sense of his world- view. Refl ecting traditional Greek country life, the Farmer is shocked to fi nd his wife talking to strangers in front of the cottage, but once he learns that they bring news of Orestes, he welcomes them inside. Deeply embarrassed by their dwelling, Electra harangues him for doing so. He responds, ‘If they’re as noble as they seem, won’t they /
gladly take the little we can off er and see it as a lot?’ (406–7). Surprising in a Greek tragedy, these exchanges have the ring of everyday domestic encounters, well suited to the rural world of the Farmer. With his departure, this tone never returns, and Euripides re- directs the action towards recognition, revenge, and remorse.

Given the three- actor rule discussed in Chapter 1, we can be fairly sure of the role-divisions in

Electra . Th
e protagonist played
the title role, the second actor played Orestes, and the third actor took on all the other parts: the Farmer, the Old Man, Messenger, Clytemnestra, and Castor. Th
e role of the Old Man does not seem like a
stretch for the actor playing the Farmer. Other than age (indicated by posture and mask), they both live and work in the country. But the shift to Clytemnestra speaks volumes about the range and technical mastery of the ancient tragic actor. It forces us to question the deep psychological commitment many modern performers view as the sine qua non for playing a tragic role.

Electra

A complex character full of contradictions and idiosyncrasies, 9 Electra remains unwavering in her desire to take vengeance on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Her forced marriage to the Farmer, her marginal position as wife and virgin (far stranger in the ancient world than in our own), and the loss of her home and status have taken their toll. Time and again Electra protests the indignities she has suff ered, frequently using

In Order of Appearance

49
the Greek term hubris to describe what her enemies have done to her.

Th
e word has several meanings, including ‘physical violation’, ‘assault’, and ‘rape’, a topic dealt with further in Chapter 7. It seems that Electra’s sense of social humiliation motivates her far more than her moral outrage at her father’s murder. 10

Many interpreters of the play note Electra’s predilection for self-dramatization. As Denniston puts it, ‘One feels throughout the earlier part of the play that she is reveling in her misery’. 11 Given to verbal and physical hyperbole, Electra works herself into a state of oblivious self-concern. On her fi rst entry, she fails even to notice the Farmer (who has been onstage for fi ft y lines), consumed as she is with showing the gods the misery of her life. 12 She frequently employs rhetorical tropes to make her case, revealing a level of self- awareness underneath her passionate outbursts. She launches a long speech on her life of deprivation and misery with the rhetorically balanced line, ‘I should speak if I must, and, since you are friends, so must I speak’ (300). At other times, her abrupt tonal shift s seem to come out of nowhere. On her husband’s return from the fi elds, she addresses him with respect: ‘Oh dearest one’ (345). As soon as Orestes enters the cottage, however, Electra changes her tune:

‘Reckless fool’ (404), she says, chiding the Farmer for inviting rich guests into their poor home, her embarrassment trumping the norms of
hospitality. 13

Inconsistencies in Electra’s behaviour and self-
presentation
complicate our picture of her. Although her hair is razor- cropped and fi lthy, she claims it is well combed and feminine. She indicates that her tattered clothes and unkempt appearance keep her from attending the festival, but she rejects the Chorus’ off er to loan her the proper clothes and accessories. She grumbles more than once about having to fetch water from the spring, although her husband insists that she need not perform this demeaning task. She tells Orestes that she shuns young women, but the presence of the female Chorus (friends of Electra) suggests otherwise. She implies that Agamemnon has no proper grave, but both Orestes and the Old Man make off erings at his tomb. She urges the strangers to tell Orestes all about her impoverished life and

50

Euripides: Electra
dwelling, but she derides the Farmer for inviting them inside, where they could see for themselves. Electra claims that modesty prohibits her from speaking what she feels about Aegisthus, but then she rails at his corpse, insulting him for being both a feminized weakling and an irresistible seducer of women.

A puzzling aspect of Electra’s character involves her occasional moments of panic, suggesting that fear lies closer to the surface than we might expect. At the sight of the strange men near her cottage (Orestes and Pylades in disguise), she fl ees in terror, an understandable response considering the isolated location of her dwelling. Harder to explain is her vow to commit suicide if Orestes fails to kill Aegisthus. She prepares to carry out her promise until a Messenger arrives, whose identity Electra doubts. When he reassures her that he is her brother’s servant (previously onstage with her for almost two hundred lines), Electra acknowledges that fear kept her from recognizing him. 14

For all these complexities and contradictions, Electra shows single-minded purpose in punishing those who have ruined her life. She decries what Aegisthus has done, exiling her brother, forcing her into a death- like marriage, and denying access to the palace and inheritance that rightly belongs to her and Orestes. 15 Imagining her absent brother as a heroic avenger, she has a hard time accepting that he proves otherwise in the fl esh, and at the crucial moment she shames him into committing matricide. In the scene with her mother, Electra’s bitter callousness contrasts with Clytemnestra’s eff orts at reconciliation and her doubts about the course she has taken.

Only aft er her mother’s murder does Electra display any misgivings about the deed, and her horror at what she has done marks an abrupt change: ‘I am to blame. / Wretch ( talaina ) that I am, to move like wildfi re against my mother! / She bore me as her daughter’ (1182–84).

16

Matricide, we might say, brings Electra to her senses. Her belated contrition recalls that of Clytemnestra, who comes to regret what she has done: ‘Ah! What a wretch ( talaina ) my plotting has made me! / Much more anger than necessary I drove against my husband’ (1109–10). As

In Order of Appearance

51
we shall see in Chapter 9, later versions of Electra’s story explore and develop the similarities between mother and daughter.

In an important sense, Euripides’ protagonist gets what she thinks she wants. She shows the gods her suff ering; she appears as a loving wife (while complaining how wretched her marriage makes her); she
browbeats her husband into doing her bidding; she pays Aegisthus back for the outrage he has infl icted; she eff ectively plots Clytemnestra’s murder; she shames Orestes into matricide and joins him in the deed; and she ends up with the kind of husband (Pylades) that befi ts a princess. For all her success, it is telling that she feels only regret and loss at the close of the play.

By far the largest role, Electra poses great challenges for the actor.

Onstage for all but 180 lines, and speaking roughly one- third of the lines in the play, she also sings a monody before the Chorus enter, and joins the young women and Orestes in a shared lyric following the matricide. 17 She has signifi cant interactions with all the major characters: the Farmer, Chorus, Orestes, Old Man, Messenger,

Clytemnestra, and Castor. As for those who remain silent, Electra crowns Pylades, reviles the corpse of Aegisthus, and compares herself to the Trojan slave women who accompany Clytemnestra – she too has seen her freedom replaced by servitude.

Electra demonstrates ruthless self-
control (the scene with her
mother, in which she must act as if she recently gave birth) and indulgent self- pity (her fi rst scene with her brother), scheming resolve (her childbirth fi ction) and petty outbursts of emotion (her reaction to her husband, her doubting the Old Man’s sanity). At times Electra’s anguish and resentment consume her; at other times they seem like useful props in a performance she wants to give to whatever audience might be watching (the gods, the Farmer, the Chorus, Orestes).

Electra is clearly the ‘motor’ of the play, and a successful production depends on the actor’s ability to engage the audience in her anguish over a life that might have been, and her compulsive drive towards vengeance and restitution, which leads – unexpectedly – to deeply aff ecting remorse.

52

Euripides: Electra

Orestes

In contrast to his portrayal in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, Euripides’ Orestes appears a most unlikely avenger. Cautious, indecisive, unsure of his next move, he seems like the wrong man for the job.

As noted in Chapter 2, Orestes lingers at the border so that he can fl ee to safety if necessary, and he refuses to reveal himself even when he learns of his sister’s absolute commitment to revenge. Only the Old Man’s dogged persistence forces Orestes into the light, and even then he must depend on others to plot vengeance on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.

Behind his caution and indecisiveness, Orestes demonstrates an
egotistical arrogance that refl ects his aristocratic background. He assumes that the Farmer respects Electra’s virginity because he fears her brother, even though Electra tells him otherwise. He perceives Electra’s dwelling place as only fi t for a ditch digger or cowherd, and he has to steel himself and his entourage to go inside.

If verbal assertion and hyperbole mark his sister, then questions and uncertainty characterize Orestes. 18 By rough count, he makes over seventy inquiries during the course of the play. Some elicit important information he needs to know; others highlight his lack of resolve and reluctance to take charge. He asks the Old Man how to revenge himself on Aegisthus, and he questions the trustworthiness of Apollo’s oracle.

He initially responds to the Farmer’s hospitality not by accepting it, but by considering how one might determine true nobility and judge
goodness in another. Th
e problem with Orestes’ philosophizing lies not
in its irrelevance but in his failure to apply what he says to himself. 19 By contrasting Electra’s mythic vision of her brother (too brave to return to Argos in secret) with the less than heroic fi gure we see onstage, Euripides exposes the gap between noble ideas (and ‘ideas about nobility’) and their realization.

When Orestes exits to fi nd Aegisthus, we have no idea what he will do or how he will do it. ‘I’m ready to go, if someone will show me the way’ ( El . 669) is the last thing Orestes says about the plan, before calling

In Order of Appearance

53
on the gods and Agamemnon for help. Joined by Electra and the

Chorus, his invocation brings to mind the great kommos in Aeschylus’s Choephori , but it delivers only ‘a faint echo of that powerful, violent, and bloodcurdling scene’. 20 Nonetheless, this short prayer sequence marks the beginning of the change in Orestes’ character that we hear about in the Messenger’s speech.

In place of the cowardly prevaricator and uncertain plotter, at the sacrifi ce and feast of Aegisthus we meet a very diff erent Orestes. Quoted several times by the Messenger, he comes across as daring and inventive, quick- witted and cool under pressure, adept and eff ective when the time is right. Returning to the stage with the body of Aegisthus, Orestes seems transformed, a cold- blooded assassin, crowned like an Olympian champion in a brutal blood sport, urging Electra to abuse the corpse any way she pleases.

Th
e sight of his mother arriving from Argos turns him around again.

From the guilt- free, exultant killer of Aegisthus, Orestes reverts to a man haunted by destiny and trying to fi ght it off : ‘How could I kill the woman who bore and raised me?’ (969). Earlier, while still in disguise, Orestes asserts that ‘only the oracles of Apollo / are steadfast; I bid farewell to human prophecies’ (399–400). Now he fi nds that very oracle

‘foolish’ (971). 21 He wonders if ‘perhaps some demon disguised as the god made the prophecy’, but his sister will have none of it: ‘Seated at the sacred tripod of Delphi? I don’t think so. / . . . / Don’t you dare get soft and play the coward. / Practice the same deceit you used / when you killed her husband Aegisthus’ (979–84). 22 Shamed into acquiescence, Orestes waits inside the cottage while Electra plays cat and mouse with the unsuspecting Clytemnestra.

In resisting what he has to do, Orestes departs radically from other versions of the story. With prescient horror he knows that matricide will mean his exile: ‘I was pure before, but I will be exiled for killing my mother’ (975). As we will see in the next chapter, Euripides highlights Orestes’ miserable life as a fugitive from Aegisthus. An ‘exiled man is powerless’ ( asthen ê s . . . pheug ô n an ê r , 236), he says, and Electra repeats that assessment almost verbatim (
asthen ê s pheug ô n an ê r , 352).

54

Euripides: Electra

Confi rming his worst fear, Orestes learns from Castor that he must suff er banishment from Argos and will never return to his homeland.

As the play draws to a close, we see Orestes covered with Clytemnestra’s blood, telling his sister, ‘Sing a funeral dirge / for me as if at a dead man’s tomb’ (1325–26). We would not have expected this from the Orestes we fi rst meet, fresh from Delphi, back in the Argive countryside, welcoming

‘the shining face of the dawn’ (102).

Pylades

Praised by Orestes, the Old Man, and Electra as a loyal friend, the silent Pylades is onstage for a good part of the play, some 750 lines. Th e
original audience may have expected him to speak before the matricide, as he does in Aeschylus’s Choephori , but Euripides’ Pylades remains silent throughout.

With the appearance of the Dioskouroi at the end of the play,
however, his character gains new importance. Castor announces that Pylades will marry Electra, taking her home with him to Phocis, along with the Farmer who will fi nd a more prosperous life there. Electra says nothing to her new husband, although both Castor and Orestes urge her to see her future with Pylades in a joyful light. Earlier in the play, Electra praises Pylades eff usively when she crowns him and Orestes for murdering Aegisthus: ‘And you, comrade in arms, scion of a most righteous father, / Pylades! Accept from my hand this garland, / for you win a prize equal to his / in this contest’ ( El . 886–89). Whatever aff ection between Electra and Orestes’ friend may surface there, we see no evidence of it at the end of the play. 23

Pylades’ silent presence poses challenges and opportunities for a stage director. Does he remain on the margins, lurking in the
background? When and how does he make his presence felt? Does

Pylades represent a calming infl uence on Orestes, or an ominous reminder of what lies ahead? How does he enter the stage aft er Clytemnestra’s murder? Would his presence on the ekkukl ê mma with

In Order of Appearance

55

Orestes, Electra, and the corpses of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra dilute the dynastic malediction behind the murders? What is his physical relationship with Electra at the end of the play? Do they exit together, or separately? Posing these questions helps us recognize the important role that Pylades (mute though he is) can play in a performance of Electra .

Th
e Chorus

Th
e Chorus consists of young female friends of Electra who, like her, live far from the city, and who have come to invite her to join them at the Argive Heraia. 24 Th
ey extend Electra their comfort and support,
off ering her clothes and jewellery so that she can attend the festival, and sympathizing with her when she refuses their request. Electra informs the disguised Orestes that they are loyal and trustworthy, and so they remain throughout the play. When Electra fears that Orestes has failed in his revenge plot, they prevent her from committing suicide, and they join in her celebration for Orestes and Pylades following the murder of Aegisthus. Th
ey welcome Clytemnestra to the Farmer’s cottage,
knowing full well that she walks into a fatal trap. When Electra departs from Argos at the end of the play, she bids the Chorus farewell, calling them ‘female citizens’ ( politides , 1335) to emphasize their ties to the city she must leave. 25

Th
e Chorus’s primary contribution to the drama lies in their lyric odes, which extend far beyond their conceivable experience as country maidens. In the fi rst stasimon , they invoke the Trojan War, from the lilting departure of the Greek ships to the bloodshed depicted on Achilles’ armour. Th
ey end their ode abruptly with an image of

Clytemnestra paying with her blood for the bloodshed of her husband, the Greek general Agamemnon. In the second stasimon , the Chorus recount the legend of the golden lamb, a tale of marital infi delity, palace intrigue, and dynastic politics. In response to the iniquities of the house of Atreus, Zeus changed the course of the sun, disrupting the climate in the known Greek world. Having laid out the myth for the audience (the

56

Euripides: Electra
stage is empty of actors), the Chorus deconstruct it in the fi nal antistroph ê . Th
ey fi nd such stories incredible, for they doubt that the
gods would react to the malfeasance of lowly mortals by altering the paths of heavenly bodies. Nonetheless, they admit that such tales encourage humans to honour the gods, precisely what Clytemnestra failed to do when she slew her husband. We will return to this chorus in Chapter 8.

Both odes open with an idyllic setting – fl ute- loving dolphins gambolling in the ocean, the Argive mountains resounding with Pan’s pastoral melodies – only to end in bloodshed, as the Chorus zero in on Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon. 26 In the third stasimon , they directly evoke his fi nal moments, his screams in the bath as his wife cuts him down with an axe. As if on cue, Clytemnestra’s desperate voice cries out from the cottage, confi rming the Chorus’ confi dence that past crimes do not go unpunished. While they believe that Clytemnestra suff ered justly, they fault Electra for driving Orestes to commit matricide: ‘Friend, you did a terrible thing / to your brother, who wanted no part in it’ (1204–5). 27

Euripides prepares us for the Chorus’s change of heart at the end of the play when, in the second stasimon , they question the veracity of the myth they have just performed. Th
ey draw the audience into the story
and then back away from it, forcing us to consider what we’ve just experienced from a diff erent perspective. Choral self- reference can produce a similar eff ect. When the Chorus use the language of music, song, and dance to suggest their own performance in the orch ê stra , they encourage the audience to remain alert to the ‘how’, as well as the ‘what’, of the drama. During the parodos , for example, they invite Electra to join the festival dance in Argos, but Electra expresses no interest in the

‘whirling dance of a virgin chorus’ (178–80), a phrase that also applies to the very women to whom she is speaking.

In the fi rst stasimon , the Chorus imagine ‘the chorus of Nereids’ and

‘ aulos

-
loving dolphins’ (434–36) that accompany the ships;

28 they
marvel at the ‘chorus of stars’ (467) on Achilles’ shield, and the Sphinx with its ‘prey- winning song’ (471) on his helmet. In the second stasimon ,

In Order of Appearance

57
they sing of ‘Pan’s sweet- voiced music, / which he plays on his . . . / reed pipe’ (702–4), and they describe the Argive ‘choruses’ (711) that celebrate the golden lamb. Before the temples, ‘a fl ute, the servant of the Muses, / sang out its lovely melody’ (716–17). But then ‘a diff erent song rose up’ (718), the one that tells of the treachery of Th
yestes, who steals
the lamb along with Atreus’s wife. One song leads to another, one story to another, until both the Chorus and the audience wonder in what way these stories are true, and for what purpose they are being told.

In the short ode aft er the Messenger speech, the Chorus celebrate Orestes’ victory over Aegisthus: ‘Let us dance, lift ing our feet and leaping / towards heaven like a fawn / . . . / Accompany our chorus /
with a triumphant song of victory’ (860–65). Th
ey urge one another to

‘continue our chorus, the dance so loved by the Muses’ (875) and to ‘let our joyful voices rise with the aulos ’ (879). While calling attention to their own singing and dancing, the Chorus point to another choral performance, the epinician odes that honoured victors at the Panhellenic games (recall that Orestes pretends to be an athlete on his way to Olympia). Although the audience may fi nd themselves swept up in Orestes’ triumph, the Chorus’s comparison of a brutal murderer to a victorious athlete give us reason to pause. As is oft en the case in Euripides, the Chorus of Electra aff ects the audience in the theatre as much as the characters and the action onstage.

Th
e Old Man

Performed by the same actor who played the Farmer, the old shepherd brings the rural world back into the play, bearing wine, cheese, plaited garlands, and a lamb to feast the strangers. Like the Chorus whose interest in the festival of Hera quickly vanishes, the Old Man soon forgets the reason for his visit, distracted by his conviction that Orestes has returned. Calling himself a ‘shriveled old man’, he complains of the climb to Electra’s cottage, ‘dragging myself up the steep path . . . / with bent back and tottering legs’ ( El . 490–92). Both Electra and Orestes

58

Euripides: Electra
address him as ‘old one’ ( geraie , the root of our word ‘geriatric’), 29 and Orestes assumes that this ‘ancient relic of a man’ (554) in tattered clothes must be a slave. Moments later, this ‘relic’ recognizes Orestes.

Th
e Old Man comes up with a plan that takes advantage of Aegisthus’s absence from the palace, advising Orestes to fi nd a way to join the tyrant’s ritual celebration in the country. As for Clytemnestra’s murder, Electra instructs her old friend to take the news to the palace that she has given birth to a son. Now it is the Old Man who expresses disbelief, doubting that Electra’s ploy will work on Clytemnestra. Once the evil genius of Electra’s plan sinks in, however, he burns with enthusiasm: ‘When I’ve seen this [Clytemnestra’s death], let me die!’ (663). 30 With far more energy than when he arrived, the Old Man exits with Orestes and his retinue. 31

Next to the Corinthian Messenger in Oedipus Tyrannus , no other character in Greek tragedy brings so many strands of a plot together.

Th
e Old Man comes from Agamemnon’s tomb; he recognizes Orestes,
who otherwise would never be identifi ed; he thinks of the plan to kill Aegisthus; he is the linchpin in Electra’s childbirth ploy, bringing news to Clytemnestra. Like the Farmer before him, the Old Man walks out of the play, but the actor (who has played both of those roles) soon returns as the Messenger.

Th
e Messenger

In most Greek tragedies, the Messenger who reports an off stage event has not appeared onstage before: a terrifi ed shepherd describes the maenads in Bacchae ; a palace servant reports the hero’s madness in Heracles ; an escaped prisoner narrates Th
eseus’s victory in Suppliant

Women

. In

Electra , however, the Messenger who arrives must allay Electra’s fears: ‘Who are you? Why should I trust what you tell me?’ ( El .

765). He proves his bona fi des by reminding her that he is Orestes’

servant, whom she had seen earlier with her brother. At that point, the attendant was a non- speaking role, played by an extra. Aft er Orestes’

entourage exits, the actor who played the Old Man changed his mask

In Order of Appearance

59
and costume for those of Orestes’ servant, and then he returns as the Messenger who describes Aegisthus’s murder. 32

Th
e personal characteristics of the Messenger in tragedy usually
matter very little; the message he delivers is what counts. But as one of Orestes’ slaves, the Messenger in Electra views his master’s victory as a triumph. He employs surprisingly large doses of direct speech (thirty-fi ve out of eighty- four lines), quoting Orestes fi ve times (a total of fi ft een lines), probably adopting the vocal infl ection of the Orestes’

actor. Th
e situation becomes more interesting with Aegisthus, whom
the Messenger quotes six times (a total of twenty lines). Because Aegisthus never appears alive onstage, the Messenger could invent the voice of Aegisthus to give us a sense of what that character was like. 33

Before he arrives, Electra cries out, ‘Where are the messengers?’ ( pou gar aggeloi , 759), calling attention to the convention in tragedy of the Messenger speech, a mainstay of Euripdean dramaturgy. Reported
news from other sources plays an important role in the plot as well. Th e

Chorus learn of the Argive festival from a mountain man who brings them the news ( aggellei , 171). 34 Th
e ersatz stranger reports ( aggellein ,

230) that Orestes is alive, and Electra tells him to take back the news ( aggell’ , 303) of her miserable existence to her brother. Th e Farmer must
bring the news ( apaggel ô , 420) about Orestes to the Old Man, news that Clytemnestra would fi nd bitter if reported to her ( aggeilaimen an , 418).

Electra sends the Old Man to her mother with a diff erent message:

‘Deliver the news ( apaggell’ ) that I have just given birth to a boy’ (652).

Th
e Old Man assures Electra that the words ‘will seem to come out of your own mouth’ (667). It is as if the actor playing the Old Man anticipates his upcoming role as the Messenger, when he will quote Orestes and Aegisthus at length.

Aegisthus

Although Aegisthus never appears alive onstage, he remains an
important presence. 35 Seven times in the prologue the Farmer singles

60

Euripides: Electra
him out by name, emphasizing his brutal treatment of Orestes and Electra, but also highlighting Aegisthus’s fear of Agamemnon’s children.

Th
e Old Man concurs, describing the tyrant as ‘consumed with fear, unable to sleep’ ( El

. 617), information that Orestes uses when he
joins Aegisthus’s sacrifi ce: ‘Do you really fear a plot from some exile /
when you rule over the city?’ (834–35). Electra gives us a contradictory sense of Aegisthus’s character. On the one hand, he seems a drunken buff oon, weak and eff eminate, a kept man who owes his status to his wealthy wife. On the other hand, Electra sees him as malevolence personifi ed: her father’s murderer, the usurper of Agamemnon’s bed and kingdom, the tyrant who drove her brother into exile and who violates her own life.

In the Messenger speech, Aegisthus emerges in a very diff erent light – outgoing, almost jovial, generous and hospitable. He prepares a beautifully observed sacrifi ce for the Nymphs, inviting the strangers to share the feast and spend the night. He even takes Orestes by the hand, refusing to accept ‘no’ for an answer. Aegisthus encourages his guest’s active participation in the sacrifi ce, bantering with him about the strangers’ (ostensible) Th
essalian background. When Aegisthus
observes ominous signs in the animal’s entrails, his fear begins to mount, until Orestes smashes him through the backbone with a cleaver.

Aegisthus’s body twitches convulsively as he dies, never knowing who –
or what – hit him. 36

At the end of the play, Castor announces that the ‘citizens of Argos /
will cover the body of Aegisthus in a grave of earth’ (1276–77). Th is
surprising detail gives the impression that his rule was less oppressive to the city at large than to Electra and Orestes, whose mother he seduced and whose father he helped to kill.

Clytemnestra

Euripides’ treatment of this tragic fi gure diff ers markedly from that of Aeschylus and Sophocles. 37 Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra towers over

In Order of Appearance

61
his

Agamemnon
like a force of nature. Passionate, intelligent, and
outrageously daring, she kills her husband without help from

Aegisthus. Sophocles’ Clytemnestra seems mean- spirited and bitter by comparison, in no small part because Electra hounds her relentlessly.

In both Aeschylus and Sophocles, a terrifying nightmare prompts Clytemnestra to send libations to calm the spirit of Agamemnon.

Euripides’ Clytemnestra has no such nightmare and sends no
off erings to her husband’s grave. We learn from the Farmer that Clytemnestra persuaded Aegisthus not to kill Electra as he originally had planned, suggesting that she still has some maternal feelings for her daughter. She tells Electra straight- out that she regrets her past actions:

‘Daughter, don’t think / I’m all that happy with the things I’ve done.

/ . . . / Did I stir up more hatred for my husband than he deserved?’ ( El .

1105–10).

In their scene together, Clytemnestra moves between logic- chopping and heart- felt confession; she expresses a mother’s grief over Iphigenia and a tyrant’s fear of Orestes; she yearns for rapprochement with her daughter, while longing for the absent Aegisthus. Acknowledging Electra’s childhood preference for her father, Clytemnestra feels sympathy for her daughter who gave birth alone, without the help of a midwife or female companions. A more suspicious character might have wondered about the group of women who greet her on her arrival, and who later reject her rationale for murdering Agamemnon: ‘What you say is just, but the justice you worked is shameful’ (1051). Expecting to meet her grandson as part of her daughter’s post- partum purifi cation, Clytemnestra enters the cottage oblivious to the deception that will end her life.

Th
e audience hears her cries from within, as she begs her children not to kill her (1165). When Orestes appears onstage with her corpse, he describes how she bared her breast to him and pleaded for her life. Th
e remorse her children express over her dead body, and

Castor’s judgement of the folly of Apollo’s oracle, lead many to conclude that Clytemnestra’s murder was unnecessary and morally reprehensible.

62

Euripides: Electra

Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioskouroi

(‘Sons of Zeus’) 38

When Clytemnestra fi rst enters the orch ê stra , the Chorus welcome her as ‘the sister of the noble sons of Zeus, / who dwell among the stars of fi ery heaven, / honoured as saviours by men / caught in the sea’s roar’

( El . 990–93). Electra reminds Orestes that the Dioskouroi twins once had been suitors for her hand in marriage (312–13), and she calls Clytemnestra and Helen ‘unworthy of their brother Castor’ (1064). For all the earlier references to the Dioskouroi, the physical arrival of Castor and Polydeuces ex machina (‘from the machine’) comes as a complete surprise.

Th
e demigods respond to their sister’s murder aft er having ‘just calmed a ship- threatening / tempest’ (1241–42), and they depart at the end of the play ‘for the waters off Sicily, / to rescue ships that sail the deep sea’ (1347–48). Scholars once thought that Euripides was alluding to Athens’ ill- fated expedition against Sicily in 415 bc , but the uncertainty around Electra ’s date makes that connection doubtful. Th e Dioskouroi
did have other ties to Sicily and also to Athens, where they were worshipped at the Anakeion sanctuary on the east slope of the Acropolis, around the corner from the theatre of Dionysus. 39

Raising doubts about the justice of Clytemnestra’s murder, Castor criticizes Apollo for the oracle that commanded the matricide.

40

Nevertheless, he predicts a bright future for Orestes, Electra, Pylades, and the Farmer, even though they all must leave Argos. Neither Electra nor Orestes takes comfort at what lies ahead, and Castor fi nds their grief contagious: ‘Even the gods and I myself feel pity for mortals, / all their trials and tribulations’ (1329–30). Still, he struggles to make the best of a bad situation, like the fi ft h- century equivalent of a spin- doctor insisting on a silver lining in the black cloud of matricide.

Whatever glorious future Castor imagines for his nephew and niece, he leaves the audience in a state of shock with his myth- shattering news about the Trojan War. Zeus swept the real Helen off to Egypt and sent a doppelg ä nger in her place, meaning that the war was fought over a

In Order of Appearance

63
phantom. Euripides tells the story more fully in Helen , which post-dates Electra , and also ends with the Dioskouroi appearing ex machina .

In that play, Castor (along with his silent twin) safeguards his sister Helen’s reunion with her husband Menelaus and guarantees their
homecoming to Sparta, an apparently happy conclusion to the
devastation of the pointless Trojan confl ict. 41 At the end of Electra , however, Electra and Orestes face separation and exile, and the revenge they took on their mother seems as unnecessary as the war on Troy waged by their father.

Here is a chart of the probable role divisions for the three actors who created the parts in Euripides’ original production at the City Dionysia: Protagonist (fi rst actor)

Electra

Deuteragonist (second actor) Orestes (and Messenger?)

Tritagonist (third actor)

Farmer, Tutor, Messenger, Clytemnestra,

Castor

Mute actors

Pylades, Polydeuces, servants, corpses
of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra

64

5

Language

Some theatre historians argue that Greek tragedy arose from a ‘song culture’, concluding that tragic performances resembled modern opera more than spoken drama. 1 Th
is view fails to take into account the
importance of speech, argument, rhetoric, wordplay, poetry, thematic motifs, and the inter- textuality discussed in Chapter 3. One of the great delights of Greek tragedy lies in grappling with the power of language to make a case, establish a character, develop an image, evoke a myth, build suspense, and deepen dramatic confl ict. From the broad
movement of the plot to the intensity of a single moment, Greek tragedians worked essentially through language, much as Shakespeare did 2,000 years later. We cannot hope to understand a play like Electra if we don’t look closely at the words and how they work on an audience’s imagination to create the world of the play.

Let us begin with the language of colour, not the fi rst thing one thinks of when discussing Greek tragedy.

Electra
abounds with
descriptions of colours and hues, from the ‘dark blue prows’ (436) of the Greek ships sailing for Troy to the ‘snake- armed, black skinned’ Furies (1345) that pursue Orestes on his way to Athens. At Aegisthus’s sacrifi ce and feast, Orestes lays bare with a knife the ‘white fl esh under the calf ’s skin’ (823); Clytemnestra imagines Iphigenia stretched over the altar for Agamemnon to ‘slit her pale white throat’ (1023). Colour- infl ected language enhances an audience’s ability to see these events in the mind’s eye, even though none of them actually takes place onstage.

Electra enters the play addressing the ‘black night that suckles the golden stars’ (54), and Orestes speaks of the ‘white face of dawn’ (102).

Th
e Chorus sing of the ‘burning circle of the sun’ on Achilles’ shield (464–65), the ‘shining day’ of Orestes’ return (585–86), the ‘light of the sun’ with its ‘hot golden face’ (729, 739–40), the ‘bright path of the stars’

65

66

Euripides: Electra

(727–28), and the ‘pale visage of dawn’ (730–31). Th
ese evocative
phrases support the temporal arc of the play, but they also inform the Chorus’s account of the sun reversing its course across the sky, a legend to which we will return in Chapter 8.

Valued in the ancient world for its luminous quality, gold glistens and shines throughout

Electra

: the reward Aegisthus off ers to kill

Orestes, the gold necklaces and jewellery that Electra would need for the festival, the golden armour and helmet that sets Achilles apart on the battlefi eld, the magical lamb with its fl eece of gold, brought to the gold- wrought temples of Argos. 2 Gold also can introduce a grimmer, darker reality. Th
e ‘golden brooches’ of Clytemnestra’s Trojan slaves
glisten against the backdrop of Agamemnon’s ‘black blood / that rots in the palace’ (317–19). On Achilles’ gilded sword we see ‘the black dust kicked up / by galloping horses’ (477–78). 3

Hair colour matters in Euripides’ version of the story. As well as the

‘black- fl eeced lamb, / its blood recently shed’ at Agamemnon’s tomb, the Old Man found ‘shorn locks of blond hair’ (513–15), which he assumes Orestes left as an off ering. ‘Put the lock of hair up to yours / to see if the colour ( chr ô ma ) is the same’ (520–21), the Old Man tells Electra. It turns out that blond hair runs in the family: Electra accuses her mother of ‘sitting before the mirror arranging your long blond tresses’ (1071) while Agamemnon was away at war.

It is hardly surprising that Euripides uses colourful language to convey character and mood. But ‘non- poetic’ diction plays an even more important role in the play. Consider the opening lines of Electra’s speech to the corpse of Aegisthus:

Enough! How shall I start? With the worst,
or do I save that for last? What words do I fi t in between?

Early every morning I would rehearse everything

I wanted to say to you straight to your face,
longing for the day when I would be free from fear.

Now it has come – time to settle accounts,
and say all I wanted to say when you were alive.

Eur. El . 907–13

Language

67

A modern version of this scene might show an enraged Electra
screaming at her defeated enemy; a contemporary performance artist might splatter the corpse with paint, or pierce her own skin and add her blood to that of the dead man. But Euripides does something diff erent: he has Electra consider the problem of verbal
taksis (‘order’),
determining which parts of a speech should go where, with the goal of presenting the most convincing argument. Even though Electra says she has long rehearsed her response to the man she hates, she pauses to consider the most eff ective rhetorical strategy to make her case against Aegisthus, knowing full well that the dead man will not answer back. 4

In the climactic scene between mother and daughter, Clytemnestra delivers a powerful defence of her actions, including her murder of Agamemnon. She off ers Electra the opportunity to reply, granting her

‘freedom to speak’ ( parrh ê sia , 1049), the term used in Athens for the free and frank expression guaranteed to citizens in the democratic Assembly. Before responding, Electra says: ‘Remember, mother, . . . /
you gave me liberty to speak my mind’ ( parrh ê sia , 1055–56). Th e
repetition emphasizes the importance of speechmaking as a means of self- presentation and as the accepted mode of persuasion in Athenian political life. 5

As demonstrated in this exchange, Euripides has a tendency to
repeat words, sometimes as part of a dialogue, and sometimes to suggest connections between separate parts of the play. To take a small example, the word skula (‘spoils’) occurs three times in Electra . Both the Farmer and Clytemnestra refer to the spoils ( skula ) seized by the Greeks aft er the fall of Troy (6–7, 1000–1). But Orestes uses the word in a very diff erent way, when he presents the corpse of Aegisthus to Electra. He tells her to ‘treat him as you like. / Toss him out as scraps for the wild beasts, / or spit him on a stake as spoils ( skulon ) for the birds’ (896 –98).

If we catch the repetition, we may think of the ‘spoils’ from Troy more viscerally – the many dead bodies left on the battlefi eld savaged by wild animals. Or we may appreciate how greatly Orestes’ ‘conquest’ (killing Aegisthus at a sacrifi ce) diff ers from his father’s victory at Troy, fi lled with the spoils of war. Or we may feel horror at Orestes’ barbaric

68

Euripides: Electra
comparison of impaling a corpse to putting war booty on display, or leaving it out as carrion for vultures.

A more concentrated use of verbal repetition occurs when

Clytemnestra prepares to perform the purifi cation rituals aft er childbirth.

She says she will off er the sacrifi ces as a charin (1133) – a ‘gift ’, ‘favour’, or

‘service’ – for her daughter’s benefi t. She then plans to join Aegisthus at his sacrifi ce to the Nymphs, keen to do her husband that ‘service’ ( charin ,

1138). 6 Aft er Clytemnestra exits, Electra makes this vow: ‘You will become a bride in the house of Hades / to the man you slept with in life.

I will do you / this service ( charin ), and you will give me justice for my father’ (1144–46). Using the same word three times in thirteen lines, Euripides shift s its meaning from the gift Clytemnestra gives to Electra (performing the ritual), to the ‘gift of service’ (with sexual overtones) that she owes her husband, and fi nally to Electra’s gift in return, arranging for her mother’s union with Aegisthus in the underworld, the just reward for the murder of Agamemnon.

By rough count, Euripides repeats a form of a word within a line or two more than a hundred times in the play. 7 For example, Electra’s monody on returning from the spring (112–66) includes the following iterations: ‘Walk, I walk’ (twice); ‘Ah me, poor me’ (four times); ‘alas, alas’ (for her own fate); ‘Zeus, Zeus’ (invoking his help); ‘what city, what home?’ (Orestes’ exile); ‘ah, ah’ (before striking her head in grief);

‘bitter the axe, bitter the murder plot’ (that killed her father). As Electra trudges home with her jug now fi lled with water, her relentless litany reminds the gods and the elements how much she, her brother, and her dead father have suff ered.

At other times, verbal repetition brings out an ironic play on words.

Electra informs Orestes (as yet unrecognized), ‘I am married

( eg ê mamesth’ ), but a marriage ( gamon ) to death’ (247). She accuses her brother of being ‘a friend who is absent, not present’ ( ap ô n . . . ou par ô n , 245), with the suggestion that she is ‘absent a friend’. Orestes picks up the verbal play on presence and absence when he accepts the Farmer’s invitation ‘on behalf of your present guest and the non- present son of Agamemnon’ ( ho te par ô n ho t’ ou par ô n , 391). We know that Orestes is

Language

69
both of these characters, but we wonder if he will ever make his true presence known. Th
e double entendre continues when the Old Man
recognizes Orestes and joyfully tells Electra to praise the gods. She responds, ‘For something absent [that I don’t have] or something present [that I do have]?’ ( ti t ô n apont ô n ê ti t ô n ont ô n peri , 564). Her question underlines the distance between the man standing before her and the fearless Orestes of her imagination.

Sometimes the repeated words convey the counter- spin of fortune and justice. Th
e Messenger claims that Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus
returns ‘blood for blood’ ( haima d’ haimatos , 857). Th e Chorus agree:

‘He did terrible things, and terribly he paid for them’ ( epraxe deina, deina d’anted ô ke , 957). Electra piles up a similar pattern when she

‘prosecutes’ Clytemnestra, bringing full circle her mother’s claim that Agamemnon’s murder was just:

Why isn’t your husband exiled ( antipheugei ) instead of your son (
anti sou posis )?

Why hasn’t he died instead of me ( out’ ant’ emou )? He has killed me ( kteinas ), still living, twice as much as my dead sister [Iphigenia]. If murder for murder means justice ( phonon dikaz ô n phonos ), then I will kill you ( apokten ô ) myself. / . . . /

If what you did was just ( dikai’ ), then this, too, is just ( endika ).

1091–96

Confi dent that she has found the way to justice, Electra soon learns otherwise. Aft er the matricide, the Chorus share her dismay at what she has done: ‘Again and again ( palin palin ) your thoughts ( phron ê ma ) /
change with the wind. / Now you think ( phroneis ) in a purer way, but then / you thought otherwise ( phronousa ), doing a terrible thing / to your unwilling brother’ (1201–5). Th
e doubling of words reinforces the
to- and-fro nature of murder and regret that sets Euripides’ version of the story apart from those of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Th
e accumulation of verbal echoes also establishes motifs that
contribute to the play’s overall integrity and dramatic impact. Exile emerges as a major theme, starting with Aegisthus’s expulsion of Orestes

70

Euripides: Electra
from Argos and Electra’s removal from the palace to the Argive
countryside. Electra uses words based on
phuge (‘fl ight,’ ‘exile’) to
describe her own situation and that of her brother seven times, and forms of the verb ‘wander’ ( alateuein ) characterize his unanchored life another fi ve times. Orestes resists murdering Clytemnestra because he fears that matricide will drive him into exile again. Aft er the deed, he realizes he was right: ‘What other city can I go to? / What host, what god- fearing man / will dare look on me / since I killed my mother’

(1194–97).

Castor confi rms Orestes’ banishment from his native city: ‘You must leave ( eklip’ ) Argos behind. It is not for you / to walk the ground of this city, because you killed your mother’ (1250–51). 8 Although he will found a new city in Arcadia, separation from his sister and from his ancestral home weighs heavily on Orestes. He bids farewell to Electra:

‘robbed of your love, / now I must leave you and be left by you’ ( kai s’

apoleips ô sou leipomenos , 1309–10). She, too, must ‘leave’ ( leipei , 1312) Argos, although she departs with a new husband. Electra fi nds this cold comfort, for ‘what greater suff ering is there / than to leave ( ekleipein ) the borders of your native land?’ (1314–15)

Electra’s future union with Pylades marks the culmination of another important theme, marriage and its discontents. As noted above, Electra considers her union with the Farmer a ‘marriage to death’ (247), and in revenge she hopes to make Clytemnestra a ‘bride in the house of Hades’

(1144), sending her to join Aegisthus in the underworld. 9 Th
e fact that
their two corpses lie side by side onstage at the end of the play testifi es to Electra’s success, but with her mother’s blood on her hands she turns the issue back on herself: ‘What marriage awaits me? What husband will ever accept me / in his bridal bed?’ (1199–1200) Castor provides the answer – Pylades, who was present at the murders of both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.

Euripides roots the nuptial theme in the experience of his Athenian audience, referring to specifi c elements of their fi ft h- century wedding practice. Th
e Farmer mentions the famous ‘suitors’ ( mn ê st ê res , 21) who wished to marry Electra when she came of age, and we learn from

Language

71

Electra that her cousins Castor and Polydeuces were among those who

‘courted’ (
emn ê steuon , 313) her. In ancient Greece, the bride’s legal guardian arranged her marriage, setting up a contract ( ekdosis , ‘giving away’) with the groom. Electra explains that the Farmer ‘was not the man to whom my father expected to give me away’ ( ekd ô sein , 249). Her husband never consummated the marriage because he knew Aegisthus had no right to ‘give me away’ (
donta

, 259; also
dous

, 267). Th
at
authority lay with her brother Orestes, as her closest living male relative.

Castor restores this proper relationship at the end of the play, telling Orestes to ‘give away ( dos ) Electra to Pylades to take home as his wife’ (1249).

Speaking to her daughter, Clytemnestra describes her own betrothal:

‘My father Tyndareus did not give me away ( ed ô ke ) to your father / so that I or the children I bore would be killed’ (1018–19). By pretending he had arranged their daughter’s marriage to Achilles, Agamemnon lured Iphigenia to Aulis, where he sacrifi ced her so the ships could sail to Troy. 10 Ten years later, Agamemnon returned from the war with the prophetess Cassandra, ‘installing her in our bed / so that now there were two brides in the same house’ (1033–34). In defi ance, Clytemnestra acquires a new man, Aegisthus, whom she weds aft er they join forces to murder Agamemnon.

Electra calls this second marriage shameful and unholy, for

Clytemnestra won her ‘deceitful bedmate / . . . / with a two- edged sword’ (164–66). From that time on, the murderous couple ‘sleep together / in a bloodstained nuptial bed’ (211–12). Although he is dead, Electra berates Aegisthus for marrying Clytemnestra: ‘You went so far in your folly to think / that aft er you married my mother, she would stay true, / even though she adulterated the bed of my father’ (918–20).

Clytemnestra levels a similar charge at Menelaus for ‘marrying that whore Helen, / a wife he did not know how to control, / and one who betrayed him’ (1027–29).

Weddings and marital life play a particularly pernicious role in the house of Atreus, infamous for the troubled unions of Th
yestes and Aerope,

Aerope and Atreus, Menelaus and Helen, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,

72

Euripides: Electra
and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Euripides implicitly contrasts their various sexual infi delities with the marriage of Electra and the Farmer, where sex plays no role. Th
e mythic background (and Euripides’ addition
to it) adds a double edge to the Chorus’s opinion on the subject: ‘With regard to women and marriage, chance holds the cards. / Some mortals have good luck; others do not’ (1100–1).

A more public motif running through Electra centres around athletic competition, an important aspect of ancient Greek life. Panhellenic (‘all-Greek’) athletic festivals took place at Nemea, Isthmia, Olympia, and Delphi, and all but the fi rst are mentioned in the play. 11 Th
e victors
in each event won a garland – made of olive leaves at Olympia, pine at Isthmia, wild celery at Nemea, and laurel at the Pythian games in Delphi. On their return to their home cities, winning athletes were lauded with the choral performance of a victory ode (
epinikia )

commissioned in their honour. 12

References to athletics occur in almost all Greek tragedies, but they carry a particular relevance in those dealing with the house of Atreus.

Th
e father of Atreus and grandfather of Agamemnon was Pelops, who won a fateful chariot race to win his wife and kingdom. King Oenomaus set this competitive test for any suitor of his daughter Hippodamia –
victory in a chariot race against himself, or death. Th
e decapitated
heads of eighteen contenders for his daughter’s hand, mounted on the columns of his palace, provided fair warning.

13 Pelops bribed

Oenomaus’s charioteer to tamper with the royal chariot, causing it to crash and kill the king. 14 Winning the race and the princess, Pelops became the new ruler and founded the Olympic games in honour of his triumph. However, as punishment for his deceit, he suff ered a deadly curse on his descendants.

Although never referring directly to Pelops, Euripides weaves aspects of the story into Electra , applying racing and other athletic vocabulary to important dramatic moments. As noted above, Aegisthus holds his fatal sacrifi ce in the ‘the fi elds where he pastures his horses’ (623).

Orestes and Pylades pretend to be athletes from Th
essaly on their way
to the Olympic games (781–82), and Aegisthus invites them to join the

Language

73
proceedings, noting the talent of Th
essalians for breaking horses (815–

17). 15 We recall Electra’s less fl attering view of horse- loving Aegisthus, when she reviles him for ‘mounting my father’s chariot, and parading up and down’ (320), insulting Agamemnon’s memory by brandishing his sceptre as if it belonged to him.

Horses, chariots, and the Olympic games come together in an
associative nexus with other sports. 16 At Aegisthus’s invitation, Orestes fl ays the bull- calf ‘faster / than a runner could fi nish both legs of a hippodrome course’ (824 –25). When Orestes brings Aegisthus’s corpse back to his sister, she praises him ‘not for winning some pointless foot race / but for having killed our enemy’ (883–84). Mocking the dead Aegisthus, Electra observes that a criminal may think he’s got a head start, but he’d be wrong to think he has beaten justice ‘until he crosses the fi nish line / and completes life’s fi nal lap’ (955–56). Uncertain how Electra’s childbirth scheme will unfold, the Old Man impatiently tells her to ‘get past the turning post and bring us to last lap of your plot’

(659). Castor reminds Orestes that he must ‘run the full distance of a trial for murder’ (1264). Combative sports also enter the play, when Electra refers to Orestes’ training in a wrestling school (528) and imagines his encounter with Aegisthus as a culminating match: ‘If, outwrestled, you take a deadly fall, / I too will die’ (686–87).

Orestes boasts that he has come to ‘win the victor’s crown’

( stephanon , 614); aft er he slays Aegisthus, the palace slaves ‘crown his head’ ( stephousi . . . kara , 854) and celebrate. Arriving with the news of Orestes’ success, the Messenger addresses the Chorus: ‘O Mycenaean maidens, glorious in victory’ (
kallinikoi

, 761). Th
e term
kallinikos ,

‘beautiful

/
glorious victor’, occurs regularly in epinician odes that
celebrate victorious athletes, and the Chorus perform just such a song in praise of Orestes: ‘He has won the victor’s crown ( nikai stephanaphorian )

/ greater than those won by the banks of the Alpheus’ (862–63; the Alpheus river runs through Olympia). 17 Th e maidens continue their

‘song of glorious victory’ ( kallinikon , 865), and Electra promises to

‘crown (
steps ô

) the head of my brother who brings victory home

( nik ê phorou )’ (872).

74

Euripides: Electra

When Orestes enters, Electra continues where the Chorus left off : ‘O
glorious victor ( kallinike ), born of a father / who brought victory home ( nik ê phoron ) from Troy, / Orestes, accept this garland for the tresses of your hair’ (880–82). She off ers a similar crown to his loyal comrade:

‘Accept from my hand / this garland ( stephanon ), Pylades, / for you win a prize equal to his / in this contest’ (887–89). Th
e language of athletic
triumph and joyful homecoming sounds like verbal overkill, as if to camoufl age the fact that the ‘contest’ Orestes and Pylades won involved a brutal murder. Lest we forget the bloodshed, Euripides has the victors return with the body of Aegisthus, whose gruesome death the Messenger described only fi ft y lines before.

Blood and gore are no strangers to Greek tragedy, but its verbal presence in Electra merits our attention, providing a counterpoint to the ‘poetic colouring’ with which this chapter began. Ancient Greek has many ways to indicate violent death, and Euripides employs most of them in the play: ktein ô , meaning simply ‘to kill’; thu ô , ‘to sacrifi ce’

(usually used of a ritual off ering, thusia , of an animal to the gods); sphaz ô ,‘to slay or slaughter’ (with sacrifi cial undertones, linked to sphagis , a ‘sacrifi cial knife’); and phoneu ô ,‘to murder’ (linked to phon ê ,

‘bloodshed’). Forms of the generic verb ‘to kill’, ktein ô , occur over thirty times in

Electra

: Agamemnon kills Priam at Troy; Aegisthus kills

Agamemnon and wants to kill Orestes; Orestes kills Aegisthus;

Agamemnon kills Iphigenia; Clytemnestra kills her husband; Orestes kills Clytemnestra; and Ares kills Halirrhothius, which leads to the foundation of the homicide court in Athens.

Although this litany seems distressing enough, Euripides darkens his vocabulary in various ways. We see this in his depiction of animal sacrifi ce – referred to oft en in the play – the sine qua non of ancient Greek religion. Euripides uses the standard term for sacrifi ce, thu ô , for the ritual off erings at the Argive Heraion, Aegisthus’s sacrifi ce to the Nymphs, the off erings that Orestes makes to Olympian Zeus, and the sacrifi ce Clytemnestra will undertake as purifi cation rites aft er the birth of Electra’s child. As soon as Clytemnestra enters the cottage to perform the ritual, however, Electra applies the language of animal sacrifi ce to

Language

75
her mother: ‘You will off er up ( thuseis ) the kind of sacrifi ce ( thu ê ) that is fi tting to the gods’ (1141).

Tragedians oft en blur the distinction between animal sacrifi ce and human murder, 18 but Euripides is second to none in conveying the visceral details. Th
e Messenger’s account of Aegisthus’s murder

(discussed in Chapter 3) begins with a point- by-point description of an animal sacrifi ce, including preparation, death, fl aying, and disembowelment. Here Euripides prefers words related to
sphaz ô ,

‘to sacrifi ce’ with a sense of the ‘slaughter’ involved in the act. Aegisthus will ‘slaughter a bullock’ ( bousphagein , 627) for the Nymphs, using a

‘sacrifi cial knife’ ( sphagida , 811) to ‘slit its throat’ ( k’asphax’ , 813), and then catching the blood in the ‘ritual bowl’ ( sphageion , 800). Orestes uses similar language for his off ering of a lamb at Agamemnon’s tomb ( epesphaks’ , 92), and the Old Man sees evidence of this recent ‘sacrifi ce with shed blood ( sphagion . . . haima ) on the ground’ (514).

Accustomed to this ritual practice, the Greek audience would have felt nothing odd or disturbing in these accounts of animal sacrifi ce.

However, they may have raised an eyebrow when Electra laments the

‘slaughter’ ( sphagais , 124) of Agamemnon and mourns him as a ‘slain

[sacrifi cial] victim’ ( sphagiasm ô n , 200). Or when she plans to ‘shed the blood’ ( haim’ episphaxas’ , 281) of her mother, using a ‘sacrifi cial knife’

( sphagis , 1142). Th
reatening suicide if Orestes fails, Electra readies her
own ‘slaughter’ ( sphag ê n , 757) but stops when her brother returns in triumph with Aegisthus’s corpse, which they must hide from the woman they plan to ‘butcher’ (
sphag ê s , 961). Aft er Clytemnestra’s murder,

Electra and Orestes cover up the ‘wounds’ ( sphagas , 1228) they have infl icted on her body, the signs of ‘slaughter’ ( sphagas , 1243) that draw the Dioskouroi to Argos. Castor insists that neither brother nor sister are ‘polluted with this [sacrifi cial] bloodshed’ (
sphagiois , 1294),
although they must go into exile. Time and again, Euripides depicts the murders of Agamemnon, Aegisthus, and Clytemnestra in terms of a (perverted) sacrifi ce.

As we might expect, the normal word for ‘blood’ – haima – appears frequently in Electra , but Euripides prefers the word phonos (‘murder’,

76

Euripides: Electra

‘bloodshed’, ‘bloody’) which occurs in various forms some forty times in the play. Clytemnestra luxuriates ‘in her bloodstained bed’ ( lektrois phoniois , 211), and Aegisthus brandishes in his ‘bloodstained hands’

( miaiphonoisi chersi , 322) the sceptre of the king he killed. Th e Chorus
hope to see Clytemnestra’s ‘dark blood ( phonion . . . haima ) pouring /
from her neck, sliced by the sword’ (485–86). Orestes will pay back his

‘father’s murders with more murder’ (
phonon . . . phoneusi

, 89), a
sentiment echoed by Electra who claims that ‘murder for murder’

( phonon . . . phonos , 1094) makes for a just exchange. When Zeus sends a phantom of Helen to Troy, he does so to promote human ‘carnage’

( phonos , 1282).

Euripides uses several other words for bloodshed, but the ones we have looked at make the point. Electra overfl ows with the language of killing, bloodletting, sacrifi ce, butchery, slaughter, murder. On average, a word evoking the deed or its result occurs every ten lines. Although we see Clytemnestra walking to her death, and corpses appear onstage more than once, the violence and bloodshed in the play depend
primarily on Euripides’ language to focus the audience’s imagination.

In contrast to the accumulation of words and images linked to
bloodletting,

Electra
includes a range of aphoristic and proverbial
utterances dealing with day-
to-day life. Th
e Farmer confesses that

‘nobility is not worth much / without money to back it up’ (37–38). He says that those who second- guess his chastity ‘measure modesty / in a crooked scale’ (52–53). As a working man, he knows that ‘words to the gods can fi ll your mouth / but it’s work that fi lls your stomach’ (80–81).

He claims that ‘any woman worth her salt / can fi nd something in the pantry’ (422–23), while admitting that ‘money helps when you need it’

(427). Even so, he takes comfort in the fact that ‘rich or poor, / a man can only eat so much’ (430–31).

Aphorisms are not limited to the Farmer. Orestes thinks that ‘too much wisdom / can lead to folly’ (295–96). He knows from experience that ‘exiles are powerless’ (236), a phrase that his sister repeats verbatim (352). Electra enjoys ‘the pleasure that comes from too many tears’

(126). She believes that ‘a man who marries above his station / is

Language

77
trumped by his wife’ (936–37), and that ‘ill- gotten gains profi t little, /
but a noble nature lasts a lifetime’ (940–41). In her view, ‘the wife who fl aunts her beauty / is looking for trouble’ (1074–75). Taunting her mother, Electra claims that ‘bad behavior sets the standard for good /
and makes it shine even brighter’ (1084–85).

When Clytemnestra wonders why her daughter could fi nd no
midwife to help, Electra reminds her that ‘poverty has no friends’

(1131). Th
e Old Man shares the same observation with Orestes, having
learned that ‘No one loves you when you’re down and out’ (literally, ‘no one befriends you in misfortune’). He adds that ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’ (literally, ‘what a fi nd / when someone shares both good and bad with you’, 605–7). Th
e Chorus utter their own bit of proverbial
wisdom that supports a patriarchal view of marriage: ‘A wife should give way to her husband in all things’ (1052). At the end of the play, we may wonder if things will work out that way for Pylades, who takes Electra home as his new wife.

Explaining why Electra and Orestes can never return to their
homeland, Castor concludes gnomically, ‘common deeds make for a common fate’ (1305). 19 Th
at may be true, but it leaves unanswered the
moral questions around murder, matricide, and the purposeless
bloodshed of the Trojan War. Th
e platitudes and aphorisms remind us
that for all its mythic pedigree, Electra keeps its feet on the ground, and asks its readers and audience to do the same. Language provides that common ground, and close attention to the words is crucial for our understanding of how the play works, and what it is working towards.

78

6

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

As we have seen, Electra depends on a rich mixture of language –
rhetorical, poetic, imagistic, descriptive, proverbial. Like all live theatre, Greek tragedy also had an essential material aspect: the physical space where the performance took place (the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, discussed in Chapter 1); the setting for each tragedy; the actors whose costumes, gestures, and movement helped bring their characters to life; and the props they used to tell the story.

Electra
takes place on a rural farm in the Argive countryside,
understood as overlooking the Inachus river valley, isolated, atop a steep hill. Th
e hut is described as dirty, shack- like, with soot- covered
walls, lacking a well- stocked larder. Perhaps the set decoration made some of this visible, but the performance schedule at the City Dionysia prohibited complicated set changes. 1 As a result, we cannot tell how literally or realistically the scenic backdrop suggested the play’s setting.

Euripides takes great pains to establish the rural location of the play through verbal description, and also through the physicality of the actors.

Shortly before dawn, the Farmer prepares for his morning labours, including spring ploughing with his oxen. A stream fl ows nearby, where Electra goes to fetch water with her jug. Th
e house seems remote, albeit
within walking distance of Agamemnon’s tomb, the Tutor’s dwelling near the Tanaus river and Spartan territory, and the horse pastures where Aegisthus holds his sacrifi ce to the Nymphs. 2 Now a shepherd, the old Tutor complains of the diffi
cult ascent to the cottage, bent over
double, his legs tottering. Electra earlier refers to her ‘exile on this mountain crag’ ( El . 210), indicating its steep isolation.

Refl ecting the environment of the play, characters emphasize
movement, walking, taking steps (oft en diffi
cult ones) towards a

79

80

Euripides: Electra
destination. 3 On her return from the stream, Electra issues a set of self-exhortations: ‘Hasten your step, walk, keep moving’ (112–13, 127–28).

At the sight of strange men, she tells the Chorus ‘Flee down the track, and I’ll run to the house / and we’ll escape these criminals on foot’

(218–19). Orestes races from his hiding place to cut his sister off . 4 Th
e

Old Man tries to prove to Electra that her brother has returned, telling her to visit Agamemnon’s tomb and ‘step into his footprint, and see whether the tread of his boot / aligns with your foot’ (532 –33). When the two strangers emerge from the cottage to meet the Old Man, they

‘step out with nimble feet’ (549), 5 eager to return to the open air. Th at
eagerness fades when Agamemnon’s Tutor begins to scrutinize Orestes, and the young man asks with trepidation, ‘Why are his feet circling around me?’ (561).

Following the long- delayed recognition scene, Orestes and his party leave to kill Aegisthus, their journey described by the Messenger: ‘Aft er we took our feet from this dwelling, stepping / onto a wagon track wide enough for two carts, / we made our way to where the new lord of Mycenae / happened to be standing in a well- watered garden’ (774–77).

At the end of the play, departure from Argos involves everyone but the Chorus. Castor reminds Orestes that ‘there is no city / you can walk in’

(1250–1) until ‘you move your feet . . . / and make your way’ to Athens (1288–89). On the way, ‘the Furies will track you, their footsteps like terror’ (1344). Th
e Farmer, too, must abandon his land and cottage, for

Pylades and Electra will take him to their new home in Phocis. Aft er the Chorus exit (customary at the end of a tragic performance), only the dead bodies of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra remain.

References to bodily exertion, manual labour, and physical contact help create the sense of a rural world. Th
e word for hand ( cheir ) is
uttered over twenty- fi ve times in the play, and Euripides oft en calls attention to his characters’ handiwork: Electra carries her jug of water; the Tutor arrives with an armful of food; 6 Orestes’ party returns with Aegisthus’s corpse; they later take it into the cottage to hide it from Clytemnestra; Electra crowns her brother and Pylades with garlands, and she off ers Clytemnestra her hand when she steps down from the

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

81
wagon. 7 Appealing to her unnamed guest, Electra merges language with her own body: ‘Take this message to Orestes: / . . . the voices are many: / my hands, my tongue, my broken heart, / my razor- slashed hair . . .’ (332 –35). 8 Mirroring the embrace that brings their recognition scene to a close, Electra and Orestes cling to one another at the end of the play, their fi nal contact before separation and exile.

Moving from bodies and their gestural life to costume,

Electra
explores the problem we all experience trying to ‘read’ other people by what they show of themselves on the surface. On fi rst seeing his sister, Orestes mistakes her for a slave girl, completely misled by her appearance.

Complaining that she lacks proper attire, Electra refuses to attend the festival of Hera, but she rejects the Chorus’s off er to lend her a dress and jewellery. 9 She explains to the stranger, ‘Stabled in these clothes / and covered with dirt, / . . . / I must make the garments myself, toiling at the loom, / or else go naked’ (304–8). 10 When the Old Tutor wipes his tears on his own ‘tattered robes’ (501), Electra wonders if he weeps at her own appearance. 11 On seeing her daughter, Clytemnestra comments on how

‘unwashed and poorly clothed’ (1107) she looks aft er giving birth.

At the other end of the spectrum, Orestes declares that Clytemnestra

‘shines with fi nery’ (966) when she approaches the cottage, accompanied by her Trojan slaves. 12 With chilling irony Electra warns her mother to take care on entering the cottage, lest ‘the sooty walls stain your dress’

( peplous , 1140), the same dress ( pepl ô n , 1206) that Clytemnestra rips open when she begs her children for mercy. Th
e diff erence between
robes and rags, between clean garments and fi lthy ones, ceases to matter when both are covered with blood.

Orestes’ costume also draws the attention of others. Returning from the fi elds, the Farmer thinks that the strange men talking to his wife must be city- folk, an indication that Orestes and Pylades are dressed distinctively. Th
e Tutor concludes the same thing when he fi rst sees the
young men – ‘Th
ey appear to be gentlemen ( eugeneis , literally “well-born”), but they could prove counterfeit’ (550). We know Orestes has returned in disguise, and his clothing – while revealing his status –
helps to mask his true identity.

82

Euripides: Electra

In order to infi ltrate Aegisthus’s banquet, Orestes and Pylades pretend to be Th
essalian athletes heading for the Olympic games. Asked
by his host to fl ay the sacrifi ced bull, Orestes removes the ‘gorgeous cloak’ (820) from his shoulders and gets down to work. Th
is presumably
is the same ‘cloak that he draws’ ( epibal ô n phar ê , 1221) over his eyes when he kills Clytemnestra, and that he and Electra use to ‘draw over’

( pharea tad’ amphiballomen

, 1231) their mother’s corpse aft er the
murder. 13 Operating as visual shorthand, Orestes’ costume helps us track his transformation from cautious prevaricator to bloodstained matricide.

‘Wreaths’ or ‘garlands’ ( stephanoi ) serve as a signifi cant stage prop in the play. Clytemnestra did not welcome home the triumphant

Agamemnon with ‘victory garlands’ (
stephanois

, 163), but Orestes
returns to Argos in the hope of gaining a ‘victor’s wreath’ ( stephanos , 614) when he kills his father’s murderers. Actual garlands come into play with the arrival of the Tutor, who brings ‘festive wreaths’

( stephanous , 496) along with food and wine to welcome the guests. But the recognition of Orestes intervenes, and no meal eventuates. One might say that Aegisthus’s feast takes its place, for Orestes and his party fi nd the tyrant ‘plucking tender myrtle leaves as a woven garland for his head’ (778), part of the festivities he invites the strangers to join. 14

Aft er Aegisthus’s murder, the Messenger describes how the older slaves recognize Orestes and ‘crown his head with garlands’ ( stephousi . . .

kara , 854), anticipating the onstage ceremony that Electra prepares for her brother and Pylades, discussed in Chapter 5. When Orestes returns aft er his triumph, he may still be wearing the garlands he received aft er the murder. Would Electra remove them before garlanding her brother a second time? Or was Orestes ‘double- crowned’, a kind of visual overkill that mocks the ostensible glory of his triumph? 15

Unlike ceremonies for athletic victors, the celebration of Orestes’

triumph includes the losers as well as the winners, for he and his crew bring Aegisthus’s corpse back with them. Electra’s epinician praise for the victors then gives way to its rhetorical opposite, her malediction directed at a fatally defeated opponent. 16 Th
e ritual garlands worn by all

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

83
three men – remember that Aegisthus wreathed his head with myrtle fronds for the banquet – conjoin athletic victory and bloodshed, heroic celebration and insults over a corpse.

Stage props tend towards the minimal in Greek tragedy, although they can prove essential to the plot, as we fi nd in Sophocles’ Philoctetes (the bow), his Electra (Orestes’ funeral urn), and his Women of Trachis (the poisoned robe). Props of a more mundane nature appear in

Euripides’ Electra , perhaps more of them than in any other tragedy. As noted above, almost every character brings something on when making their entrance – a jug, a sword, food and drink, a corpse. When Electra returns with water from the spring, she tells herself to put the jug down so she can better lament her dead father. Th
e day- to-day realities of farm
life literally get in the way of the heroic suff ering to which she aspires.

When the old Tutor arrives from his farm, he brings food and
supplies and the aforementioned garlands: cheese, wine (in a wine skin,

Fig. 4 Elektra (Irene Pappas) and Chorus, from Elektra (1962), directed by

Michael Cacoyannis. Courtesy of the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation.

84

Euripides: Electra
indicated at 511), and a lamb. In no other tragedy does an animal specifi cally meant for food appear on stage. Th
e presence of a lamb – as
well as wine and cheese – seems more at home in a comedy of Aristophanes. 17 However, Euripides cleverly weaves sheep and lambs into the fabric of the drama. Th
e Tutor describes the remains of a black
lamb sacrifi ced at Agamemnon’s tomb, evidence of Orestes’ return.

Euripides then introduces a magical lamb into the story when the Chorus sing of the golden lamb stolen by Th
yestes. Possessing this
animal prodigy enables him to seize power from his brother Atreus, an event of such gravity that the gods change the course of the sun. Th e
onstage presence of the Tutor’s lamb – meant to be slaughtered and eaten, but forgotten in the rush to murder – sets the table for the Chorus’s lyric evocation of the magic lamb of myth. 18

In the original production at the City Dionysia, Clytemnestra
entered the orchestra (along with her attendants and Trojan slaves) on a horse- drawn wagon. Aegisthus holds his feast for the Nymphs in the meadows where he pastures horses, and Clytemnestra plans to travel to meet him aft er she helps Electra. Earlier the Chorus sing of the horses engraved on Achilles’ sword hilt, kicking up dust as they race by, evoking the dragging of Hector’s corpse around the walls of Troy. With Clytemnestra’s arrival, the ancient audience saw live horses bringing the Queen to her death. 19 In her last onstage act, Clytemnestra instructs her slaves to take the horses out to graze and return when she has completed the birth ritual (1135–36). Euripides’ audience watched the horses and wagon led out of the theatre, to wait in vain for their regal passenger.

One other stage prop demands our attention – Orestes’ sword. We know he arrives on stage armed, for Electra indicates as much when she fl ees from him: ‘Why, with sword drawn, were you waiting in ambush near my house?’ (225). We presume Orestes used the weapon to
sacrifi ce the sheep at his father’s grave (92), and that he plans to kill Aegisthus with it. However, Euripides surprises us with some cleverly dramatic ‘misdirection’. In place of the sword, Aegisthus gives his new guest a ‘well- hammered Doric knife’ (819) to display his skill, and Orestes fl ays the sacrifi ced calf with panache, leading us to believe he

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

85
then will use the knife as the murder weapon. But Orestes asks for ‘a Phthian cleaver instead of this Doric blade’ (836) to split the beast’s breastbone, which he does, and then uses the same butcher’s tool to smash Aegisthus’s backbone. 20 Only aft er the murder do Orestes and Pylades draw their swords to protect themselves, until someone
recognizes Agamemnon’s son, and jubilation replaces confrontation.

In terms of shedding human blood, Euripides saves Orestes’ sword for Clytemnestra. At fi rst his mother’s desperate plea stops Orestes in his tracks: ‘My hands had to drop the weapon’ (1217). But he steels himself, covering his eyes with his cloak, and then ‘I sacrifi ced my mother, / driving my sword into her neck’ (1222–23). Th
e prop we have
seen from Orestes’ fi rst entrance fi nally does what it was meant to do.

But by this time, he – and many in the audience – wishes his sword had not fulfi lled its ‘destiny’.

Although not normally considered props, two corpses appear on
stage, those of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. We don’t know how the ancient theatre represented a corpse, but the tragedians probably used a dummy or a mute actor, dressed in the costume and mask of the character who had been killed. Because Aegisthus never appears alive onstage, the look of his corpse (if any features were visible) was not pre-determined. As noted above, the servants of Orestes and Pylades bring what’s left of Aegisthus into the theatre via an eisodos . Th e arrival of a
body from off stage occurs frequently in tragedy, usually followed by a mourning scene over the dead. Only in Euripides’ Electra is a corpse brought onstage from outside the theatre (i.e. not displayed on the ekkukl ê ma ) for the specifi c purpose of abusing it. Orestes encourages his sister ‘to outrage the corpse’ ( nekrous hubrizen , 902), exposing it to the ravages of dogs and birds. 21 Following Electra’s diatribe, Orestes orders the body removed to the cottage in order to hide it from their mother. Aft er the matricide, the corpse appears once again, this time on the ekkukl ê ma with that of Clytemnestra. 22

Th
e Messenger announces to Electra that her brother ‘comes / to show you something, not the head ( kara ) of the Gorgon, / but Aegisthus, whom you hate’ (855–57). Th
ese lines refer to Perseus’s beheading

86

Euripides: Electra
of the gorgon Medusa, one of the foundation myths of the city of Argos. With that story in mind, many scholars believe that Orestes has decapitated Aegisthus, bringing both the head and the corpse onstage. 23

Th
e idea that Electra addresses much of her speech to Aegisthus’s head (however it was represented) brings together several elements in the play that otherwise seem puzzling, and does so to great dramatic eff ect.

To understand why this scenario makes sense, we need to look briefl y at the Perseus myth. When an oracle informs Acrisius, an early king of Argos, that his daughter Danae will bear a son who will kill him, Acrisius locks her up in a bronze chamber (open to the sky so she can breathe) to ensure she never has a child. Enamoured of her beauty, Zeus impregnates Danae with a shower of gold from above, and she gives birth to Perseus. Once he has grown, Perseus is sent on an impossible mission to kill the gorgon Medusa, who turns to stone anyone whose gaze meets hers. 24 With the help of Athena and Hermes, and the use of either a mirror or refl ective shield to avoid direct eye contact, Perseus decapitates Medusa. In thanks for the goddess’s assistance, he gives the head to Athena, who incorporates it as an apotropaic device on her goat- haired breastplate (or shield) known as the aegis . At the moment of her decapitation, Medusa’s blood spontaneously generates a winged horse (Pegasus), which the hero Bellerophon rides in his quest to kill another monster, the tri- formed Chimaera, who has a lion’s head, the body of a goat, and serpent’s tail.

Th
e story found its way into many tragedies, all of them lost.

Aeschylus produced a tetralogy on the Perseus myth; Sophocles’ wrote three plays based on the legend; Euripides’

Danae
deals with her
impregnation, and his Dictys seems to have dealt with Danae’s fate when Perseus leaves to pursue the gorgon. 25 Sophocles and Euripides each wrote an Andromeda , dealing with Perseus’s post- gorgon adventure in which he saves the Ethiopian princess Andromeda from a sea-monster. 26 Both of these plays seem to have culminated in the conversion into constellations of Perseus, Andromeda, her father Cepheus, her mother Cassiopeia, and the sea-monster Cetus, much like the
transformation of Castor and Polydeuces into the twin stars of Gemini.

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

87

References to Perseus and his story occur throughout Electra . 27 In the fi rst stasimon he is on the rim of Achilles’ shield, holding ‘the head of the Gorgon’ (

El

. 460). Th
e Chorus describe Achilles’ breastplate, which
depicts the Chimaera fl eeing Bellerophon, who rides on ‘the winged horse Pegasus’ (475), born from the blood that fl owed from Medusa’s severed head. Following the matricide, Orestes wonders ‘Who . . . / will dare look on my face’ ( kara , literally ‘head’, 1195–96), as if he had become gorgon- like himself. 28 Orestes had to cover his eyes before driving his sword through his mother’s neck (1221–23), reminding us again of the beheading of Medusa. Just as she earlier helped Perseus, Athena will protect Orestes from the Furies by holding her gorgon shield (the aforementioned aegis ) over his head ( kara , 1257). Th e presence of so
many strands of the Perseus myth supports the view that Orestes has decapitated Aegisthus.

Other Greek tragedies refer to the beheading and dismemberment
of corpses. Th
e Egyptian herald threatens to cut off the Danaids’ heads
in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women (836–40). 29 Assailing the Furies in Eumenides , Apollo claims they only belong where decapitation and mutilation serve as punishment (A. Eum . 186–90). In Sophocles’ Ajax , Tecmessa describes how Ajax mutilated livestock and decapitated a ram; later the deranged hero appears on the ekkukl ê ma surrounded by the bloody carcasses (S. Aj . 235–44, 346–47).

Euripides specializes in this kind of brutality: in Hecuba the blinded Polymnestor wants to tear the Trojan Queen to pieces and gorge on her fl esh (Eur. Hec . 1070–74); the one- eyed protagonist dashes out the brains of one of Odysseus’s crew in the satyr play Cyclops (400–4); swinging his mace against the Th
ebans, Th
eseus ‘snaps off necks, / harvesting a crop
of helmeted heads’ in Suppliant Women ( Supp . 716–17); the protagonist in Heracles vows to decapitate the tyrant Lycus and throw his head to the dogs (Eur. HF 567–68). Th
is method of execution also recalls the story
of Pelops, discussed in Chapter 5, where Oenomaus affi
xed the heads of
the defeated suitors to the columns in his palace.

Th
e most famous beheading in tragedy occurs in Euripides’ Bacchae .

Th
e Th
eban king Pentheus threatens to decapitate the Lydian stranger

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Euripides: Electra

(Eur. Ba . 241), and then suff ers that punishment himself (1125–43). His mother Agave returns from the mountain with the impaled head of her son, represented by the mask worn by the actor who played Pentheus –
the very actor who now plays his mother. 30 Agave thinks she holds the head of a lion, until her father brings her to her senses, and together they try to arrange the scattered bits of Pentheus for burial (Eur. Ba 1168–1300). Th
e beheading of Aegisthus’s corpse in Electra lies well within Euripides’ repertoire.

Aegisthus’s decapitation off ers clear advantages for staging the scene in the theatre of Dionysus. Unlike most monologues in tragedy, Electra’s tirade is aimed at the face of the man she hates: ‘I never stopped rehearsing what I wanted to say to your face’ ( kat’ omma son , literally

‘into your eyes’, El . 910). 31 Assailing him as seducer of her mother and murderer of her father, Electra directs her venom at Aegisthus’s

Fig. 5 Electra (Roxanne Hart) with the head of Aegisthus, Chorus members,
from the 1973 Th
eatre Intime production of Electra , translated and directed
by Rush Rehm. Photograph: John Coventry.

Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

89
appearance: ‘You, with your good looks! But I prefer a husband / who doesn’t have girlish features, but looks like a man’ (948–49). 32 Although tragic acting was not realistic in our sense of the term, we can imagine the diffi
culty for the actor in a large, open- air theatre, with most of the audience sitting above him, having to speak to Aegisthus’s corpse as it lies on the ground. It would be far more eff ective to have a graspable object for Electra to address, much as Agave holds the mask (‘head’) of her son in Bacchae .

Th
roughout

Electra , Euripides calls attention to a character’s face, neck, hair, and head. When the Messenger returns to the stage, he expresses surprise that Electra does not recognize his face ( pros ô pou , 768) from before, when he appeared as a (silent) servant of Orestes. For her part, Electra accuses her mother of tarting herself up for other men,

‘showing your prettifi ed / face ( pros ô pon ) in public’ (1074–75). 33 Th e

Chorus imagine Clytemnestra’s death: ‘One day I will see the bloody gore below her neck / pouring down to the ground from the sword’s blow’ (485–86). Th
e actual murder takes this form, for Orestes drives
his sword through his mother’s neck (1222–23). Th
e garlanding of

Orestes, Pylades, and Aegisthus directs attention to the crown of the head ( kara , 778, 854; krata , 872, 874) and the hair ( kom ê s , 870–71, 882).

Electra threatens to commit suicide by striking her head ( kara , 688) with a sword if her brother fails to kill Aegisthus. 34 Time and again Electra talks about her hair, razor- cropped and fi lthy, in contrast to Clytemnestra’s groomed, blond tresses. Orestes leaves a lock of his hair at Agamemnon’s tomb, which the Tutor unsuccessfully hopes to match with Electra’s. Th
e snake-
haired monster Medusa, whom Perseus
decapitates, fi ts into this scenario, indirectly supporting the view that Electra addresses the head of her hated nemesis.

Unlike the face of Medusa that petrifi es the onlooker, that of Aegisthus provides a focal point for Electra to direct her anger. Aft er speaking to Aegisthus’s head, she might return it to the corpse with her dismissive ‘To hell with you’ (literally, ‘Away with you’, 952). Her closing lines bring us back to images of movement, footwork, and physical exertion with which we began this chapter: ‘Let no criminal think that

90

Euripides: Electra
because he runs / his fi rst steps in the race well, he can gain / a victory over Justice. Wait till he reaches / the fi nish line . . .’ (953–56). Addressed to a man whose backbone has been smashed, Electra’s vision of

Aegisthus reaching a fi nish line seems bizarre in the extreme.

We have examined the attention that Euripides pays to important visible and physical aspects of his story, interweaving setting, props, costumes, and the performers’ bodies with the language of the play. In the next chapter, we will explore a set of related themes arising from this combination, focusing on the representation of gender and sex, children and childbirth.

7

Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles

Maleness, Mothers and Off spring

In his prologue, the Farmer informs the audience that the murdered Agamemnon left behind ‘a male ( arsena ) and female ( th ê lu ) shoot’

( El

. 15), namely Orestes and Electra.

1

By highlighting the gender
diff erences, the Farmer introduces an important theme that runs through the play. As Agamemnon’s son, Orestes is the legitimate ruler in Argos and the likely avenger of his father’s murder. He poses an immediate threat to Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Electra, on the other hand, presents a longer- term problem – as Agamemnon’s daughter, she one day might bear male off spring who would inherit the throne, should her brother perish. Once Electra is married off to the Farmer, that problem vanishes. 2

Th
e ancient Greeks viewed marriage as the fulfi lment to which all girls aspire, assuming the roles of bride, wife, and mother. 3 Tragedy off ers many examples of doomed ing é nues lamenting the fact that they will die unmarried: the title characters in Sophocles’ Antigone (810–15), and in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (1343, 1399) and Iphigenia among the Taurians (856–58); Electra and Chrysothemis in Sophocles’ Electra (187–90); Polyxena in Euripides’ Hecuba (416) and Macaria in Children of Heracles (579–80). Mothers and fathers in tragedy worry about the marital prospects of their daughters. Th
e blind Oedipus asks Creon to
oversee his young daughters’ future marriages near the end of Sophocles’

Oedipus Tyrannus (1492–1510). As the guardian of his sister Antigone, Eteocles re- affi
rms her betrothal to Haimon in Euripides’ Phoenician

Women (757–60), and Helen expresses dismay that Hermione remains unwedded back in Sparta in Helen (283–84, 688–90, 933).

91

92

Euripides: Electra

In Electra , Euripides works a perverse variation on concerns over an unmarried daughter. Th
e marriage arranged for Electra represents the
opposite of a good match, but it serves Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s purposes. Unbeknownst to them, Electra’s husband respects his wife’s royal lineage, and she remains a virgin. Even if that arrangement were to change, any off spring that might result would not threaten Aegisthus’s rule.

In spite of the unorthodox nature of their union, Electra and the Farmer adopt surprisingly conventional gender roles, but with the occasional twist one associates with domestic comedy. Aft er complaining to the heavens of the demeaning menial labour forced upon her, Electra rejects her husband’s off er to help and insists that she’s keen to be a good wife and take care of the household chores. When he sees Electra talking to strange men, the Farmer suspects impropriety, a sign of his traditional social values. He quickly reverses himself when he learns that the strangers come from Orestes, and he invites them into his poor cottage.

His generosity angers Electra, who berates him for forgetting the superior status of their visitors. Th
e Farmer asserts a last vestige of male
authority, telling Electra to fi nd something for the guests to eat. He then follows her orders and leaves to get the old shepherd, who can provide decent provisions. Gender roles fl ip back and forth, in humorous, and sometimes unsettling, ways.

While acknowledging her husband’s kindness to her, Electra has no doubt about what constitutes real virility and male courage, especially as it concerns her brother. She chastises the Old Man for implying that Orestes might return in secret, out of fear. She wonders how he could think that the hair of her brother, raised in the manly environment of wrestling schools, could resemble her own, all combed and ‘feminine’

( th ê lus , 529), the same word used by the Farmer in the prologue. When the Old Man suggests that her footprint might resemble the one left at Agamemnon’s tomb, Electra reminds him that ‘the feet of siblings are not equal, when one is a boy ( andros ) / and the other a girl ( gunaikos ): the male ( ars ê n ) is larger’ (536–37). We may fi nd nothing peculiar in Electra’s emphasis on how genders diff er, but the fact that she returns to

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93
the subject in her speech to Aegisthus’s corpse suggests that more is going on. 4

Electra disparages the dead man for not being a bona fi de male, and extends her disgust to his off spring:

You would hear this from all the Argives: ‘Th
is one
belongs to his wife ( gunaikos ), and not his wife ( gun ê ) to her husband ( andros )’.

What a disgrace to allow the woman ( gunaika ), not the man ( andra ), to stand as the head of the house’. 5 I hate any child who is known throughout the city not by virtue
of his male father ( arsenos patros ) but of his mother ( m ê tros ).

930–35 6

Th
e ‘pretty- boy looks’ of Aegisthus represent the opposite of what Electra wants in a man, especially one who might father her sons: ‘No girly- faced ( parthen ô pos ) husband for me; / I want one who is manly ( andreiou ) in his looks. / For the children of such men are masters of warfare, / but the pretty sort are only fi t to deck out a chorus’ (948–51). 7

We sense Electra’s prurient interest in the man she hates, as if she once had thought of Aegisthus as a possible husband, only to reject him because he is dominated by a woman, and looks like one. 8

Electra berates the dead man for trusting his wife, hinting that Clytemnestra may have cheated on him ( El . 921–24). She also accuses Aegisthus of seducing other women, but then refuses to elaborate: ‘It’s not a fi tting subject for / a virgin’ ( parthen ô i , 945 –46). In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon , Clytemnestra levels similar charges against Agamemnon for his infi delities – ‘such a soothing lover for so many Trojan girls’, she says, including Cassandra, ‘the woman he raped’ (A. Ag . 1438–39).

Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra extends that accusation to Cassandra herself, cruelly suggesting that this captive slave girl encouraged Greek soldiers to abuse her: ‘She shared his nights, / and the rowing benches with the sailors, / rubbing their “masts” ’ (A. Ag . 1441–43). A prurient interest in the sexual past of their victims seems to characterize both Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Electra. 9

94

Euripides: Electra

Like many tragic heroines, including her mother, Electra transgresses conventional gender norms. Clytemnestra reminds her daughter, ‘You always loved your father – it’s in your nature. / So it goes: some children are on the male side ( arsen ô n ) side; / others love their mothers more than their fathers’ (Eur. El . 1102–4). 10 Electra does more than favour the male, however; she behaves like one. Assuming the task traditionally performed by Orestes, she concocts the plan to kill Clytemnestra: ‘Let me handle my mother’s murder’ (647). 11 At the crucial moment she takes hold of the sword along with her brother, and together they kill their mother. No other version of the murder of Clytemnestra has Electra share in the actual bloodshed.

As a married virgin, a young woman permanently stuck in the
liminal state between maiden and wife, Electra represents an anomaly in the clearly structured social world of the Greeks. Th
e ambiguity of
her social and sexual identity helps explain her refusal to ‘join in the chorus / of young brides of Argos’ at Hera’s festival ( El . 178–79). 12 Once the princes of Greece had sought her hand in marriage; now she fi nds herself trapped in a sexless marriage to a farmer. With a touch of irony, the Farmer calls on Aphrodite – the goddess of erotic love – to vouch for his wife’s purity and his own sexual restraint: ‘She is still a virgin’

( parthenos , 44). Orestes, however, assumes the normal state for his wedded sister: ‘Th
ey say that she is yoked / in marriage, that she’s no
longer a virgin’ (
parthenon

, 98–99). Electra sets him straight: ‘My
husband has never touched me in bed’ (255).

In Xanthus’s lost Oresteia (mentioned in Chapter 3), the seventh-century poet claims that the name ‘Electra’ ( Ê lektra ) arose from a play on the word lektron ,‘(marriage) bed’. Th
e initial ê ta (‘ ê ’ ) negates the noun
that follows, a construction familiar in English in words like ‘amoral’,

‘asexual’, ‘ahistorical’. 13 For the Greek audience, Electra’s name carried with it the secondary meaning ‘with no marriage bed’, ‘un-bedded’,

‘without sex’. Acknowledging her condition, Electra says that the citizens call her the ‘wretched bed- less one [Electra]’ ( athlian Ê lektran , 119).

Euripides introduces a darker aspect of male- female sexual relations with the word hubris . Frequently translated ‘pride’, hubris carried a more

Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles

95
visceral punch in fi ft h- century Athens: ‘an outrage against another’,

‘physical violence against someone’, ‘assault’, ‘rape’. 14 Th
e Farmer’s sense
of honour and social rank prevents him from ‘committing an outrage against’ (i.e. ‘raping’, hubrizein , 46) his wife. Electra praises her husband for ‘never taking advantage of me physically’ ( enubrisas , 68). On the other hand, she accuses Aegisthus of ‘outrage’ ( hubrin ) against her (58, repeated by Orestes at 266), and of ‘violating’ ( hubrizes ) other women (945–48). Afraid that Orestes might fail to slay Aegisthus, Electra vows to kill herself before her enemies ‘utterly violate ( kathubrisai ) my body’

(698). 15 Electra’s fear of rape refl ects real danger in a misogynist world, but it also underlines a deep sexual insecurity arising from her abnormal status as a virgin wife.

In contrast to her daughter, Clytemnestra in Electra is ‘oversexed’, and her carnal ties to Aegisthus emerge as a prominent reason for her children’s hatred. Orestes wants to punish his mother ‘for sharing an unholy marriage ( koin ô non anosi ô n gam ô n ) with him’ (600). Electra picks up the phrase in her invective over Aegisthus’s corpse: ‘You knew what kind of unholy marriage union ( anosion g ê mas gamon ) you made’

(926). 16

She accuses her mother of tarting herself up as soon as Agamemnon left for Troy, hoping to attract male attention. Appalled that she ‘lives in sexual union with another / in her bloodstained marriage bed’ ( lektrois phoniois , 211–12), Electra cannot forgive her for having ‘dishonored the bed ( lech ê ) of my father’ (920). Th e Chorus also
condemn Clytemnestra’s ‘adulterous bed’ ( sa lechea , 481), the ‘errant marriage bed’ ( didromou lechous , 1156) that cost Agamemnon his life.

Speaking to Electra, the Messenger refers dismissively to Aegisthus as

‘your mother’s bedmate’ ( m ê tros eunet ê s , 803). Electra picks up the term when she predicts what lies ahead for Clytemnestra: ‘Soon you will be the bride in Hades’ house / of the man you slept with ( xun ê udes ) in the light’ (1144–45). 17 She does not mean Agamemnon.

Electra compares her mother’s promiscuity to that of her sister Helen, the Greek exemplar of failed female virtue. Clytemnestra herself depicts Helen as a shameless whore who ran off with Paris and betrayed her husband Menelaus, causing the death of countless Greeks and

96

Euripides: Electra

Trojans. 18 But as Clytemnestra well knows, promiscuity goes two ways.

She recalls Agamemnon’s infi delities at Troy, particularly his decision to bring home his war- prize Cassandra and introduce her to their marriage bed in Argos. 19

. . . So there were two brides
in the same house, at the same time.

Now women can be wayward fools, I won’t deny it.

But when a husband wanders off
and rejects his marriage bed, his wife may want
to follow his example and acquire a new lover.

Yet all the blame falls on us women,
while men, who set it off , hear nothing said against them.

Eur. El. 1033–40

Euripides treats Clytemnestra far more sympathetically than Aeschylus or Sophocles, and her account of the double standard rings true.

Passages such as this one give the lie to the claim that Euripides lacked sympathy for the situation of women in his society. 20

Marital infi delity runs deep in the house of Atreus. In the second stasimon , the Chorus condemn the sexual misconduct of the previous generation, when Th
yestes seduced Aerope, the wife of his brother

Atreus, and seized the golden lamb. Although Euripides does not describe the aft ermath, his audience knew that Atreus took revenge by tricking Th
yestes into feasting on the fl esh of his own children

(described in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon , 1583–1602). Recognizing the horror, Th
yestes curses Atreus, and the consequences fall on Atreus’s
son Agamemnon. Aegisthus, the only child of Th
yestes to survive,
avenges his father by imitating his sexual transgression. He becomes Clytemnestra’s lover, and together they assassinate Agamemnon.

Aegisthus looks to secure his dynastic rule by producing a brood of children with his new wife and queen.

Aeschylus makes no mention of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra’s
off spring, but Sophocles’ Electra assails her mother for bearing the usurper’s children (S. El. 585–89). Euripides’ Electra goes even further, for the children of her mother and Aegisthus rob her and Orestes of

Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles

97
their rightful inheritance: ‘Th
e accursed daughter of Tyndareus, my
mother, / has driven me out of my house to gratify her husband. /

Begetting new children with Aegisthus, she pushes Orestes / and me aside, inherit- less subordinates in our own home’ (Eur. El . 60–63).

On hearing that Aegisthus sacrifi ces to the Nymphs, Orestes asks, ‘Is it for nurturing existing children, or is another child on the way?’ (626).

Th
e Nymphs in question are probably the Inachides, daughters of

Inachus, the river that the Farmer mentions in the fi rst line of the play.

Linked to Hera (the patron goddess of Argos), these minor deities were associated with marriage and childbirth – ‘nymph’ ( numph ê ) also can mean ‘nubile young woman’, or ‘bride’. 21 Euripides raises the possibility that Clytemnestra is expecting another child with Aegisthus, further threatening the patrimony that rightfully belongs to Orestes. 22

Because tragic myths move across generations, issues of parentage and descent loom large, and Electra pays close attention to lineage and off spring. Consider line 60, quoted above: ‘Th
e accursed daughter of

Tyndareus, my mother’. Th
is short phrase moves from the father who
engendered Clytemnestra to the mother who gave birth to Electra. 23

Although we fi nd many references to fathers in the play, Euripides focuses on the female as the bearer of children, preparing us for the

‘faux-
child’ scheme of Electra and the matricidal horror that is

Clytemnestra’s murder.

In the fi rst stasimon , the Chorus sing of the shield of Achilles, identifying the Greek hero by name only once. However, they twice refer to him as ‘the son of Th
etis’ (438, 450), honouring his goddess
mother who will grieve over his death in the tenth year of the war.

Clytemnestra also names Achilles, but only to emphasize the untimely death of her child, Iphigenia: ‘My father Tyndareus did not give me to your father / so that the children I bore should be killed. / Yet he

[Agamemnon] enticed my child from home / with a [fi ctional] marriage to Achilles, / leading her to the harbour at Aulis’ (1018–22). 24 As noted in Chapter 2, Clytemnestra wonders how Agamemnon would have
reacted if his brother Menelaus (rather than Helen) had been abducted to Troy, and if she had sacrifi ced their son Orestes to get Menelaus back.

98

Euripides: Electra

She makes a telling point: in male- dominated Greek society, killing a daughter is one thing, a son quite another.

Th
e maternal losses suff ered by Th
etis and Clytemnestra fi nd two
small but signifi cant echoes on the pastoral level. Sent for by Electra, the Old Man brings a ‘newborn lamb / pulled from the fl ock’ (494–95) to provide a feast for the strangers. 25 In the second stasimon , the Chorus sing of the shepherd god Pan, who ‘took a tender lamb away from its mother in the mountains / of Argos’ (699–700), the ‘golden lamb’ that represents political power in Argos. Th
ese passages do not imply that
the Greeks held sentimental views about livestock, but they do specify the separation of the young from their mothers. In Aeschylus’s

Agamemnon

, Clytemnestra uses the same image to describe how

Agamemnon killed her daughter Iphigenia, as if ‘slaughtering a lamb /
when his fl ocks teemed with sheep’ (A. Ag . 1415–16). 26

Given the importance of the matricide in Electra , it is hardly surprising that Euripides emphasizes children and childbearing. In relation to Clytemnestra’s maternity, he frequently uses a form of the verb tekein (‘to give birth’) in addition to, or in place of, the more generic
m ê t ê r

(‘mother’). 27 Electra says ‘I am born ( egenoman ) of Agamemnon, / and Clytemnestra gave me birth’ ( m’ etikte , Eur. El . 115–16). Orestes asks Electra, ‘Did the mother who bore you ( m ê t ê r de s’ h ê tekousa ) allow your marriage to happen?’ (264). In the decisive dialogue between Orestes and Electra (961–77), m ê t ê r (‘mother’) or a comparable term occurs eight times in seventeen lines. 28 Electra announces the arrival of ‘the woman who bore me and gave me birth’ ( t ê n tekousan h ê m’ egeinato , 965). A hesitant Orestes wonders how he can kill ‘the woman who bore me and raised me’? ( h ê m’ ethrepse k’ateken , 969). Aft er the murder, Electra repents of having raged with such hatred against ‘my mother, / who gave me birth as her daughter’ ( matri taid’, / ha m’ etikte kouran , 1183–84). Th e Chorus
identify the fatal web that ties Clytemnestra to her progeny: ‘Unforgettable the children you bore as a mother ( mater tekous’ ) / and more than unforgettable / what you suff ered from your off spring’ ( s ô n tekn ô n , 1186–

88). Standing over his mother’s corpse, Orestes captures the simple, tragic irony: ‘You gave birth to your own killers’ ( phoneas etiktes , 1229).

Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles

99

By inventing a newborn child to lure Clytemnestra to her death, Electra puts the unnaturalness of matricide in high relief. ‘Tell her I bore a male’ ( arsenos tok ô i , 652), she says, thinking that Clytemnestra will come ‘to weep at the low status of my child’ ( em ô n tok ô n , 658). 29

Her mother makes the journey, but she fails to behave as Electra predicts. Clytemnestra says nothing about her grandson’s father or the newborn’s social inferiority. Rather, she notes with dismay her daughter’s isolation and poverty: ‘And you, unwashed, your body in rags / aft er just giving birth?’ ( neogn ô n ek tok ô n , 1107–8). 30 She wonders where the women are who ‘delivered the baby’ ( ek tok ô n , 1128). Electra answers that she had no midwife and ‘bore ( ka’tekon ) this infant alone’ (1129).

Why does Clytemnestra come to Electra’s cottage? Guilt for her past actions, the need to state her case to her daughter, pity for Electra’s condition, concern for ritual propriety, and grand- maternal instincts all seem to play a part. 31 Clytemnestra says that she off ers her help as a

‘gift ’ or ‘grace’ ( charin , 1133) for her daughter, before she ‘graces’ ( charin , 1138) her husband’s sacrifi ce to the Nymphs (Chapter 5). Earlier Electra claimed that ‘women love their husbands, not their children’ (265), but in this scene, Clytemnestra tries to do both.

Two details in Clytemnestra’s off stage murder bring home the
disturbing connection between the (false) childbirth and the matricide.

Before she dies, Clytemnestra bares her breast, forcing Orestes to confront the fact that he is about to kill the woman who bore and nursed him. Her gesture points to the famous scene in Aeschylus’s Choephori when Clytemnestra does the same thing, crying out ‘My son, my child, / pity the breast where you dozed, your gums / sucking the milk that nourished you’ (A. Cho . 896–98). 32 Euripides adds an even more intimate appeal. Orestes describes how his mother sprawled on the ground, exposing ‘the limbs that gave me birth’ (1209).

33 Th
e
ensuing spilled blood brings to mind the bleeding that accompanies childbirth, 34 suggesting that Electra’s virtual ‘delivery’ has merged with her own mother’s lifeblood.

Having presented his protagonist as both a married virgin and a childless mother, Euripides tries to set things straight at the end. Once

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Euripides: Electra

Electra’s suitor and now a demigod, Castor tells Orestes to release his sister from her marriage to the Farmer: ‘Let Pylades . . . take Electra with him / as virgin and wife’ (1284–85). Orestes highlights her soon-to-be- lost chastity, telling Pylades: ‘Go with blessings, and wed / the body of Electra’ ( numpheuou / demas Ê lektras , 1340–41). 35 However, the prospect of union with Pylades fails to lift the spirits of the bride- to-be. Electra expresses grief at the separation from her brother, and from Argos; she says nothing about the married life that lies ahead, or the fulfi lment that she once had longed for as a much- wooed princess. 36

As we shall see in Chapter 9, some adaptations of the Electra story develop her more- than-sisterly attachment to Orestes. Euripides scatters a few details that support this possibility, particularly Electra’s infl ated opinion of her brother’s physical qualities, his masculine persona, and his heroic character. Orestes also implies that stronger- than- normal bonds draw them together: ‘You were young when you were separated

[literally ‘unyoked’, apezeuchth ê s ] from Orestes’ (284). Electra returns to this fi gure of speech at the end of the play: ‘Th
e curse of mother’s murder
unyokes us ( dia . . . zeugnus’ ) / from our father’s house’ (1323–24).

Tragedians frequently employ the metaphor of yoking for a wedding or a wedded pair, and Euripides implies that association here. 37

In Electra , Euripides brings together an array of gender- bending contradictions and sexually charged paradoxes. A chaste husband, a married virgin; an adulterous wife, and her seductive but eff eminate lover, then husband; childlessness, murdered off spring, and an imaginary son and grandson; sexual rivalries, marital infi delities, and invectives against promiscuity and double standards; excessive
glorifi cation of masculinity and fear of male physical assault; women who behave like men and vice- versa; a festival for maidens and for newlyweds, rejected by a heroine who is neither and both; belated maternal aff ection and deadly fi lial hatred; fabricated childbirth and the real blood of a murdered mother. Given the explosion of current interest (from genetic research to identity politics) in questions surrounding gender and sexuality, Euripides’ Electra seems very much our contemporary. 38

8

Highs and Lows in Electra

Rich and Poor, Gods and Mortals, Sky and Earth

During tragic performances at the City Dionysia, audiences witnessed mythic characters in situations far exceeding the norms of daily life: revenge, assassination, human sacrifi ce, matricide, epic warfare, confl icts between gods and mortals (usually with lethal consequences).

At the same time, the performances drew on legal, religious, social, and cultural practices that refl ected contemporary Athenian society. As in other tragedies of Euripides, Electra uses the diff erences between the mythic realm and the world of fi ft h- century Athens to explore – and expose – values inherent in each.

When the Farmer entered and launched the prologue, the original audience in the theatre of Dionysus must have wondered, ‘What is Euripides doing ? Why has he set the story we all know in front of this poor Farmer’s cottage?’ 1 Th
e sense of not belonging, of displacement,
extends to the principal characters. Electra sees her life on the farm as a violation of her rightful position in the palace, and her role as a peasant’s wife an insult to her aristocratic birth. At fi rst sight, Orestes takes his sister for some slave woman tasked with bringing water from the spring.

When he learns the truth, and Electra’s husband welcomes him into their humble abode, he wishes that he – and the real Orestes – were entering the palace and not a peasant’s hovel. 2

Th
e opposition between wealth and poverty, nobility and low birth, and luxury and labour runs through the play. Electra tells her regally dressed mother that ‘paupers ( pen ê tas ) have no friends’ ( El . 1131), and she warns Clytemnestra to be careful when entering ‘our impoverished ( pen ê tas

) house’ (1139).

3

Earlier Electra describes her husband as

101

102

Euripides: Electra

Fig. 6 Elektra (Irene Pappas) and Peasant (Notis Periyalis), from Elektra

(1962), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. Courtesy of the Michael Cacoyannis

Foundation.

‘a poor man ( pen ê s ) but noble ( gennaios )’ (253), and the Farmer says the same of himself: ‘Although I am poor ( pen ê s ), / I will show you no ignobility (
dusgenes

) of character’ (362–63). He knows that ‘a full
stomach / is the same, whether one is rich ( plousios ) or poor ( pen ê s )’

(430–31). Orestes doubts that either prosperity or poverty guarantees excellence of character: ‘Wealth ( plout ô i ) is poor criteria’ (374), for it can disguise the faults of pride and cowardice. On the other hand,

‘poverty ( penia ) is a disease, / that teaches men to be evil out of necessity’

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(375–76). In the end, Orestes says that he prefers ‘a poor ( pen ê s ) host /
who is eager, to a wealthy one ( plousiou ) who is not’ (394–95).

Th
e social and economic tensions in Euripides’ Athens lie behind
these passages: the challenge to hereditary prerogatives posed by Athenian democracy; the rise of self-made citizens (merchants,
politicians, artisans) at the expense of the old aristocracy; doubts about the causal link between high birth and good character, and the
possibility that nobility lies in behaviour rather than privilege. 4 More than any other extant Greek tragedy, Electra challenges the assumptions that wealth is self- validating, and that poverty in itself signals idleness and moral weakness. 5 Although the social upheavals of fi ft h- century Athens may seem remote to us, we are experiencing a similar disjunction caused by our political- economic system that enables great prosperity for the few at the expense of the many, particularly those ‘at the bottom’.

Refl ecting the interests of diff erent economic and social strata, Euripides’ characters frequently employ mercantile language and fi nancial metaphors, which seem at odds with the play’s mythic context.

Before pursuing his revenge, Orestes assumes he must act alone because he is ‘bankrupt of friends’ ( El . 601–2). Th
e Messenger views the murder
of Aegisthus as ‘blood for blood, / the bitter paying back of a loan’

(857–58), long overdue for the children of Agamemnon. As noted in Chapter 5, the colour gold occurs frequently (golden sun, golden temples, golden lamb, the golden face of dawn), but it also refers to mere lucre: Aegisthus off ers gold as fi nancial reward for anyone who kills Orestes. Electra rejects the view that riches in themselves have long-term value, or that they can purchase anything that does. She assails Aegisthus for boasting that his ‘money’ ( chr ê masi , 939) compensates for his lack of character. He should have known that ‘wealth doesn’t last, /
but only blossoms for a short spell, and then fl ies away’ (943–44).

Although Clytemnestra sees her Trojan slaves as ‘beautiful possessions for the house’ (1003), Electra accuses her of ‘buying her husband’

Aegisthus for the price of their ancestral home (1089–90).

Th
is ‘money talk’ fi nds its down- to-earth counterpart in the words of the Farmer. ‘With respect to money / I am poor’ ( chr ê mat ô n . . . /

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Euripides: Electra
pen ê tes , 37–38), he admits, but he displays qualities of forbearance, respect, and open- heartedness. Th
e only innocent character in the play,
he knows nothing of palace life, has played no part in its bloody past, and has no knowledge of the actual plan to kill Aegisthus and

Clytemnestra. When Electra sends him off to fetch the Tutor, he leaves the stage, never to return. 6 His absence allows the former inhabitants of the house of Atreus – Electra, Orestes, and the Tutor – to turn his poor cottage into the home of a non- existent infant, a temporary storeroom for Aegisthus’s corpse, and the setting for Clytemnestra’s ambush by her own children.

As we would expect in Greek tragedy, the earthly concerns of
humans – from poverty to payback – inevitably involve the ‘higher- ups’

on Olympus. Gods and demigods are all over Electra – the word theos (‘god’, the root of our ‘theology’) occurs more than twenty times in the play. 7 A host of divinities are mentioned by name, most of them more than once: Aphrodite, Ares, Pan, Moira (Fate), and Night, once each; Athena, Hera, Gaia (Earth), Keres (Furies), and the Nereids (sea nymphs), twice; Hades and Dike (Justice), three times; the Nymphs (female deities associated with water, marriage, and fertility), fi ve times; Zeus, nine times; and Apollo, fi ft een times. As happens in most plays of Euripides, Electra ends with the actual appearance of a god on high. Th e
deifi ed sons of Zeus, Castor and Polydeuces, comment on what has transpired and attempt to provide closure to the tragic events of the play. Some scholars think they succeed; others fi nd the eff orts of the immortal twins so inadequate that they undermine the wisdom, and even the credibility, of the divine forces behind the myth. 8

In Euripides’ Heracles , the title character condemns the goddess Hera, who struck him with madness that made him slay his wife and children: ‘Who would off er prayers / to such a goddess? . . . / . . . She destroyed a man who accomplished / great things for Greece, a man who was guiltless’ ( HF 1307–10). We fi nd similar statements about the gods in Electra , revealing a fundamental gap between the immortals’

perspective on events and the experience of the humans caught up in
them. 9 For some scholars, such passages demonstrate the limited range

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105
of human vision, and they conclude that Euripides never seriously questions belief in the gods or challenges their role as ultimate arbiters of human aff airs. From this perspective, issues of divine right and wrong are irrelevant – the Olympians exercise a level of power and authority that humans cannot understand, but would be fools to question. 10

When Electra rejects the Chorus’s invitation to join them at the festival of Hera, the maidens respond that the goddess is great, and that by honouring her Electra will get the help she needs more eff ectively than by lamenting her misfortunes. Electra insists that no gods hear her prayers, for they have not responded to her father’s murder and her brother’s exile. We may compare her despair regarding the justice of the gods with her brother’s initial faith in the word of Apollo: ‘Th e oracles
of Apollo are steadfast, / but I reject prophecies from mere mortals’ ( El .

399–400). Orestes bases his belief in the gods on their commitment to his and Electra’s cause: ‘No longer should we believe in the gods / if injustice [the murder of Agamemnon] triumphs over justice [revenge on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra]’ (583–84). Before embarking on the fi rst stage of their revenge, he and Electra pray to Zeus and Hera for success: ‘Grant us victory, if our prayer is just’ (675). Confi rming Orestes’ triumph, the Messenger announces to Electra and the Chorus,

‘Now we must off er prayers of thanksgiving to the gods’ (764).

Once the matricide approaches, however, Orestes questions his
earlier conviction: ‘Apollo, there was no wisdom when you prophesied.

/ . . . You commanded me to kill someone I must not, my mother. / . . .

/ Did some destructive spirit speak disguised as a god? / . . . / I cannot believe that such a prophecy was good’ (971–73, 979–81). Electra dismisses her brother’s startling reversal as nothing more than cowardice. Aft er the event, however, she too questions the gods: ‘What kind of Apollo, what sort of oracle / made me into the murderer of my mother?’ (1303–4). 11 Castor tries to convince Orestes and Electra that the murder of Clytemnestra was not their fault: ‘I ascribe this act of bloodshed / to Apollo’ (1296–97). In almost the same breath, he criticizes the god and his oracle: ‘Fate and Necessity and the unwise words / of Apollo directed the destined outcome’ (1301–2).

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Euripides: Electra

For all the talk of Apollo, his oracle plays a far less signifi cant role in Euripides’ tragedy than in Aeschylus’s Choephori or Sophocles’ Electra .

Aeschylus’s Orestes describes a list of horrors that Apollo will infl ict on him if he fails to kill his mother (A. Cho . 269–97). Th e opening of

Eumenides , the third play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, takes place at the god’s temple in Delphi, where Orestes takes refuge from the Furies. Apollo appears in person to protect him, and he reappears to defend Orestes at his trial in Athens. Sophocles’ Electra opens with Orestes having just consulted the Delphic oracle. Orestes’ ‘false death’, narrated by the Tutor, involves a fatal accident in a chariot race at the Pythian games in Delphi, held in Apollo’s honour. Sophocles burnishes the god’s role by having Electra pray to Apollo to aid in the matricide just before it takes place.

In his Electra , however, Euripides minimizes Apollo’s presence and importance. When Castor tries to blame the god rather than Electra and Orestes for the matricide, one hears special pleading. Even the killers refuse to embrace Castor’s dismissal of their responsibility, and they remain unpersuaded that what lies ahead for them – a new
husband for Electra and a new city for Orestes – is what they want, or should want.

Th
e audience, too, may have a hard time swallowing the happy
ending announced by Castor. Recall that the Dioskouroi also reveal the truth about the Trojan War. Zeus, greatest of the gods, instigated the confl ict ‘to cause unrest and bloodshed among mortals’ (1282).

Whatever heroics arose from that ten- year confl ict now seem absurd:

‘Deeds of bravery and courage for what? To recover Helen, who never set foot in Troy?’ Whether taking the blame for something they didn’t do (Apollo), or tricking mortals into a meaningless war (Zeus), the gods pose an intractable problem for the human characters in Electra .

So who were the gods and what did they represent? In the polytheism of ancient Greece, the gods had multiple cults, many of which linked their power and infl uence to natural phenomena. Zeus had almost a hundred diff erent cult titles, connected to a broad range of elements, activities, and places – rain, darkness, lightning, thunder, moisture,

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107
dust, fair winds, harvest, friendship, guests and hospitality, suppliants, deliverance, victory in battle, the market place, the household hearth, the city council, oak forests, tall mountains. 12 Ancient Greek religion was grounded in the physical environment, lending a play like Electra an ecological dimension, bound up in the (oft en fraught) relationship between humans and their divinely infused surroundings.

In Chapters 3 and 4, we touched on the workmanlike concerns of the Farmer, aware of the watershed and the changing seasons, ready to begin his spring ploughing and sowing at dawn, working with his animals to eke out a living. His cottage is surrounded (at least verbally) by nature: the rocky hillside, the Inachus river below, the fi elds, the freshwater spring, and so on. So, too, the hills where the Old Man tends his fl ocks and the meadows where Aegisthus rears his horses – both belong more to the natural world than to the Argive palace, the traditional backdrop for the story. 13 Visible and audible parallels to the verbal descriptions in the play appeared to Euripides’ audience in the theatre of Dionysus, introduced in Chapter 1: Mt. Hymettus
dominating the horizon to the east; the Ilissos river glistening much closer, to the south- east; the Saronic Gulf opening up to the Peloponnese to the south and west; the braying donkeys in the farms just outside the city walls below the theatre; the horses whinnying behind the stage fa
ç
ade, yoked to the wagon and waiting for their entrance with

Clytemnestra and her Trojan slaves.

Th
e characters and Chorus in Electra also look up towards the heavens. On her fi rst entrance, before addressing anything or anyone else, Electra calls on the night and the golden stars (54). Because Agamemnon’s tomb lies far from the cottage, the site cannot serve as the locus for Electra’s grief, so she laments to the sky above. At the end of his opening speech, Orestes announces the rising sun (102), and the Chorus interpret his homecoming as the ‘long- awaited day / dawning’

over Argos (585–86), freeing them from the benighted rule of the tyrant Aegisthus. Fabricating her murder plot, Electra claims that she gave birth to her baby ‘ten suns ago’ (654), a story she repeats to Clytemnestra, replacing ‘suns’ with ‘moons’ (1126). 14 Electra’s use of celestial bodies to

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Euripides: Electra
mark temporal change reminds us that the ancients maintained a
primary connection between natural phenomena and the passage of time, something we tend to forget when we speak of days and months and years that lie ahead of, or behind us. 15

To grasp the degree to which the heavens matter in Electra, let us return to the two great lyric stasima of the Chorus. In the fi rst, the women describe engravings on Achilles’ shield, in the centre of which shine bright celestial bodies: the chariot of the sun surrounded by a chorus of stars, the Pleiades and Hyades (464–69), which formed the eyes and shoulder of the constellation Taurus (the Bull). 16 Associated with the spring rains, the mythical Hyades were a sisterhood of nymphs, all of them daughters of Atlas, one of the Titans who revolted against Zeus and the Olympian gods. Atlas also fathered a second group of daughters, the Pleiades (probably derived from the Greek verb ‘to sail’, plein ), also known as the ‘Seven Sisters’. Th
ese stars appeared in the

Mediterranean sky in the spring, rising above the eastern horizon to announce the opening of the sailing season. 17

Brightest among these Seven Sisters was Maia, the mother of the god Hermes. Th
e Chorus refer to both her and her son when they describe
the images on the outer rim of Achilles’ shield: ‘Perseus skims over the sea on winged sandals / holding the severed head of the Gorgon / along with Hermes, the messenger of Zeus, / the country- wild son of Maia’

(459–62). Th
e Messenger invokes the same myth when he compares

Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus to Perseus’s slaying the Gorgon (discussed in Chapter 6), leading some to conclude that the ‘arms of Achilles’ ode off ers a heroic analogy to Orestes’ eventual encounter with Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. 18

Th
is interpretation seems correct as far as it goes, but the images spiralling around Achilles’ shield set off a wider range of associations.

Th
e rainmaking Hyades (depicted in the shield’s centre) help feed the spring where Electra fetches water, and they nourish the horse pasture and ‘well- watered garden’ (777) where Orestes kills Aegisthus. Th eir
welcome rain would swell the Inachus river (1) that irrigates the farmer’s fi elds; the Tanaus River (410) where the Old Man tends his fl ock; the

Highs and Lows in Electra

109

Simois that fl ows through Troy (441); the Alpheus that borders Olympia (781, 793–94, 863) and that runs through the city that Orestes will found

(1273–75). 19 As for the Pleiades, their appearance in spring roughly coincided with the City Dionysia, held when the Aegean Sea grew more hospitable to those travelling from afar. 20 Described as ‘saviours / to men in the midst of the salt waves’ (992–93), Castor and Polydeuces depart at the end of the play for the seas around Sicily. Th
ere, they will continue
their mission of protecting sailors (1347–55) who depended – as all Greeks knew – on the stars to mark the seasons and steer their ships.

Given the primitive technology of the ancient Greeks, and their relative powerlessness before the forces of nature, it is not surprising that they held a more numinous view of the environment than we do. 21

One sees this clearly in the Chorus’ second stasimon , which posits a causal link among human actions, divine intervention, and the motion of celestial bodies. Th
e Chorus recount ‘an age- old legend’ (701) about
a golden lamb, torn from its mother and brought to Argos as a sign of the city’s rightful ruler. To punish Th
yestes for stealing the lamb, Zeus
reverses the course of the sun, altering its direction across the sky and causing a radical change in the earth’s climate. 22

Th
en, then it was that Zeus
changed the path of the glowing stars,
reversed the course of the shining sun,
pale glowing face of dawn.

Now the sun drives westward, laying
a god- kindled fl ame along the back
of the sky, while the rain- fi lled clouds
head north. Now the African plains
lie fallow, parched, dying of thirst,
robbed of the lush spring rains of Zeus.

Well, that’s how the story
goes, but I don’t put much faith in
old wives’ tales . . . really! . . . Th
at the sun
would change, speed its molten face of gold
the other way, because of mortals’

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Euripides: Electra
folly, or for their punishment!

But such myths do profi t men by
teaching them to fear and serve the gods,
the gods you forgot, Clytemnestra, when you killed
your husband, you, sister of such glorious brothers. 23

El. 727–46

Performed between Orestes’ departure and the Messenger’s arrival, the second
stasimon
covers the off stage murder of Aegisthus, tying his
misdeeds to those of his father Th
yestes. Both unseated the rightful Argive
king (Agamemnon / Atreus) by seducing his queen (Clytemnestra / Aerope), and both stand justly condemned.

However, the Chorus direct the last lines of their lyric at Clytemnestra (‘you didn’t listen’), and they do the same at the close of the fi rst stasimon

: ‘Your adulterous bed

/
killed the leader of such great

/

warriors . . . / May I see your neck gone, as once more / the iron blade gushes deep crimson’ (479–81, 485–86). Both lyric narratives propel the action specifi cally towards matricide. As that prospect approaches, however, Orestes wonders whether the gods have acted wisely in urging this revenge, and he, Electra, and the Chorus express their horror once the murder of Clytemnestra takes place.

Let us approach their shift in attitude towards the matricide by considering the Chorus’s earlier doubts about the story of the sun’s reversal. At the turning point in the lyric (737–46), the young women abandon their role as engaged narrators of received legend and become sceptics who question its veracity. 24 In so doing, they anticipate the distancing that Electra and Orestes feel aft er committing themselves to their traditional roles as avengers of their father’s murder. Th eir change
of heart, from driven executioners to appalled murderers, represents a profound re- thinking of the entire Orestes / Electra myth. Along with them, we (as readers and audience) may question the necessity and morality of the story these characters have found themselves in.

In his volume on Euripides’ Orestes in this series, Matthew Wright coins the term ‘meta-mythological’ for this troubling aspect of

Euripides’ tragedies, which aims ‘to problematize the concept of myth

Highs and Lows in Electra

111
itself ’. 25 In Electra , the coup de gr â ce of this attack on myth comes with Castor’s revelation about the Trojan War: ‘Helen will help with the burial, having left Egypt / and the house of Proteus [the Egyptian king].

She never went to Troy. / In order to bring strife and death to mortals, Zeus / fashioned an image of Helen and sent it to Troy’ ( El . 1280–83).

In four lines, Euripides exposes the mythic justifi cation for the great Trojan War as nothing but a god- sent delusion.

We should not underestimate the fallout from this revelation, which casts a long shadow over the play we have seen. 26 Orestes and Electra learn that their father unwittingly led his men to war for no other reason than to satisfy Zeus’s desire for ‘strife and death’. What are we to make of the ‘arms of Achilles’ chorus that celebrated the Greek fl eet’s departure for Troy, or of Electra’s invective against Aegisthus for not fi ghting in the war? Or of Orestes’ summoning his father for help, to

‘come with all your dead allies, / all those who helped you wipe out Troy by the spear’ (680–81)? Agamemnon’s sacrifi ce of Iphigenia appears even more unwarranted than Clytemnestra imagined in her speech to Electra. In so far as the murder of Iphigenia drove her to kill her husband, Clytemnestra’s revenge and her subsequent death at the hands of her children appear as collateral damage in a gratuitous war that accomplished nothing but the loss of human life. Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon for sacrifi cing their child so that he could wage war for a phantom; Electra kills her mother by luring her to off er sacrifi ce for a grandchild who doesn’t exist.

Orestes and Electra make no response to Castor’s news that Zeus started the Trojan War to cause havoc for the human race. But they continue to express their anguish over killing their mother, asking why Apollo and the gods allowed it to happen. Castor insists that they look on the bright side, reminding Electra that she has ‘a husband and a home’ (1311) and urging Orestes to ‘cheer up, for you are going to the holy city / of Athena’ (1319–20). Castor’s eff orts to throw a positive light on what has transpired fail to brighten the mood.

27 His physical
separation from those below refl ects an unbridgeable gap between divine perspectives and human experience.

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Euripides: Electra

Euripides forces us to question the cosmic reaction to the golden lamb, the need to murder Clytemnestra, and the justifi cation for the Trojan War. Nevertheless, these myths continue to make meaningful contact with audiences, ancient and modern. In the twenty-fi rst
century, we might fi nd ourselves agreeing with the Chorus in the second stasimon , concluding (as they do) that if we imagined our actions had large- scale consequences, we would think twice before we performed them.

Th
e story of the sun shift ing course and drastically changing the earth’s ecology might prompt us to reconsider the contemporary myth that ‘progress’ depends on environmental degradation. Although
powerful forces are aligned against any change, we know that if we continue to burn fossil fuels, destroy biodiversity, level forests, poison the air, and pollute the seas and the land, then we threaten the survival of human life on earth. At the end of Euripides’ play, Electra and Orestes wish they had resisted the myth that they were swept up in. Th
eir
belated awareness might speak to us, as we realize what lies in store if we don’t break out of our inherited narrative.

In Aristophanes’ Frogs , Euripides describes his tragedies as teaching people ‘to suspect everything’. 28 Elec tra may not go that far, but Burian points out that the play forces ‘the audience to rethink every facet of character, motivation, and the very meaning of the action’. 29 Electra exposes the fault lines between heroic ideals and everyday life, between those who have inherited privilege and status and those who work in the fi elds, between the perspective of powerful gods and the aspirations of vulnerable mortals, between the artifi ce of the theatre and the messier world that the stage represents.

Th
e nineteenth- century English poet Algernon Swinburne wrote
that great tragedy (Aeschylus, Shakespeare) deals with ‘the grave and deep truth of natural impulse’, but in Euripides this theme is oft en

‘outraged and degraded by the vulgar theatricalities’.

30 Perhaps

Swinburne was thinking of Electra’s self- dramatization, the grotesque murder of Aegisthus, or the sordid nature of the matricide. As we shall see in the closing chapter, later versions of the play oft en emphasize

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113
these elements, as if they represent the best Electra has to off er. One can imagine a Hollywood agent pitching Euripides’ play as an innovative hybrid – eroticized melodrama and slasher fi lm – but one that merits a GP (‘General Public’) rating due to its classical pedigree.

In my view, Euripides’ ‘vulgar theatricalities’ add immeasurably to the moral and emotional eff ect on his audience, part and parcel of what makes Electra such a powerful and disturbing tragedy. Like Orestes and Electra at the end of the play, we may fi nd ourselves caught between the bloodshed on the ground and the distant movement of the heavens, looking for hopeful signs of divine intervention as we grapple with the losses we have brought on ourselves, and the exile that lies ahead for many of us on the planet.

114

9

Electra through the Looking Glass

. . . and the repeated air

Of sad Electra’s Poet had the pow’r

To save th’Athenian Walls from ruine bare.

John Milton 1

Th
e lines of John Milton’s sonnet refer to an anecdote from the Greek biographer and essayist Plutarch (46– c . 120 ad ). At the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 bc ), he tells us, the victorious Spartan generals planned to raze the city of Athens, but they changed their minds when someone sang the opening of the parodos of Euripides’ Electra . Th e
conquerors then decided it would be wrong to destroy a city that had produced so great a poet. 2

Th
is chapter explores the aft erlife of Euripides’ play – translations, productions, and adaptations inspired or shaped by the original. Th e
many performances of his tragedies at the City Dionysia attest to Euripides’ popularity in the last half of the fi ft h century bc , as do the frequent references to the playwright in the comedies of Aristophanes. 3

From the fourth century bc through the heyday of the Roman Empire, Euripides proved the most popular source for theatrical revivals and adaptations, more so than Aeschylus and Sophocles; however, his Electra was not among the favoured plays. 4 Sometime between the fourth and ninth centuries ad , scholars and educators compiled the so-called ‘select’ plays of Euripides, chosen on the basis of performance popularity (oft en as excerpts rather than full plays), the needs of school curricula, their usefulness for rhetorical training, and the perceived relevance of their mythological content. 5 Again, Electra was not in this group. Our play survived due to the accidental transmission of

Euripides’ ‘alphabetic’ plays, which included titles beginning with the 115

116

Euripides: Electra

Greek letter epsilon through kappa , into which Electra falls. For over two millennia aft er its fi ft h- century bc premiere at the City Dionysia, no signifi cant translation, production, or adaptation of Euripides’

Electra left its mark.

A remarkable change in the fortunes of the play occurred in 1905
with the English translation by Sydney- born, Oxford- educated Gilbert Murray (1866–1957). Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow and later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Murray was something of a Renaissance man who maintained a strong interest in contemporary theatre. 6 Th
e success of his translations of Euripides arose in no small
part from their association with a theatrical movement that had taken off a few decades earlier. Playwrights involved with this ‘new theatre’

include Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Wedekind, John Millington

Synge, George Bernard Shaw, and (somewhat later) Eugene O’Neill.

Smaller theatres dedicated to the new drama mushroomed in European capitals – Th
é â tre Libre in Paris, the Freie B ü hne in Berlin, the Art Th
eatre in Moscow, the Abbey Th
eatre in Dublin, the Court (later the

Royal Court) in London. Th
is last theatre played a major role in
restoring Euripides’ Electra to the stage.

Murray translated several of Euripides’ tragedies, which his friend Bernard Shaw urged him to publish aft er hearing Murray read from them at a Fabian Society meeting in London in 1901. 7 Shaw ushered Murray into the London theatrical scene, and he befriended the young Harley Granville Barker, who directed Murray’s translation of Euripides’

Hippolytus in London in 1904. 8 Later that same year, Barker became manager of the Court Th
eatre in Sloane Square, inaugurating his tenure
with a new production of Hippolytus (again Murray’s translation). Over the next three seasons (1904–7), Granville Barker produced (and oft en directed and acted in) an impressive number of productions, including eleven plays by Shaw and three by Euripides – Hippolytus , Trojan Women , and Electra , all in Murray’s translations – making Euripides the second most produced playwright during Barker’s transformative years at the Court. 9

Electra through the Looking Glass

117

Among the many Shaw productions, Barker directed Major Barbara (1905), in which he also played the role of Adolphus Cusins, a high-minded classicist based on Gilbert Murray. At the end of Major Barbara , Cusins overcomes his scruples about the armaments business:

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too.

Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes . . . I want a power simple enough for common men to use, yet strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good . . .

Dare I make war on war? I dare. I must. I will. 10

One detects a Euripidean undercurrent here, and many at the time perceived a strong connection between Shaw and Euripides, viewed as the ironists and iconoclasts of their respective epochs. 11

Barker, Murray, Shaw, and the Court Th
eatre off ered a springboard
for approaching Euripides as a modern playwright rather than an ancient Greek author, one who spoke to contemporary audiences.

Electra entered the twentieth- century English theatre less as a timeworn classic than as a play for the modern moment. Such was the view of theatre critic Desmond MacCarthy in 1907:

Mr. Gilbert Murray’s rare and beautiful translations of Euripides proved that . . . the old Greek dramas could be refashioned into plays that the English reader might enjoy and understand with the same close, eff ortless sympathy with which he might follow the work of a modern imagination . . . Mr. Murray had turned Euripides into an English poet- dramatist . . . Barker tried what could be done towards naturalizing him on the English stage. 12

One should be wary of echoing MacCarthy’s enthusiasm for Murray’s translations uncritically. 13 Consider, for example, his rendering of the opening lines of Electra , spoken by the Farmer:

Old gleam on the face of the world, I give thee hail,

River of Argos land, where sail on sail

Th
e long ships met, a thousand, near and far,

When Agamemnon walked the seas in war;

Who smote King Priam in the dust, and burned

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Euripides: Electra

Th
e storied streets of Ilion, and returned

Above all conquerors, heaping tower and fane

Of Argos high with spoils of Eastern slain. 14

Rhyming couplets (Greek tragedians did not use rhyme), fl owery elaboration, and inappropriate Victorian diction hardly serve the play.

Nonetheless, Murray’s translations helped establish Euripides as the most contemporary of ancient tragedians. 15

Following the success of Euripides at the Court, Euripides’ Electra received numerous professional productions across the globe. 16 Th e
fi rst modern-Greek production of the play, staged in 1924 at the indoor Royal (later National) Th
eatre in Athens, featured Angeliki Kotsali as

Electra, a role she reprised in 1927 and 1930 at the outdoor Odeon of Herodes Atticus. A stone’s throw from the original theatre of Dionysus, where Euripides staged his Electra , this Roman theatre (seating roughly 5,000) became one of the main performance spaces for the Athens and Epidaurus Festivals, launched in 1955. Th
e major venue of the Festival
remains the late fourth-
century
bc
theatre at Epidaurus (seating
roughly 13,000).

Th
e most acclaimed modern-Greek production of Euripides’ Electra took place at Epidaurus in 1989, directed by Kostas Tsianos, with Lydia Koniordou in the title role. 17 Tsianos began as a dancer with the Dora Stratou Company, renowned for performing traditional music and folk dance from across the Greek world. He moved into the theatre as an actor and director; his mentor Dimitris Rontiris had mounted the fi rst modern staging of a Greek tragedy at Epidaurus in 1938. 18

Fitting for a play set in the country, far from the centre of political power, Tsianos’s production of Electra began in a regional theatre of Larissa before moving to Epidaurus. Its extraordinary success helped validate regional theatre in what had been an Athenocentric cultural landscape. Incorporating music, costume, and dance from the Greek folk tradition, Tsianos opened up new possibilities for the tragic Chorus. In the title role, Lydia Koniordou harnessed the raw dramatic power of Euripides’ troubled protagonist (see Figure 2). 19 A triumph in Greece, the production toured internationally from 1991 to 1993,

Electra through the Looking Glass

119
allowing non-Greek audiences to experience ancient tragedy that drew on popular performance traditions rather than dated assumptions about ‘classical style’.

In spite of Tsianos’s infl uence, many contemporary productions of Euripides’ Electra tend to sacrifi ce rootedness in community in favour of cinematic eff ects, using graphic visuals to bring home the off stage violence of the original. In his 2019 Com é die-Fran ç aise production É lectre / Oreste , for example, director Ivo van Hove placed the Farmer’s cottage in a fi eld of mud, with a slightly elevated walkway allowing for entrances from the distance. As the play moved to matricide, the mud gradually covered the bodies of Electra and Orestes, mixed with Clytemnestra’s blood. ‘Forget Game of Th
rones ! Nobody does violence
like Euripides!’ proclaimed the headline of the New York Times review:

‘With her cropped hair and tattered shorts, Ms. Brahim cuts an
androgynous fi gure, who doesn’t just maim Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus, but bites into his dismembered genitals before throwing

Fig. 7 Chorus member, Oreste (Christophe Montenez), and É lectre (Suliane

Brahim), with corpse of Clytemnestre (Elsa Lepoivre), Chorus in background,
from the 2019 Com é die-Fran ç aise production É lectre / Oreste , directed by

Ivan van Hove. Courtesy of Com é die Fran ç aise.

120

Euripides: Electra
them at the Chorus’. 20 Van Hove took the verbal energy of Euripides and replaced it with physical and visual excess. Supported by an onstage percussion quartet, the choreography by Wim Vandekeybus added to the sense of wildness in the Chorus and Electra, well suited to the play’s subject, if not exactly to Euripides’ treatment of it.

Turning from theatrical productions of Euripides’

Electra to
signifi cant adaptations of the play, the American poet Robinson Jeff ers published a long dramatic poem dealing with the house of Atreus, Th e

Tower beyond Tragedy , in 1925. 21 Educated in Greek and Latin from an early age, Jeff ers (1887–1962) based the fi rst half of his drama on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon , then increasingly drew on Euripides as the plot turned to matricide.

Years aft er Agamemnon’s murder, a beggar shows up at the palace, her face covered in fi lth – Electra in disguise. Aegisthus tells Clytemnestra to treat kindly ‘this poor creature on the step who has been reared nicely and slipped into misery’. 22 Aft er revealing her identity, Electra gives her mother the false news that Orestes has died, a plot device borrowed from Aeschylus and Sophocles. In the scene between mother and
daughter, however, we see Euripides’ infl uence writ large. A repentant Clytemnestra asks for understanding and reconciliation: ‘Electra,

/

Make peace with me. . . . / I have labored violently all the days of my life for nothing – / nothing worse than anything – this death / Was a thing I wished. See how they [the Gods] make fools of us. / Amusement for them, to watch us labor aft er the thing that will / tear us in / pieces . . .’ 23

Once Orestes arrives, Electra spurs her brother to matricide, just as she does in Euripides’ play. Orestes hesitates, asking again and again if he should ‘Dip in my sword / Into my fountain?’ ( Tower 69).

His sister berates him and calls him a coward, until he reluctantly slays Clytemnestra. A triumphant Electra announces the return of Agamemnon’s son as rightful king, but Orestes has no interest in power and wishes to leave the city. Developing the sexual theme hinted at in Euripides, Electra off ers herself to her brother, trying to persuade him not to go: ‘O will you stay! these arms / Making so soft and white a bond around you . . . I also begin to love you that way, Orestes, / Feeling the

Electra through the Looking Glass

121
hot hard fl esh move under the loose cloth, shudder against me . . . Ah, your mouth, Ah, / Th
e burning – kiss me’. 24

Orestes rejects her advances, saying: ‘It’s Clytemnestra in you’, and Electra soon comes to regret what she has done, much as in Euripides:

‘I drove on, burning; your mind, reluctant metal, / I dipped it in fi re and forged it sharp, day aft er day I beat and burned against you, and forged

/ A sword: I the arm’. Orestes abandons his sister, Argos and all human society. Jeff ers concludes his dramatic poem with a Euripides-like
dissolution of the house of Atreus: ‘Electra turned and entered the ancient house. Orestes walked [away] in the clear dawn . . . / . . . climbed the tower beyond time . . . and . . . entered the earlier fountain’. 25

Aft er its fi rst performance at the University of California in 1932, Jeff ers adapted Th
e Tower beyond Tragedy in 1941 for a fully staged
production at the outdoor Forest Th
eatre near Jeff ers’ home in Carmel-
by-the-Sea. Th
e play had four performances, with the Australian- born

British actress Judith Anderson as Clytemnestra. Encouraged by the response, Jeff ers next adapted Euripides’ Medea , with Judith Anderson in the title role, and the play was a smash hit on Broadway, running for six months from 1946–47. Jeff ers brought Th
e Tower beyond Tragedy to

New York three years later, with Anderson again playing Clytemnestra.

Drama critic Brooks Atkinson proclaimed Jeff ers’ poem on the Electra theme ‘a masterpiece . . . written in lines of fi re that make an ancient theme seem immediate and devastating’. Of Anderson’s performance, Atkinson wrote: ‘No one should ever expect anything fi ner in the theater’, adding that ‘Marian Seldes’ Electra and Alfred Ryder’s Orestes . . . keep the tragedy ominous and breathless aft er Clytemnestra has left it’. 26 Although focused on Clytemnestra, Robinson Jeff ers’ Th e

Tower beyond Tragedy
helped introduce Euripides’ version of the

Electra story to modern American audiences.

Long drawn to Greek tragedy, the American playwright Eugene

O’Neill (1888–1953) began working on

Mourning Becomes Electra
three years aft er Jeff ers published his dramatic poem. In an early entry in his work diary, O’Neill raised a question that guided his adaptation:

‘Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of Greek

122

Euripides: Electra
sense of fate . . . which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?’ 27 O’Neill identifi ed the basic approach followed by almost every modern treatment of Greek tragedy since: character psychology is fate; the gods (and demons) are rooted within family histories and manifest in individual psyches; we hunt for the truth of others hidden behind the masks they wear; and we haunt our own selves by the masks we invent to hide our inmost fears from others. For O’Neill, tragic myths provided a framework for exploring the ‘psychological fate’ that affl icts
modern man.

Mourning Becomes Electra
relies heavily on the

Oresteia – Th
e

Homecoming , Th
e Hunted , Th
e Haunted correspond to the three plays of

Aeschylus’s trilogy. But O’Neill also draws on Sophocles and Euripides’

versions to explore the ill- fated Mannon house in the aft ermath of the US Civil War. Th
e decorated general Ezra Mannon returns from the
front; his disaff ected wife Christine and her lover Adam Brant arrange his death; the Mannon’s daughter Lavinia discovers their aff air and their role in her father’s murder; fuelled with this knowledge, Lavinia’s brother Orin kills Brant, whose murder drives their mother to suicide.

Haunted by guilt over her death, Orin goes mad from ‘the Furies within’

and kills himself. Lavinia breaks off her engagement with Orin’s friend Peter (the Pylades fi gure), and she withdraws into the desolate confi nes of the family home:

Lavinia:

Th
ere’s no one left to punish me. I’m the last Mannon. I’ve
got to punish myself! . . . I’ll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out . . . ( with a strange cruel smile of gloating over the years of self- torture ) . . . It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born! 28

O’Neill considered Electra ‘the most interesting of all women in drama’ 29 and his Lavinia shares many traits with Euripides’ heroine, as does Orin with Orestes. In psychoanalytic terms, the Mannon siblings display symptoms of the ‘Oedipal’ and the ‘Electra complex’. Promoted by Sigmund Freud, the Oedipal complex assumes that a young boy

Electra through the Looking Glass

123
sexually desires his mother, sees his father as competition which he cannot defeat, identifi es with the male gender as he grows up, and his obsession turns away from its primal maternal source towards more suitable women. Th
e ‘Electra complex’, developed by Freud’s disciple

Carl Jung, posits a comparable process for a young girl. She fi ghts her mother for her father’s aff ections until she realizes that she cannot win, then identifi es with the female gender as she grows up and looks for men other than her father to fulfi l her desires. 30

Like Euripides’ Electra ( El . 1102–4), O’Neill’s Lavinia prefers the patriarchal Ezra to the less than maternal Christine. However, she sees her mother as a rival not for her father, but for Adam Brant, to whom she is sexually attracted. Here O’Neill develops an idea implicit in Euripides – Electra’s interest in Aegisthus’s sexual life as her mother’s

‘kept man’ (Eur. El . 945–49). For his part, Orin incestuously desires his mother and becomes murderously jealous when he learns of her aff air with Brant. In terms of Euripides’ Electra , we might compare Orestes’

disgust that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are breeding more children ( El . 626), and his encouragement that Electra despoil Aegisthus’s corpse ( El . 896 – 9).

Resembling Orestes aft er the matricide, Orin is consumed with guilt following his mother’s suicide. He then tries to transfer his sexual desire to his sister, but Lavinia rejects his overtures, and Orin kills himself.

Lavinia soldiers on by shutting herself up in the accursed house of the Mannons, alone with the ghosts and the memories. In his Electra , Euripides challenges the ancient myth of heroic vengeance; in Mourning Becomes Electra , O’Neill embraces the modern myth of family- bred psychological fate.

For all of its impact on American drama, Greek tragedy has exerted far greater infl uence on French theatre and culture. From the Late Renaissance onwards, French artists, composers, and playwrights have turned to tragic myth for inspiration – the operas of Lully, Charpentier, Rameau, Gluck, Berlioz, and Off enbach; the neoclassical tragedies of Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, and Cr é billon (his É lectre appeared in 1709); and later adaptations by Giraudoux, Cocteau, Anouilh, and Sartre. In

124

Euripides: Electra

1937, Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944) produced his É lectre , the fi rst French play in centuries with a strong connection to Euripides’ Electra . 31

A drama of striking originality, Giraudoux’s

É lectre
draws on

Aeschylus and Sophocles, but owes its biggest classical debt to Euripides.

É gisthe tries to marry off É lectre to the palace gardener; the young woman hates her mother and drives the reluctant Oreste to murder; the intractable relationship between mythic inheritance and individual choice remains problematic until the end. A similar issue arises in Euripides’ tragedy, whose heroine clings to an unreal vision of her heroic brother, and to an unquestioning sense of the justice of matricidal revenge. Th
ese articles of faith shatter with Electra’s horror at what she and Orestes have done. In Giraudoux’s version, however, É lectre remains unwavering in her commitment to righting perceived wrongs until the bitter end.

Like Euripides, Giraudoux incorporates ironic twists and comic
elements that unsettle the tragic mood, yet paradoxically raise the dramatic stakes. 32 He introduces a small ‘Chorus’ of Eumenides (‘kindly spirits’), the name given to the chthonic forces of vengeance when they are transformed at the end of Aeschylus’s Oresteia .Young girls at the start of the play, they predict that É lectre ‘is going to poison everything with her venom . . . of truth, the only one without an antidote’. 33 When she drives her brother to matricide, they rage at her for forcing them to

‘mature’ into their old roles as Furies who must hound Oreste to madness.

Already committed to punishing her mother,

É
lectre belatedly
discovers that É gisthe and Clytemnestre killed Agamemnon. She now justifi es her life- long loathing of her mother by claiming that she serves an impartial cosmic justice that abides no exceptions. 34 É lectre applies the same law to É gisthe, even though he transforms over the play from a petty tyrant to the only leader that can defend Argos against a foreign invasion. In É lectre’s absolutist view, Oreste must kill Clytemnestre and É gisthe, even though it means the annihilation of Argos. Th
e drama
ends with the city burned to the ground, while É lectre’s sense of justice remains intact. Euripides leaves the city of Argos abandoned; Giraudoux leaves it destroyed.

Electra through the Looking Glass

125

Giraudoux re- imagines Euripides’ Electra as a tangle of lies and deceptions that lead to disaster – lies about the past, about personal motivation, about justice, about purity, about love, about privilege and social class. Although he denies his

É
lectre repentance or regret,

Giraudoux ends his play very much as Euripides does. Argos loses its leaders; Aegisthus and Clytemnestra lie dead; Orestes and Electra are banished. Writing in 1937, when Europe feared the return of cataclysmic violence, Giraudoux delivered a tragedy that was not fated to be one. In so doing, he tapped a strong undercurrent in Euripides’ original. 35

Seven years aft er the premiere of Giraudoux’s play, the Belgian- born novelist and playwright Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) began

É lectre, ou La chute des masques ( Electra , or the Fall of the Masks ). 36 In her foreword to the published text, Yourcenar explains why she chose Euripides’ tragedy as her model: ‘His play corresponded to the taste and the conditions of our time . . . I went to the most somber realist, whose protagonists – hidden away or on the run – are accustomed to an underground way of life, where poverty and humiliation make their hatred venomous’. 37

Forced into marriage with the farmer Th
é odore, Yourcenar’s É lectre
lives on bitterness and hatred. Her motivation for vengeance stems from loss of status; the need to punish her father’s slayers plays a relatively minor role. Like Euripides’ farmer, Th
é odore honours his wife

(and her virginity), even though their fundamental values diff er. Bound to the land, Th
é odore views the natural cycle as worthy of respect and
wonder, and the etymology of his name – ‘gift of god’ – indicates his decent character. É lectre, however, sees nature as a tool she can turn to her own ends: ‘I had my own seasons . . . my poisoned fruit ripening on secret vines’. To have a baby would interfere with her ‘brainchild’: ‘Isn’t this murder our child? . . . Aren’t the odds that I will die of it, covered with blood as though I had given birth’. 38 Th
e parallels with Euripides’

play are striking.

Refl ecting her protagonist’s preference for mental rather than natural fertility, Yourcenar sets the action inside, within the four walls of Th
é odore’s dirt- fl oor cottage. 39 Nature, as it were, is kept at bay. É lectre

126

Euripides: Electra
lures Clytemnestre from the palace with the ruse of a newborn child, and she arrives (like Euripides’ Old Man) with a basket of food. Instead of a meal, however, an angry exchange ensues between mother and daughter. Debunking É lectre’s idealized view of her father, Clytemnestre portrays Agamemnon as a brutal conqueror and ruthless colonizer (shades of Hitler and Mussolini enter into her depiction).

Describing how the teenage É lectre fl irted with É gisthe, provocatively allowing a glimpse of her shoulder and leg, Clytemnestre forces her daughter to admit her sexual attraction to him. Both ashamed and jealous, É lectre cannot forgive her mother for taking É gisthe as her husband and leaving her a miserable marriage with a poor farmer. In Euripides’ play, Electra holds onto Orestes’ sword when he drives it into his mother (Eur. El . 1225); Yourcenar has É lectre kill Clytemnestre by herself, with her own two hands.

A confrontation between Oreste and É gisthe balances the deadly encounter between mother and daughter. Learning of Clytemnestre’s murder, É gisthe informs the young man of the family secret – he, and not Agamemnon, is Oreste’s real father. Filled from childhood with stories of his warrior father Agamemnon, Oreste cannot endure the truth: ‘So I cried for the wrong father since the age of twelve!’ 40 When É gisthe expresses unconditional love for his son, the enraged Orestes stabs him. Th
e dying É gisthe instructs his guards to let É lectre, Oreste, and Pylades leave; he refuses to implicate them in his assassination.

As the subtitle La chute des masques (‘Th
e Fall of the Masks’) indicates,

Yourcenar’s version of the Electra story – much like Giraudoux’s –
consists of a web of deception and lies: by Clytemnestre and É gisthe to their son Oreste; by Oreste to himself, preferring a mythologized Agamemnon to his real father; by Pylade to Oreste, pretending to be a friend while serving as an agent for É gisthe and by Pylade to É gisthe, whom he betrays by helping Oreste with the murder; by É lectre to her mother, inventing a newborn baby, and to herself by never admitting her attraction to É gisthe. Th
e most distressing deception involves the
character of Th
é odore. When he returns from the fi elds, he is arrested as
the party responsible for the murders of É gisthe and Clytemnestre.

Electra through the Looking Glass

127

É lectre has escaped with Pylade and Oreste, but Th
é odore remains ever
loyal. He delivers the closing lines of the play: ‘Th
e angels have
accomplished their butcher’s task . . . I know everything. Nothing occurred without me. I am Electra’s husband’. 41

Like other French writers at the time, Yourcenar turned to Greek tragedy for the strength to keep writing in the face of Nazi terror and the hypocrisy of the Vichy government. Championing patriotic
compromise for the good of France, Marshal P é tain and most of the country accepted the Nazi occupation and more or less did their oppressor’s bidding. Confronting the hollow myth of national honour, Yourcenar found Euripides’ Electra all too relevant. With twisted killers and a phantom Helen, Euripides’ play presented a world that desperately wanted to believe in the past, in its heroes, and in the narratives that supported them. Like Euripides, Yourcenar dared to expose how
misplaced – and dangerous – such faith had become.

In 1962, Cypriot-
born Michael Cacoyannis made a signal
contribution to the reception of Euripides’ Electra with the fi rst fi lm in what became his Trojan trilogy. 42 Shot in black and white on location in ancient Mycenae, Elektra closely follows Euripides’ plot, adding a

‘prequel’ to help modern audiences with the background story.

Cacoyannis opens the fi lm with scenes from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon : the king’s triumphal return from the Trojan War, Clytemnestra’s extravagant welcome, and Agamemnon’s murder (along with Cassandra) in the bath, their death cries echoing off the cold stone walls. Th e fi lm
then moves ahead several years to Electra’s forced marriage to the peasant farmer, her loss of status captured in the long trip on a donkey cart from the palace to the impoverished farmhouse (see Figure 6).

Th
e fi lm gives a realistic sense of hardscrabble country life, with a group of peasant women replacing the eager maidens of Euripides’ Chorus (see Figure 4). Th
e setting emphasizes the wrongs done to Electra, whose
unquenchable hatred is etched into memory by the searing performance of Irene Pappas in the title role. We meet a young (but not self- conscious) Orestes, who returns incognito with Pylades; a vicious Aegisthus, cruel and drunk (his sacrifi ce and banquet to the nymphs resembles a Dionysian

128

Euripides: Electra
orgy); a deeply vain Clytemnestra, whose arrival at the cottage conveys the vastly diff erent worlds of the queen with her Trojan slaves, and the daughter with her village women (see Figure 3). Th
e carefully calibrated
score by Mikis Th
eodorakis never succumbs to Hollywood overkill,
remaining sombre and spare until the murders. Sharp staccatos and rising pitch accompany the violence, which are fi lmed, not narrated, but eschew blood and gore. No gods appear at the end.

Consistent with the setting, a cinematic realism defi nes the fi lm, which leads Cacoyannis to iron out (or eliminate) the elements that make Euripides’ play so challenging: the ironic, occasionally comic tone; the self- dramatization of the main characters; the gap between heroic idealization and mundane reality; the doubts about the oracle and the role of the gods. In place of the Dioskouroi, the fi lm closes with the villagers silhouetted in silence against the landscape, ominous and disapproving of those who brought bloodshed to their community. Th e
privileged aristocrats must leave, or (one suspects) they will be driven out. Pylades and Elektra depart for their life together; in the opposite direction Orestes makes his way towards Athens for his trial and eventual purifi cation. Th
e Greek villagers remain, as stern and timeless
as the Argive hills that loom behind them, bearing witness to a tragedy that seems as inevitable as the earth and the sky.

Th
ese diff erent productions and adaptations of

Electra capture
something of the range of artistic and cultural responses to Euripides’

play, but barely cover the waterfront. Elements from Euripides’ Electra fi nd their way into poems by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, ‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’), Sylvia Plath (‘Daddy’, ‘Azalea Path’), and Marilyn Hacker (‘Elektra on Th
ird Avenue’, ‘For Elektra’), and into novels by Th
omas

Berger ( Orrie’s Story ), Joyce Carol Oates ( Angel of Light ), and Colm T ó ib í n ( House of Names ).

Wherever traces of Euripides’ play may be found, they have a way of pointing us back to the original. I think you will fi nd there, as I have done, a complex, disturbing, and deeply compelling play. At one with the genre of ‘Greek tragedy’, Euripides’ Electra also complicates what we think we mean when we employ that time- honoured term.

Notes

Introduction

1 Emily Vermeule (1959), Philip Vellacott (1963), Janet Lembke and

Kenneth Reckford (1994), James Morwood (1997), and Elizabeth Seydel

Morgan (1998). In 1980, playwright Adrienne Kennedy adapted Electra
and Orestes for a production at the Juilliard School. Th
is powerful
cut- down version follows Euripides’ Electra very closely, but it eliminates
the Farmer prologue (replaced by the Chorus), Orestes’ speech on
nobility, and the appearance of Castor and Polydeuces at the end

(Kennedy 2001).

2 All dates are bc (unless otherwise noted), except in the last chapter dealing
with later productions and adaptations of Electra . Th
e Greek text referred
to is Kovacs (1998), supplemented by Cropp (2013) and Roisman and

Luschnig (2011). Translations are my own, although I draw heavily on

Kovacs (1998). Spelling and transliteration follow popular practice and
aim for ease of recognition. Endnotes with author, date, and page numbers
refer to entries in the References; in the notes, I use cf. in the sense of

‘contrast’.

Chapter 1

1 Some scholars believe women could not attend the theatre; however, cults
and festivals linked to Dionysus generally were open to women (Rehm

2002, 322 n.94). On the complex question of the ‘competence’ of ancient
audiences, see Revermann (2006).

2 On ancient play production, see Rehm (2017, 13–33), Csapo (2007),

Wilson (2000), and Csapo and Slater (1995).

3 For the survival of Greek tragic texts, including Euripides’ Electra , see

Chapter 9.

4 Th
e current remains of the theatre of Dionysus date from the fi rst to the
third centuries ad , some 500–700 years aft er Euripides’ Electra . Visiting the

129

130

Notes to pp. 6–9
theatre now, one must think away the stone seats, the paved semi- circular
orchestra, the stone stage ( prosk ê n ê ,‘proscenium’), and the built- up
modern city of Athens sprawling into the distance. Th
e earliest permanent

(stone) foundations in the theatre date from the fourth century bc , and
archaeologists have found no substantive evidence for the oft -repeated
claim that the original shape of the orch ê stra was circular. Until the
building of the theatre at Epidaurus a century aft er Euripides’ death, no

Greek theatre had a circular playing area or used such a template for
theatre construction. See Rehm (2017, 34–50); also Papastamati-Von

Moock (2015), Csapo (2007), and Moretti (1999–2000).

5 Some think that the corpses were carried out through the central door,
mirroring the removal of Aegisthus’s corpse from the orch ê stra into the
cottage earlier in the play. It seems more likely that Euripides mirrored the
staging in Aeschylus’s Oresteia , which used the ekkukl ê ma to reveal the
corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra in Agamemnon , and those of

Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in Choepori (discussed in Chapter 3).

6 Mastronarde (1990); more generally Dunn (1996). Nine of Euripides’

eighteen surviving plays (few now attribute Rhesus to Euripides) feature
the arrival of a god or gods on high near the end of the play. If one counts
the appearance of Medea in the chariot of Helios, Euripides ends ten of his
tragedies with a deus entry. Gods also appear on high at the start of Trojan

Women and arrive unexpectedly in the middle of Heracles to strike the
hero mad.

7 Th
e performers in the dithyrambic competitions at Athens did not wear
masks, but actors and choruses in tragedy and comedy always did.

8 Drawing on M.M. Bakhtin ( Th
e Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays [1981],

Austin: University of Texas Press, 130–46), Csapo (2002, 139–40) points
out that modern realism ‘strives to reveal character inwardly as a private
and unique essence. But . . . the ancients generally constructed character
outwardly as a public persona defi ned by a broad typology oriented less to
psychological than to sociological distinctions that defi ne one’s é tat civil ’.

Th
is outside- in approach helps explain how ancient actors could play
multiple roles in the same play, oft en in quick succession.

9 Th
e Farmer uses the normal spoken metre in tragedy, iambic trimeter

(three metrical ‘feet’, each consisting of an unstressed- stressed,
unstressed- stressed pattern, with some variants), what we would call
iambic hexameter: six iambic feet, alternating unstressed and stressed

Notes to pp. 9–11

131
syllables. Shakespeare uses a similar form with fi ve metrical feet, iambic
pentameter (‘blank verse’), as in Portia’s lines from Th
e Merchant of Venice :

‘Th
e
qual / i ty / of mer / cy is / not strained ’. On Greek metre generally, see

West (1987); for metre in Electra , Cropp (2013) and Roisman and

Luschnig (2011) provide scansion and commentary.

10 Sifakis (2002, 161 n.33).

11 Aimed to reach out to its audience, Greek tragedy features ‘language
fl edged for fl ight’ (Tony Harrison, ‘A Poet’s Drama,’ lecture at Getty

Museum conference, ‘Contemporary Performance of Greek and

Roman Drama’, 20 June 2002). In the view of actress Fiona Shaw

(2010, xi), ‘A poetic scale of performance makes the actor rise and meet
the language with the spatiality of a stage that does not mimic the
domestic’.

12 Th
e Orestes actor also may have played the Messenger who announces

Orestes’ victory over Aegisthus (Cropp 2013, 13–14; Dickin 2009, 131; cf.

Marshall 1999–2000, 337–40). However, only twenty- one lines separate
the Messenger’s exit from Orestes’ entrance, making for a very quick
change.

13 I use ‘Chorus’ for the performers (understood as a plural entity), ‘chorus’

for the lyric that they perform. See Gould (1996), Goldhill (1996), Foley

(2003), and Rehm (2017, 59–69) on the various functions of the tragic

Chorus.

14 In only fi ve extant tragedies does the Chorus leave the stage and return
later: Aeschylus’s Eumenides , Sophocles’ Ajax , Euripides’ Alcestis and

Helen , and the fourth- century Rhesus . Euripides plays with this possibility
in Electra when, at the sight of strange men (Orestes and Pylades), Electra
tells the Chorus to fl ee ‘down the track’ while she runs into the cottage ( El .

215–19). Assurances from the (disguised) Orestes keep either departure
from taking place; see Arnott (1973, 53–54).

15 At one point the Chorus of Electra actually refer to this accompaniment

( El . 435), calling attention to their own role as performers in the play.

Euripides uses this technique (discussed further in Chapters 4 and 8) to
encourage the audience to think about how the story gets told.

16 Born in 480 bc , either on the island of Salamis or in the Athenian deme

( d ê mos ,‘borough’) of Phylla, Euripides died in Macedonia in 406. No one
knows why he left Athens near the end of his life for the court of Archelaus
in northern Greece, but he did present a tragedy there ( Archelaus , named

132

Notes to pp. 11–19
for the ruler’s ancestor). On Euripides’ ancient biography (much of it
suspect), see Scodel (2017) and Lefk owitz (2012, 87–103). Ancient sources
credit Euripides with some ninety- fi ve plays.

17 Dickin (2009, 53–86); more generally, de Jong (1991) and Barrett (2002).

18 Zeitlin (1970) examines the role of Hera and the Argive Heraion in the
play. Electra refuses to participate in the festival dance of brides- to-be,
even as she joins the lyric of her friends, an irony that accentuates the
diff erence between her and the Chorus (Weiss 2018, 69–73).

19 For the aulos used for marching, rowing, and other activities, see West

(1992, 28–30); also Csapo (1999).

20 A formal debate ( ag ô n ) occurs frequently in Euripides (Lloyd 1992, esp.

1–36, 55–70; Collard 1975). In Electra , he uses fi ft h- century Athenian legal
language for the punishment of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra ( El . 484, 668,

953 ). See Kells (1966) and Cropp (2013, on 668).

Chapter 2

1 Aristotle, Poetics 1450a 15–16; Golden and Hardison (1981, 13 and

127–31).

2 I avoid the word ‘act’ because of its associations with later European
drama, structured around the rise and fall of a curtain, or a series of
blackouts, marking the beginning and end of each section. Greek
tragedy does not share in this convention and is not constructed in
this way.

3 Th
e manuscripts and papyrus fragments show no such divisions, only the
metrical shift s from dialogue to lyric metre, and an occasional mark to
indicate the change of speaker (rarely named, requiring editors to assign
speakers from the context). Th
e folios and quartos of Shakespeare also
indicate no act or scene breaks. Modern editors have invented these tools
to help fi nd specifi c scenes and passages in the text.

4 Brecht (2015, 109–10, 117, 122–25).

5 Th
ese time indicators do not imply that performances at the City Dionysia
began at sunrise, a practical impossibility given the size of the audience,
the performers’ preparation, the logistics of animal wrangling, the
pre- performance ceremonies, etc.

Notes to pp. 19–21

133

6 Tracking servants across the play requires care. Some think Electra has a
servant, pointing to the lines ‘Take this jug off my head’ ( El . 140), but the

Scholiast (an anonymous ancient commentator) has it right: ‘Electra says
this to herself ’ (Roisman and Luschnig 2011, on 140). Two servants
accompany Orestes and Pylades on their initial entrance; the Farmer
addresses them at 360–61. One of these returns as the Messenger, a
speaking part played either by the Orestes’ actor wearing the servant’s
mask, or the actor who played the Farmer and the Old Man. Th
e latter
actor returns as Clytemnestra, and then later as Castor. Two servants
bring on the body of Aegisthus, one of Orestes’ original servants and
another mute actor, perhaps understood to be one of Aegisthus’s men
who now supports Orestes (851–53). When ordered by Orestes (959–61),
they take Aegisthus’s body off stage, probably accompanied by Pylades.

We are meant to forget their presence in the cottage during the
matricide, one of many examples of tragedy’s disinterest in strict
dramatic realism.

7 Th
is is most likely the great Argive Heraia, celebrated every four years in
the spring. Th
e Heraia festival featured games and ritual ploughing with a
team of oxen, an act associated with fertility, both agricultural and human.

Th
e practice also refers to the festival’s foundation in honour of Kleobis
and Biton, the dutiful sons of the priestess of Hera (Herodotus 1.31).

When oxen could not be found, they yoked themselves to their mother’s
cart and pulled her six miles to arrive at the festival on time. Th
e priestess
prayed to Hera to bestow on her sons the greatest of gift s, and her wish
was granted: their deaths. Th
e irony seems inescapable – in Electra , the
children bestow that ‘gift ’ on their mother.

8 By moving from lyric into dialogue metre, Euripides uses the two lines of
the Chorus and two lines of Electra, to mark a shift in the action, back (as
it were) to the plot.

9 Th
e exchange between Orestes and Electra runs seventy lines. Euripides
goes further in his Ion , when a long- separated mother and son share over
one hundred lines of stichomythia (the longest such passage in tragedy),
with no recognition at the end.

10 Electra’s speech features a high number of resolutions (irregularities in the
normal dialogue metre), indicating her agitation (Roisman and Luschnig

2011, on 300–38).

134

Notes to pp. 23–33

11 Th
e Chorus do not describe the famous shield forged by Hephaestus in

Iliad 18, but the armour presented to the young Achilles before he sets off
for Troy.

12 Here Euripides parodies the recognition scene from Aeschylus’s Choephori ,
discussed in Chapter 3.

13 ‘In this the shortest of all recognition scenes [in tragedy], no terms of
endearment, no personal appellations are exchanged’ (Hartigan 1991,

114).

14 Electra uses a beacon image a hundred lines later for news of Orestes’

encounter with Aegisthus, perhaps a reference to Clytemnestra’s ‘fi re
speech’ in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (Roisman and Luschnig 2011, on

585–89).

15 Electra’s interruption of the rapid dialogue between Orestes and the Old

Man demonstrates her ‘take- charge’ attitude vis- à -vis the matricide.

16 ‘In the three tragedians there are twenty- six messengers and heralds who
enter a play to give extended information. Th
is is the only one not trusted
on sight’ (Gellie 1981, 4). Arnott (1973, 50–53) shrewdly analyses this and
other ‘red- herrings’ in the play.

17 Orestes may have cut off Aegisthus’s head, a possibility dealt with in detail
in Chapter 6.

18 Th
e father of Pelops (and great- grandfather of Agamemnon), Tantalus was
a mortal son of Zeus. He off ended the gods so greatly (the exact crime
remains unclear) that aft er his death they condemned him to eternal
punishment in Hades, where he was ‘tantalized’ with food and drink that
always remained just out of reach.

19 Not named here (or by Euripides in Orestes 1645–46), the town was

Orestheion, located near the source of the Alpheus river, which also fl ows
through Olympia ( El . 781–82). See Th
ucydides 5.6.34 and Herodotus 9.11.

Chapter 3

1 Th
e fact that Greek tragedies reiterate earlier versions of the myth and
accept their basic structure suggests to some that the genre demonstrates
the impossibility of social and political progress. ‘Th
e whole drama is

“scarred,” both made and marred by its inescapable relations to anterior

Notes to pp. 33–36

135
texts’ (Goff 1991, 261). For Wohl (2015, 87), ‘ Electra suggests that tragic
form, far from instantiating a “utopian tendency,” instead smothers it’.

Artistic form and content are indeed intertwined; however, common sense
tells us that the shape of the bottle does not necessarily determine its
contents.

2 Garvie (1988, ix–xxvi, ‘Th
e Story before Aeschylus’) provides a thorough
account; also Cropp (2013, 20–31), March (1987, 79–118, focusing on

Clytemnestra), and Swift (2015).

3 Euripides’ Electra incorporates several elements from Homer’s Odyssey .

Th
e Farmer’s hut and his welcome recall the hospitality shown by the
swineherd Eumaeus to Odysseus (disguised as a beggar); Orestes’ scar
brings to mind the lesion that betrays Odysseus’s identity to his old nurse

Eurykleia (H. Od . 19.388–475); the drunk, lascivious Aegisthus (Eur. El .

326–31) conjures up the suitors on Ithaca; Orestes’ murder of Aegisthus at
a feast reverses Aegisthus’s murder of Agamemnon at a welcoming
banquet (H. Od . 11.409–15) . See Davidson (1999–2000, 120–22), Goff

(1991), Michelini (1987, 185–86), Cropp (1986, 189–96), and Tarkow

(1981). Neither the character of Electra nor the murder of Clytemnestra
appears in the Homeric account.

4 Th
e Epic Cycle (Davies 1989); Xanthus’s and Stesichorus’s Oresteia ’s

(Campbell 1991, 26–27, 127–33). On the genesis of ‘Electra’ as the name of

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s younger daughter, see Moreau (1984, esp.

64–78).

5 Prag 1985. Scholars reasonably assume that a revival of Aeschylus’s

Oresteia occurred in Athens around 425 bc . See Marshall (2017, 46–52,
drawing on Ar. Acharnians 9–11 and Ar. Frogs 868–69) and Hammond

(1984, 386–87, referring to vase paintings); cf. Biles (2006–7). On
fi ft h- century re- performances of Aeschylus generally, see Lamari (2017,

18, 58–77).

6 Which of the two Electra ’s came fi rst remains in doubt. For Finglass (2007,

2), the uncertainty of dating Sophocles’ Electra precludes ‘even a
provisional decision’ on priority, and Cropp (2013, 26–28, 31–33) concurs.

Based on resolutions in the iambic trimeter line, some argue that

Euripides’ play likely came fi rst (Lloyd 2005, 17–18, 31; March 2001, 20–22
and 1987, 115–16; Harder 1995, 15). Others think Sophocles’ tragedy is
probably earlier (Roisman and Luschnig 2011, 30–32; Michelini 1987,

185–87, 199–202; Bernard 1985, 245–46; Conacher 1967, 202–3, n.9;

136

Notes to pp. 36–38

Denniston 1939, xxxiv–xxxix). Without direct evidence, even metrical
dating is problematic – out of 120 plays by Sophocles, merely seven survive
intact; out of roughly ninety- fi ve by Euripides, only eighteen are extant.

7 Cropp (2013 on 518–44) summarizes the various opinions on Euripides’

use of Aeschylus’s recognition scene, with extensive bibliography. See
also Roisman and Luschnig (2011 on 522–44), Ronnet (1975), and

Torrance (2011).

8 Euripides refers to this scene again in Orestes (408 bc ). Electra asks
her ailing brother, ‘Would you like me to set your feet on the ground? /

It’s a long time since you made a footprint’ (Eur. Or . 233 –34; see Wright

2008, 121).

9 Onstage with Orestes for some two hundred lines, Electra fails to notice
the scar; she only sees it when the Old Man points it out. Unlike Odysseus,
whose scar came from a wild boar during a dangerous hunt (above n.3),

Orestes fell when chasing a pet deer, a most unheroic adventure (Tarkow

1981, 144; Goff 1991, 260). For a comparison of the recognition of Orestes
in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, see McClure (2015, 219–29) and

Zeitlin (2012).

10 von Schlegel (1815, 235) saw Euripides as ‘the precursor of the new
comedy’, an idea developed in a seminal article by Knox (1979). In the
recognition scene, ‘the comic rudely interjects itself into the tragic mode’

(Michelini 1987, 206); the country setting ‘conf è re á la pi è ce une tonalit é
tr è s pariculi è re’ (Bernard 1985, 248); the domestic feel of the Farmer/

Electra exchanges suggests an ‘assimilation of the comic universe’

(Michelini 1987, 100); the play shows Euripides’ penchant ‘for making
sophisticated jokes at the expense of gods, of Aeschylus, and of stage
conventions’ (Winnington-Ingram 1969, 132; also Gellie 1981; Goff

1999–2000). For all of Euripides’ experiments with comic and parodic
tonalities, Mastronarde (1999–2000) rightly insists that the ancient genre
of tragedy had no trouble encompassing them. Aft er all, Aristotle refers to

Euripides as ‘the most tragic’ of the playwrights ( Poetics 1453a 30).

11 In Aeschylus and Sophocles, Orestes must insinuate himself into the
palace. Euripides, however, turns this problem inside out, for Orestes ‘has
to bring the victim to the killers’ (Carey 2008, 96).

12 As Halporn (1983, 114) puts it, ‘At the end of the play there is a tie of blood
between Electra and Orestes; it is not the blood of the father in their veins,
but the blood of the mother on their hands’. Segal (1985, 22) emphasizes

Notes to pp. 38–45

137
the ‘atmosphere of internal doubt, guilt, self- pollution, and self- disgust’

that diff erentiates the matricide in Euripides from those in Aeschylus and

Sophocles.

13 At line 360 the Farmer tells Orestes’ servants to bring his belongings inside,
but Orestes and his entourage don’t enter until line 400. Perhaps the
servants look for a sign from their master that they must enter the hovel;

Orestes responds with a speech explaining indirectly why they should
swallow their pride. Denniston (1939 on 396–98) fi nds Orestes’ tone ‘a little
ungracious. His enthusiasm for the noble Farmer seems to have cooled’.

14 Vernant (1972, 285).

15 Th
e word occurs some twenty- three times, oft en with great emphasis.

Aft er the matricide, Orestes returns to the stage crying out, ‘O Earth [ Ga ]

and Zeus who sees all / mortal acts, look on this deed of bloodshed / and
pollution . . .’ (Eur. El . 1177–79). Another word for ‘ground’, chth ô n , occurs
eight times in the play. Castor’s uses it for the chasm at the base of the

Areopagus where the city will establish a cult for the Furies (1271), again
linking the end of Electra to that of Aeschylus’s Eumenides .

16 In his Trojan Women , Euripides employs a similar phrase for the end of the
war, dekaspor ô i chron ô i (20), literally ‘in the tenth- sowing year’.

17 Built on reciprocity of giving and receiving, Greek religion depended on
animal sacrifi ce, which also provided meat for human consumption – only
the fat of the victims was off ered to the gods. At the Argive Heraia, to
which the Chorus invite Electra, a hundred oxen were sacrifi ced, giving
the festival its popular name, Hekatombaia (‘one- hundred bulls’).

18 For a summary of the dating controversy, see Roisman and Luschnig

(2011, 28–32); also Cropp (2013, 25–28, and on 998–1123).

19 Both Sophocles’ funerary urn and Euripides’ water jug may have reminded
audiences of the ritual vessels brought by Electra and the Chorus in

Aeschylus’s Choephoroi . In Euripides, however, Electra’s prop serves only
pragmatic needs. See Hammond (1984, 378–81), Luschnig (1995, 89–93),

Easterling (1997, 168–69), and Stieber (2009, 249–50).

Chapter 4

1 Grube (1941, 314).

138

Notes to pp. 45–48

2 Aristotle, Poetics 1450b 27–33; Golden and Hardison (1981, 14 and

139–42).

3 Some ‘performance studies’ theorists argue that performance informs
every aspect of human life; a performance that appears to end simply
morphs into another performance, ad infi nitum , or ad nauseam ,
depending on whether this process takes us deeper into the world, or
keeps us circulating endlessly on its surface; see R. Rehm (2003), Radical

Th
eatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World , London: Duckworth, 9–16.

4 Stieber (2009).

5 Goldhill (1986a, 163).

6 Michelini (1987, 187) considers eugenia (‘nobility’, ‘good- breeding’) the
major theme of Electra .

7 His prologue has ‘the longest delay before identifi cation [of the speaker] of
any extant Euripidean play’ (Hartigan 1991, 108 n.6).

8 Because the Greeks valued fi nancial independence, ‘the man who farms
his own land is his own man, unlike the craft sman, the market trader or
the hired hand . . . for Euripides the character of the farmer came loaded
with ideological implications’ (Carey 2008, 101). See Burford (1993,

167–72) on the positive valence of land- based independence in ancient

Greece; also Denniston (1939, on 253, and on 367–72) and Blaicklock

(1952, 175–76).

9 Vermeule (1959, 3) refers to the ‘double vision’ at work in the play:

‘Electra’s image of the truth, and the truth itself, stubbornly refuse to
match’. Luschnig (1995, 109) agrees: ‘Sadly no one really lives up to her
vision and she must invent a self and the other characters who will play the
roles suitable to her tragedy’. Hartigan (1991, 122) writes that ‘Elektra sees
a glorious avenger, a tomb- desecrating usurper, a gleefully luxuriating and
coldhearted queen . . . But . . . Euripides has presented us with a cowardly

Orestes, a genial, if unhappy, Aigisthos, a self- deprecating somewhat
motherly Klytaimnestra’. For similar views on Electra, see Burian (1997,

180), Tarkow (1981, 150–51), Arnott (1981, 185–86), Conacher (1967,

204–10), O’Brien (1964, 36), Adams (1935), England (1926), and Sheppard

(1918). Th
ose who interpret Electra more sympathetically include Ringer

(2016, 147–56), Lloyd (1986, 1–10), Zeitlin (1970, 647–51), and Bates

(1930, 89), who sees Electra as ‘a young woman of a gentle nature who has
been deeply wronged by her mother’. For a useful comparison of Euripides
and Sophocles’ portrayal of their title character, see Harder (1995).

Notes to pp. 49–53

139

10 Michelini (1987, 209), Conacher (1967, 208), Grube (1941, 300–3).

11 Denniston (1939, on 71–73). Barlow (2008, 54) calls attention to Electra’s

‘self- conscious . . . romantic posturing’, as do many others.

12 Something similar occurs in Euripides’ Bacchae (215–48). Pentheus enters
and delivers a tirade against the Th
eban maenads, failing to notice the
presence of Cadmus and Teiresias, already onstage for forty- fi ve lines.

13 ‘Electra feels her poverty more now because it can be seen by others’

(Roisman and Luschnig 2011, on 403–31).

14 ‘Fear has infected all the major characters to a degree unknown in the
corresponding plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles’ (O’Brien 1964, 18).

Aegisthus is so characterized (Eur. El . 22–23, 25–26, 39, 617, 831–35), as is

Orestes (336–38, 982), Clytemnestra (30, 643, 1114), and Electra (216–21,

686–92, 695–98, 757–59, 911–12).

15 Electra asks her mother, ‘Why, aft er killing your husband didn’t you / hand
over the ancestral home to us?’ ( El . 1088–89). As Conacher (1967, 208)

puts it, ‘She is vexed to the point of murder by the loss of her patrimony’.

See more generally Griffi
n (2008).

16 On Electra’s sudden change, von Schlegel (1815, 172) thinks that her

‘repentance . . . arises from no moral feeling, but merely from a
commotion of the senses’. Cf. Walsh (1977, 286): ‘Electra blames herself . . .

and rightly, because she knows best that she killed Clytemnestra not
because Apollo demanded it, but because she desired it herself ’.

17 In Hecuba , Trojan Women , and Ion , Euripides also has a character sing a
monody before the Chorus’s parodos , but only Electra performs a strophic
song, as if playing both parts in a call- and-response dirge (Roisman and

Luschnig 2011, on 112–13; also on 125 and 140).

18 Th
ese diff erences may refl ect their relative ages. In this play, Orestes seems
the younger, as he does in Euripides’ Orestes , but not in his Iphigeneia in

Aulis (Roisman and Luschnig 2011, 254–55).

19 ‘Th
e young Argive aristocrat convicts himself out of his own mouth’

(Adams 1935, 120); ‘a talker and a poseur , he dramatises himself ’

(Blaicklock 1952, 168); Orestes is ‘the touchstone that proves the case’

(Hartigan 1991, 110); ‘Th
e failure of Orestes to realize the applicability of
these arguments to his own behaviour and noble birth off ers a typically

Euripidean sardonic comment on the distance between words and the
world’ (Goldhill 1986, 228–29).

20 Roisman and Luschnig (2011, on 671–84).

140

Notes to pp. 53–56

21 Th
e noun that Orestes applies to the oracle, amathia , has many meanings –

‘senselessness’, ‘stupidity’, ‘ignorance’, ‘foolishness’, ‘lack of inner feeling’ –
all of which fi t the context.

22 Electra shames Aegisthus in similar fashion: ‘I don’t like girlish men, but
ones who are manly’ ( andreiou , 949). When she calls Orestes a coward, she
uses the term ‘un- manly’ ( anandrian , 982).

23 Moreau (1984, 76) sees Pylades as Orestes’ ‘double’, because Electra greets
him as her brother’s equal following Aegisthus’s murder. However, Electra
expresses no excitement or interest in her imminent union with Pylades at
the end of the play.

24 Female Choruses sympathetic to the heroine appear oft en in Euripides; of
eighteen extant plays, only four ( Heracles , Children of Heracles , Alcestis ,

Cyclops ) have a male Chorus.

25 Electra’s word- choice sounds forced; the Chorus live far from city, with
little knowledge of what goes on there ( El . 298–99). Th
ey learn of the
upcoming festival in Argos from a mountain dweller from Mycenae, who
spread the news to the hinterland (169–74).

26 Th
ese choruses employ ‘New Music’, a lyric style popular in Athens
towards the end of the fi ft h century. Th
ese songs value word pictures over
structure, and sensual detail over logical narrative. Th
ey feature compound
adjectives full of colour and sound, and adopt a singing style called

‘melism’, where a syllable might extend over several notes (Csapo 2003,
esp. 71–74, 94–95; also Cropp 2013, on 432–86; and Csapo 1999–2000).

For useful readings of the fi rst stasimon , emphasizing the change from
idyllic heroism to grisly violence, see Csapo (2009), Morwood (1981),

King (1980), and Walsh (1977). According to Walsh (1977, 278), ‘the
contrast between ode and what precedes it produces something like

Verfremdungseff ekt ’ (Bertolt Brecht’s term for ‘distancing’ or ‘making
strange’). Brecht developed this technique to keep the audience alert to the
manner of the story’s unfolding, preventing them from abandoning their
critical judgement to the momentum of the plot, and from losing
themselves in sentimental sympathy with the characters (Brecht 2015,

101–8, 143–46, 166–67, 181–98, 241–42, 251–54).

27 Th
e Chorus’s change is ‘partly an echo of the inconsistency that Euripides
builds into his tragic world, and partly a traditional privilege of the chorus
position . . ., serving both intradramatic and extradramatic goals’

(Mastronarde 2010, 121; also Foley 2003).

Notes to pp. 56–60

141

28 Th
e Greeks called the dolphin’s blowhole an aulos , associating the mammal’s
breathing to a kind of sea- music (Aristotle, History of Animals , 537a- b).

29 Th
e repetition (at El . 503, 524, 553, 566, 570, 577, 598, 618, 651, 664)

drives the point home. Old people feature prominently in Euripides’

tragedies: the Chorus in Heracles , Iolaus in Children of Heracles , Peleus in

Andromache , the aged veteran in Iphigenia in Aulis , Creusa’s Tutor in Ion .

Although not decrepit, Hecuba ( Hecuba , Trojan Women ), Iphis ( Suppliant

Women ), Jocasta ( Phoenician Women ), Pheres ( Alcestis ), and Silenus

( Cyclops ) all speak of the diffi
culties of old age.

30 Th
e Old Man unconsciously echoes Electra’s line to Orestes: ‘Once I have
shed my mother’s blood, then let me die’ (281).

31 Th
e Tutor in Ion , the Old Man in Iphigenia in Aulis , and Iolaus in Children
of Heracles also fi nd their strength restored by a new mission (murder plot,
a letter to deliver, an impending battle).

32 Oft en in tragedy, the actor playing the Messenger will narrate the suff ering
of a character he played earlier, and the Orestes actor could have played the

Messenger (Chapter 1, note 12). If so, Electra would fail to recognize the
same actor twice – fi rst when playing Orestes (in their initial encounter),
then as Orestes’ servant (who reports her brother’s victory). See Luschnig

(1995, 131 n.105).

33 Electra quotes Aegisthus earlier in the play ( El . 330–31), perhaps providing
the template for his ‘sound’. De Jong (1991, 132–34, 153–54, 161–62)

analyses the way the Messenger ‘focalizes’ his account, privileging one
point of view over another.

34 Th
ey also learn of the shield of Achilles from a sailor in the port of Nauplion

( El . 452–53), a detail picked up when Castor announces that Helen and

Menelaus have just arrived at Nauplion (1278–79). In this way, Euripides
subtly ‘frames’ the news of the beginning and the end of the Trojan War.

35 De Jong (2003, 382–88).

36 According to Henrichs (2000, 187), ‘Th
is is arguably the most graphic
account of a homicide in the extant plays of Euripides’. For some,

Aegisthus’s death simply represents the tyrant’s long- overdue punishment

(Lloyd 1986, 15–16; Gellie 1981, 6). In Burnett’s view (1998, 235), the word

‘convulsions’ (used for deaths in Homer) even adds a heroic dimension to

Orestes’ deed. However, Homeric deaths generally occur in battle, face to
face, not at a sacrifi ce with a cleaver brought down on the victim’s back.

Th
e garden- like setting, Aegisthus’s hospitality as host, the sacrifi ce that

142

Notes to pp. 60–65
shift s from animal to human victim, and the visceral details raise serious
doubts about the justice meted out by Orestes. See Verheij (2016, 769–77),

Sourvinou-Inwood (2003, 346–47, 349), de Jong (2003, 384–88), Raeburn

(2000, 160–62), Porter (1990, 255–60, 275–78), Easterling (1988, 101–7),
and Arnott (1981, 181–83).

37 Foley (2001, 234–42) provides a useful comparison of the several tragic

Clytemnestras.

38 Th
e Latin name for Polydeuces is Pollux, which gives us the names for the
prominent stars in the constellation Gemini, namely Castor and Pollux.

39 Th
e temple to the twin- gods in Agrigento, Sicily, dating from the mid- fi ft h
century bc , seems to have honoured the Dioskouroi, which could explain

Castor’s reference to returning to the sea around Sicily. In their role as
protectors of sailors, the twins also appear ex machina at the end of

Euripides’ Helen (1495–1505, 1664).

40 ‘Castor and Pollux appear to make the best of a bad job’ (England 1926,

104); Castor’s ‘aborted attempt to explain Apollo’s purpose underlines the
pointless nature of the matricide’ (Dunn 1996, 139). See also Morwood

(2002, 42–43), Hartigan (1991, 123–26), Whitman (1974, 133), Conacher

(1967, 209–10), and McDermott (1984, 107), who sees only ‘moral chaos’

at the end of the play. However, some scholars think that Castor and

Polydeuces present ‘a more balanced understanding of the workings of

Justice than is given to man in the entanglement of action and passion’

(Zuntz 1955, 68), a view shared by Van Emde Boas (2017, 159–64) and

Cropp (2013, 11–12; but cf. on 1238–91). And ú jar (2016) emphasizes the
irresolvable tension between the Dioskouroi’s divine status and their
familial concern for their mortal relatives.

41 Euripides’ Helen , 1642–79. Th
e version of the story in which a phantom

Helen goes to Troy (rather than the woman herself) fi rst appears in the
early sixth- century bc Palinode by Stesichorus; his Oresteia is discussed in

Chapter 3.

Chapter 5

1 Herington (1985, esp. 1–40) provides the classic account of the infl uence
of earlier Greek poetry (much of it sung and accompanied) on the

Notes to pp. 65–67

143
development of tragedy. Wilson (2002, 39) takes the idea much further:

‘Greek tragedy was a fundamentally musical experience . . . Tragedy was
much closer to what we might term “choral opera” than “theatre” ’. Th
is
view ignores the fact that roughly seventy per cent of the lines in extant
tragedy are in dialogue metre, spoken without instrumental ( aulos )

accompaniment. As for tragic lyric, the sung / chanted poetry by the

Chorus possesses a linguistic complexity much greater than opera libretti,
which tend towards simplicity that allows the words to serve the music.

2 For imagery of gold in the play, see Maxwell-Stuart (1971). Seaford (2004,

153) rightly stresses the diff erence between gold as talisman (the golden
lamb) or as an aspect of identity (Achilles’ shield), and the use of gold as
impersonal ‘money’.

3 Th
e engraved armour of Achilles resembles the shield of Phidias’s ivory
and gold statue of Athena Parthenos that stood in the Parthenon (Csapo

2009, 102–3), well known to the fi ft h- century Athenians. Csapo also notes
that the adjective ‘black’ ( kelaina , El . 477) modifying ‘dust’ is the normal

Homeric epithet for ‘blood’. Th
e dust engraved on the sword evokes the

(black) blood of Hector (named at 469) spilled on the ground when

Achilles drags his corpse around Troy. Th
ese details add to the sense of
waste that comes with Castor’s revelation that the Trojan War was fought
for a phantom.

4 Th
is speech exemplifi es epeideixis , oratory ‘fi t for display’, one of Aristotle’s
three branches of rhetoric ( Art of Rhetoric I.iii.1–3), which aims to convey
praise (on ceremonial occasions) or blame (as here). Aristotle’s Rhetoric
includes seventeen quotations from Euripides, fi ve from Sophocles, and
none from Aeschylus. See Garland (2004, 19); also Scodel (1999–2000)

and van Emde Boas (2017, 130–41).

5 A similar scene occurs in Sophocles’ Electra , where Clytemnestra allows
her daughter to speak (S. El . 556–57), but then silences her aft er she does
so (626–29). Euripides’ Electra demonstrates a keen interest in the
structure of her ‘free’ response to her mother: ‘Th
en I will speak, making
this wish my preamble’ ( prooimion , 1060), the term used by orators for the
formal opening of a public address (Roisman 2004, and Mossman 2001).

On rhetoric in Euripides, see Conacher (1981 and 1998), Goldhill (1986a),
and Gallagher (2003, esp. 406–12), who emphasizes the sophistic qualities
of Electra’s speech. For Sophistic infl uence in Euripides generally, see de

Romilly (1992, passim ).

144

Notes to pp. 68–73

6 Electra uses the same word ( charita , 61) for Clytemnestra’s ‘gift ’ to

Aegisthus, when she cast her daughter out of the house.

7 Denniston (1939, on 337) thinks that such repetition by Euripides ‘oft en
degenerates into a mannerism’. Roisman and Luschnig (2011, on 89) argue
that Orestes uses verbal repetition to help mask his identity. On this
tendency in Euripidean choral lyric, see Breitenbach (1934, 214–26).

8 Castor delivers some twelve imperatives; the play includes sixty- one
others, as well as six self- exhortations and two second- person
prohibitions (Roisman and Luschnig 2011, on 112–13). Th
e god also
refers to eighteen places by name, pointing to the diaspora that lies
ahead, but also bookending the Farmer’s prologue, with its plethora
of place names (see Chapter 2, ‘Th
e Farmer’; also Roisman and Luschnig

2011, on 1312–13).

9 Before her union with Aegisthus in Hades, Clytemnestra recounts another
marriage to death – that of her daughter Iphigenia, sacrifi ced by

Agamemnon at Aulis under the smokescreen of a wedding to Achilles ( El .

1020–29). Greek tragedy oft en treats this subject; see Rehm (1994) and

Seaford (1986 and 1987).

10 Euripides deals with this story in Iphigenia in Aulis , beautifully presented
in Michael Cacoyannis’s fi lm Iphigenia . We discuss Cacoyannis’s Electra ,
the fi rst fi lm in his ‘Trojan trilogy’, in Chapter 9.

11 Nemea lies only twenty miles from Argos; Isthmia is thirty miles away.

Orestes will pass through Isthmia ( El . 1288) on his way to Athens.

Olympia lies further west in the Peloponnese; Orestes tells Aegisthus he
and Pylades are heading there for the games (781–82). Delphi is the site of

Apollo’s oracle, which Orestes visits (87) before the start of the play.

12 Miller (2004).

13 March (2014, ‘Oenomaus’, ‘Pelops’, with references); Pausanias, Description
of Greece , 5.10.6, 6.21.9–11.

14 Discussed briefl y in Chapter 3, the chariot race in Sophocles’ Electra draws
on this myth (S. El . 504–14); see Finglass (2007) and March (2001) on

504–15. Euripides also refers to the story in Orestes (988–96, 1547–48) and

Helen (386–87).

15 Kraus (1992) sees their assumed Th
essalian identity as a reference to

Achilles, the most famous hero from Th
essaly. His armour provides the
subject of the fi rst stasimon , and Achilles may serve as a model (or foil) for

Orestes.

Notes to pp. 73–80

145

16 Myrick (1994, 138–41, 148).

17 Roisman and Luschnig (2011, on 859–79) note that the Chorus reverse the
standard epinician trope of comparing athletes to mythological characters.

Pindar, the greatest of epinician poets, oft en includes the crowning of
athletic victors ( Ol . 9.84, 13.33; Nem . 4.88; Is . 2.16, 5.62, 8.64; etc.).

18 Seaford (1994), Foley (1985), Zeitlin (1965).

19 Cropp (2013, on 50–53) labels these ‘conclusive refl ections’. Paley (1872,
vi–viii) and van Emde Boas (2017, 40–47, 132–34, 168–71) discuss

‘gnomic’ (proverbial) utterances in the play. On everyday speech in

Euripides, see Aristophanes, Frogs 939–43; Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric III .

2.5; Paley (1872, x–xvi); and Collard (2018, 185–202, 207–13).

Chapter 6

1 Aristotle ( Poetics 1449a 18) mentions scene painting, presumably on wood
or canvas, removable from the wooden sk ê n ê building. Th
is scenic element
may have diff erentiated the settings between individual plays, although not
as extensively as some scholars imagine. During the City Dionysia, the
sk ê n ê building provided the backdrop for three diff erent tragedies and a
satyr play on each day of the tragic competitions, and for fi ve comedies

(each by a diff erent playwright) on the day devoted to comedy. Given these
constraints, language off ered the most eff ective means by which the
tragedians could create the visual world of their plays. Elaborately
designed sets can lead contemporary audiences to fi nd the verbal
description in Greek tragedy redundant, or a sign of bad playwriting.

2 Th
ese distances are virtual, not real; to walk from the northern border of

Argos (where Euripides locates the cottage) to the southern area where the

Tanaus river cuts through Sparta and the Argolid (the old shepherd’s
dwelling) would take two full days. Both Sparta and Argos (an Athenian
ally) claimed this southern border territory during the Peloponnesian War

(Th
ucydides 5.41). Depending on the date of Electra , the reference to this
area may have reminded the fi ft h- century audience of the battles fought
between the Argives and Spartans around 417–16 bc (Roisman and

Luschnig 2011, on 410–11).

3 Th
e word ‘foot / leg’ ( poda ) occurs over twenty times in the play, and verbs
for walking another eleven. In order to convey the physicality in the

146

Notes to pp. 80–81
language, the translations in this section sound purposefully awkward.

In actable English, ‘Aft er we took our feet from this dwelling’ might
come out ‘We left here with purpose’, or ‘When we made our way from
the cottage’. Nevertheless, a good translation of Electra should convey
the physical reality embedded in the ancient Greek language and
experience, something we have lost in our own.

4 Cropp (2013, on 215–99, ‘ staging ’) describes the almost humorous eff ect
of this back- and-forth movement. During the ‘chase’, Electra calls on

Apollo for help. Cropp assumes (on 216–21) that she refers to a small
aniconic column dedicated to Apollo aguieus (‘of the ways’, protecting
comings and goings) that some Greeks placed outside their homes.

Th
is seems unlikely for a poor farmer’s cottage out in the country.

Electra probably calls on Apollo as she might on any god, with the
added signifi cance that Castor later blames the lord of Delphi for the
matricide.

5 Th
e description recalls the famous epithet ‘swift - footed’ that Homer uses
for Achilles, also suggested by Euripides (439 and 451). Given Orestes’

reluctance to identify himself (even among friends), the evocation of the
heroic Achilles seems ironic (Mulryne 1977, 36–37).

6 Th
e Old Man hints at the labour involved in preparing what he brings: he
has ‘pulled the new- born lamb’ from its mother, and taken the cheese

‘from the cheese press’ ( El . 494–96).

7 Worman (2018, 194–98) examines ‘sinister hands’ in Electra . For tragic
corporality generally, see Griffi
th (1998).

8 Euripides does something similar in Hecuba – the Trojan queen wishes
that her hands, hair, arms, and feet could make her plea to Agamemnon
more convincing, because words on their own have failed (Eur. Hec.

836–40).

9 Th
ese references to costume and appearance ‘off er clues to
characterization’ (Wyles 2011, 51–52, 76–77). However, Kubo (1967, 23)

errs in assuming that the Chorus are already dressed for the festival; they
clearly state it will take place ‘two days / from now’ ( El. 171–72), the Greek
meaning for ‘on the third day’. Costume played a key role in the Heraia
festival itself, where Argive maidens presented a new robe to the goddess,
possibly for her ‘sacred marriage’ to Zeus (Cropp 2013, on 165–212).

10 Electra may have learned this skill as a child ( El . 539–42). For weaving and
the recognition scene, see Torrance (2013, 16–19).

Notes to pp. 81–84

147

11 ‘Rags again!’ comments Denniston (1939 on 501); also Muecke 1982. In

Acharnians , Aristophanes mocks Euripides for costuming his characters
this way ( Ach . 410–17).

12 Earlier Electra describes these Asian slaves as wearing ‘rich Trojan robes
with golden brooches / to fasten them’ ( El . 317–18), useful information
for a costume designer working on a production. Stieber (2009, 305, 314,

317–18, 329) looks at the visual contrast between luxury and poverty in
the play.

13 We might compare this pathetic gesture to cover up their crime with that
of Orestes in Choephori , who presents the evidence of Clytemnestra’s guilt
by laying out the net she used to trap Agamemnon in the bath (A. Cho .

980–1004). In Sophocles’ Electra, the disguised Orestes displays a covered
body, which Aegisthus thinks is that of the dead Orestes, until he pulls off
the cover and sees Clytemnestra’s corpse (S. El . 1466–80).

14 Th
e Greeks also associated myrtle with death, fi tting for the way

Aegisthus’s sacrifi ce will end. Electra says that her father’s grave has no
myrtle branches (Eur. El . 324); the Tutor remedies this when he visits

Agamemnon’s tomb (512).

15 It seems likely that the two men remain garlanded throughout the scene
with Aegisthus’s corpse. However, Orestes could off er his ‘crown’ to Apollo

(Cropp 2013, on 890–92); or remove it on entering the cottage, acquiescing
to the matricide (985–87); or throw it away aft er the murder (‘Who would
look on my head?’, 1196), which Burnett (1998, 228 n.10) suggests. As for

Aegisthus, would he still be wearing his myrtle garland when his corpse is
brought on stage? Or did his violent death dislodge it? Euripides gives the
director dramatically powerful choices.

16 Miller (2018, 39) argues that ‘the spectral presence of the loser in the
poetics of athletic victory’ means that the ‘poetry of victory is,
simultaneously, the poetry of defeat’. If so, the ‘spectral loser’ in Electra
lives up to that name, for he appears as a corpse.

17 Sheep take the stage to great comic eff ect in Euripides’ satyr play Cyclops ,
lines 36–83.

18 Kubo (1967, 19–20). What happens to the Old Man’s food and wine, and to

Electra’s jug of water? Perhaps she takes them inside when she goes to
prepare a meal for the strangers ( El. 425). Or the food could remain
onstage, forgotten by the characters, but not by the audience, who see
vestiges of ‘normal life’ that the play will soon leave behind.

148

Notes to pp. 84–86

19 Clytemnestra’s entrance resembles her husband’s arrival in Aeschylus’s

Agamemnon ( Ag . 783–809); he also enters in a horse- drawn wagon,
accompanied by his Trojan slave, Cassandra. For stage vehicles in Electra
and other Greek tragedies, see Ley (2007, 70–83).

20 Off stage props proliferate in the Messenger’s description of Aegisthus’s
sacrifi ce, and Euripides introduces a ‘trail of possible murder weapons’

(Arnott 1973, 56; also de Jong 1991, 161–62).

21 In Chapter 7, we unpack various meanings of hubrizein . Orestes and

Electra’s language recalls Achilles’ violation of Hector’s corpse in the Iliad ,
and Creon’s refusal to bury Polyneices’ body in Sophocles’ Antigone . Th
ese
actions exemplifi ed moral error in the Greek world, where burial of the
dead was sacrosanct. Sophocles’ Electra also suggests that Orestes violate

Aegisthus’s corpse by denying it a proper burial (S. El . 1487–90).

22 Euripides mirrors the end of Aeschylus’s Choephori , when Orestes reveals
the corpses of his victims on the ekkukl ê ma . Unlike Aeschylus (and

Sophocles), Euripides denies Aegisthus and Clytemnestra knowledge of
the other’s fate before they are killed.

23 Th
ese include von Schlegel (1815, 167), Paley (1874 on 894), Headlam

(1901, 99), O’Brien (1964), Conacher (1967, 207), Sider (1977, 16–17),

Mulryne (1977, 36–37), Tarkow (1981, 144–45), Halleran (1985, 15),

Michelini (1987, 214–15), and Hammond (1984, 373–75), who contrasts

Electra carrying her water jug with her holding Aegisthus’s head.

Denniston (1939, on 894–95) thinks that the killers bring Aegisthus’s body
along with his head impaled on a stake, like the Persian Mardonius who
beheads Leonidas aft er Th
ermopylae (Hdt. 9.78.1–9.79.2). Th
ose who
reject decapitation point out that the Messenger says that Orestes brings
back Aegisthus without specifying his head (Kovacs 1987; also Gellie 1981,

11 n.12; Hartigan 1991, 118–19 n.29; Kraus 1992, 161; Marshall 1999–

2000, 334; Raeburn 2000, 161–63; Roisman and Luschnig 2011, on 854–57;

Cropp 2013, on 855–57).

24 A popular motif in Greek art, gorgons were depicted either as a free-
fl oating face or head, usually with snakes for hair, or as a mask- like face
appended to a body. See Phinney (1971).

25 Ogden (2008, 12–17).

26 In Euripides’ Andromeda (produced in 412 along with Helen ), Perseus
carries the gorgon’s head in his bag (Collard, Cropp, and Gibert 2004,
fragments 137 and 142).

Notes to pp. 87–91

149

27 References to Perseus’s story fi t the context of the play, for the hero
eventually founds the city of Mycenae, while maintaining close ties to

Argos, Sparta, and Athens.

28 In Euripides’ Orestes , Orestes taunts the Phrygian slave for ‘being afraid of
turning into stone, as if catching sight of the Gorgon’. Th
e slave replies, ‘No,

I’m afraid of turning into a corpse; I’ve never heard of the Gorgon’s head’

( Or . 1520–21).

29 Later mythographers including Apollodorus (2.1.5) and Pausanias (2.24.2)

report that the Danaids beheaded the Egyptian husbands they were forced
to marry.

30 Foley (1980).

31 Th
e specifi city of Electra’s language refl ects the details of Perseus’s story,
where petrifaction would result from direct mutual eye contact with

Medusa (Ogden 2008, 50–54).

32 Ancient audiences may have recognized a parody of the traditional ritual
lament for the dead. For common elements, see Alexiou (2002, 161–84). In
her monody, Electra laments ‘continually, day by day’ (145). She speaks
similarly to Aegisthus’s corpse: ‘Every morning I never let up / rehearsing
what I wanted to say to your face’ (909–10).

33 Th
e term pros ô pon is the same word used for an actor’s mask. Th
e Chorus
also refer to the ‘pale face’ ( leukon te pros ô pon , 730) and ‘golden face’

( chrys ô pon , 740) of the sun; Orestes describes the sunrise as ‘the white eye

[face] of dawn’ ( leukon omm’ , 102).

34 Several editors bracket lines 685–89, others bracket 688–92, suspecting
interpolation or sensing an otherwise compromised text. Some substitute
h ê par (‘liver’) for kara (‘head’, 688), the innards being the usual location for
a suicidal blow in tragedy. If the lines are by Euripides, however, then
kara – as the less conventional word- choice – is more likely; interpolators
tend to avoid odd or unexpected diction.

Chapter 7

1 As well as the wordplay ( th ê lu / thalos ), the term ‘shoot’ implies off spring,
impossible for a married virgin like Electra (Roisman and Luschnig 2011,
on 14–15). Th
e Farmer fails to mention Agamemnon’s third child,

150

Notes to pp. 91–93

Iphigenia, killed by her father at Aulis. Clytemnestra forcefully reminds us
of her later ( El . 1018–29).

2 As Burnett (1998, 243) points out, Aegisthus’s marriage scheme for Electra
constitutes ‘a plot against her womb, an attempt to control what it might
contain’.

3 In ancient Greece, ‘marriage is for the girl what warfare is for the boy. For
the young girl emerging from childhood it represents the normal goal of
her sex, access to full femininity’ (Vernant 1990, 99).

4 In her diatribe at Aegisthus, some think that Electra simply mouths
accepted truisms about gender propriety (Van Emde Boas 2017, 129–41);
others, that she strives for appropriate ‘female speech’ in a mixed company
of men and women (Mossman 2001, 377–79). But for most readers of the
play, what Electra says – and the strong possibility that she says it to the
head of Aegisthus – makes this ‘an intensely personal speech dominated by
sexual insults . . . [showing] the obsessive nature of Electra’s hatred’ (Cropp

2013, 2; also Roisman and Luschnig 2011, on 914–51; Walton 2009,

146–47; Michelini 1987, 215–17; Arnott 1981, 183–84).

5 Clytemnestra levels the same charge against Helen’s husband, Menelaus, a
man with ‘no idea how to control the wife who betrayed him’ ( El . 1028).

Electra harangues Aegisthus for letting a woman rule the roost, yet she
herself drives the action of the play: ‘She implicitly subverts the gender
hierarchy she explicitly endorses’ (Hall 2010, 263).

6 Note the pointed redundancy of ‘male father’. In Sophocles’ version of the
story, Electra taunts her sister Chrysothemis for this same failing: ‘Instead
of being called / the daughter of the noblest of all men, / you’re known as
the child of your mother’ (S. El . 365–67). Passages like these provide
further evidence that Sophocles and Euripides’ plays were very much in
dialogue.

7 Perhaps Euripides had the Chorus members (male performers wearing
female masks and costumes) nod their assent.

8 Some adaptations of Electra (discussed in Chapter 9) develop the erotic

Aegisthus-Electra attraction hinted at in Euripides’ play.

9 Cropp (2013, 10–11, 24, and on 1139–46) and Foley (2001, 237) note
similarities between Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra and Euripides’ Electra.

Robinson Jeff ers’ Th
e Tower beyond Tragedy and Eugene O’Neill’s

Mourning Becomes Electra (discussed in Chapter 9) develop this
connection.

Notes to pp. 94–97

151

10 In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (638–39) , Clytemnestra says almost the
same thing to her daughter Iphigenia: ‘Of all our children, / you were
always fondest of your father’.

11 Th
e word Electra uses for ‘arranging’ the murder ( exartusomai , 647) is the
same the Farmer uses when he tells her to ‘arrange things’ in the cottage

( exartue , 422). Euripides neatly captures the opposite poles of his Electra,
both a mythic avenger and a farmer’s wife.

12 Weiss (2018, 65–70) observes that Electra’s commitment to lament sets her
apart from the Chorus, even while she shares the lyric with them. Th
e
distinction disappears when the Messenger addresses the Chorus and

Electra collectively as ‘Mycenean maidens, glorious in victory’ ( kallinikoi
parthenoi Muk ê nides , 761).

13 Tragedy incorporates elements of Doric Greek, which uses ê ta ( ê ) instead
of the alpha ( a ) of the Ionic dialect, the vernacular of Euripides’ Athens.

14 Carey (1995, 408–10) and Dover (1974, 207).

15 Electra later claims she is afraid to ‘outrage’ ( hubrizein , El . 902) Aegisthus’s
corpse, and then proceeds to do so.

16 Castor uses the same construction to characterize the ‘unholy wedding’

( anosi ô n numpheumat ô n , 1261, i.e. ‘rape’) of Ares’ daughter by

Halirrhothius, prompting Ares to kill the perpetrator. Th
e murder leads to
the fi rst homicide trial on the Athenian Areopagus.

17 In Aeschylus’s Choephori , Orestes forces Clytemnestra into the palace so he
can kill her by the side of Aegisthus: ‘Sleep with him ( sugkatheud’ ) in
death, since you loved / that man, and hated the man you should have
loved’ (A. Ch . 906–7).

18 We learn later from Castor that Helen never actually went to Troy, so the
myth of her infamous infi delity dissolves, making the deaths at Troy seem
all the more meaningless.

19 Ancient audiences might have recalled the opening of Homer’s Iliad , when

Agamemnon quarrels with Achilles over another captured woman,

Chryseis. Agamemnon says, ‘I rank her higher than Clytemnestra, / my
own wife – she’s no way inferior / in looks, stature, mind, and what she can
do’ (H. Il . 1.113–15).

20 Most readers and scholars agree with March (1990, 63): ‘In no way can he

[Euripides] be called a misogynist’.

21 Larson (2001, 114–15, also 149–51).

22 Michelini (1987, 214); also Hall (2006, 77–80) and Kubo (1967, 28).

152

Notes to pp. 97–98

23 Leitao (2012, 52 –57) thinks that Euripides favours the ‘single seed’ idea of
procreation championed by the sophist Anaxagoras, in which the father is
the only real parent. Th
is seems unlikely, given the emphasis in Electra on
the role of mothers and the horror of matricide. Unaware that women
produced the eggs that sperm impregnated, the Greeks thought that the
male provided the seed for the embryo, and the woman the blood (because
pregnant women stop menstruating, that blood must go to the unborn
child). In spite of their biological confusion, most fi ft h- century Athenians
would have recognized the truth of this passage from a lost tragedy of

Euripides: ‘A mother always loves her children more than a father: / she
knows they are hers; he only thinks so’ (Collard and Cropp 2008, fr. 1015).

24 Neither Aeschylus nor Sophocles mentions Agamemnon’s ploy of a
marriage to Achilles to lure Clytemnestra’s daughter to her death, the
subject of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis .

25 Th
e shepherd describes the lamb as neognon (‘newborn’, 495);

Clytemnestra uses the same word ( neogn ô n , 1108) for Electra’s purported

‘off spring’.

26 In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis (529–30) , the Chorus use the image of a
young animal torn from her dam to symbolize the trauma of a new bride
separated from her mother (Rehm 1994, 74–75; Seaford 1986, 51–54). In

Euripides’ Electra , the lamb lost to her mother obviously suggests

Iphigenia, but it might also apply to Electra.

27 tekein and its cognates also can refer to the father as ‘begetter’, a term

Electra uses once for Agamemnon ( El . 335). But the word occurs far more
frequently in the context of a mother ‘bringing forth’ children:

Clytemnestra, as ‘bearer’ of Aegisthus’s children (62), and as ‘birth- mother’

of Orestes and Electra (116, 264, 640, 1061, 1212); Electra as potential

‘bearer’ of male off spring (22, 26), and who has (fi ctionally) ‘given birth’

(652, 653, 1127, 1129) to one. Sophocles uses the same word when

Clytemnestra cries for mercy from Orestes: ‘O child [one I bore], child

[one I bore], / pity the one who bore you ( o teknon teknon, / oiktire t ê n
tekousan , S. El. 1410–11).

28 Euripides’ Electra uses m ê t ê r (‘mother’) for Clytemnestra, but her

Sophoclean counterpart never does so (Michelini 1987, 218 n.162).

Sophocles downplays the importance of the matricide, saving the ultimate
revenge for Aegisthus.

Notes to pp. 99–101

153

29 Th
at very prospect motivated Aegisthus to marry Electra to the Farmer:

‘He desired to weaken any children that I might bear’ ( tekein m’ eboulet’

asthen ê , Eur. El . 267).

30 Cropp (2013, on 654) explains that the ‘tenth- day sacrifi ce’ following
childbirth was designed to remove the ‘defi lement’ of parturition from the
mother. See Garland (1990, 94–98). Note that Kovacs (1998, n. p. 272) and

Cropp (2013, on 1107–8) transpose lines 1107–8 to follow 1131; cf.

Roisman and Luschnig (2011, on 1107–8).

31 As Hall (1993, 264) observes, ‘It is diffi
cult to appreciate the heroic justice
of reciprocal blood letting when the victim thinks she has just become a
grandmother’.

32 In Aeschylus, the gesture refers back to Clytemnestra’s nightmare, in which
she gives birth to a serpent that feeds at her breast, sucking blood with the
milk (A. Cho . 523–51). In Euripides’ Phoenician Women , Jocasta makes the
same gesture (off stage, as in Electra ) to try to persuade her sons to abandon
their fratricidal combat (Eur. Ph . 1567–69). See generally Damet (2011).

33 Luschnig (1995, 120) points out that ‘Orestes sees more of his mother than
a son should’.

34 Goff (1991, 265).

35 Electra uses the same word demas ,‘physical body’, when she accuses

Orestes of pitying Clytemnestra once he sees her arriving ‘in the fl esh’ ( El .

968).

36 Electra’s clear disinterest in a normal marriage with Pylades undermines
the claim (Zeitlin 2008, 323) that her ‘newborn’ plot arises from her deep
longing to have children.

37 Orestes uses this expression earlier, having heard that his sister ‘is yoked /
in marriage’ ( gamois / zeuchtheisan , El . 98–99). See Seaford (1988, 135–36).

38 As the title of Walton (2009), Euripides Our Contemporary , suggests; over
twenty years earlier, de Romilly (1986) entitled her study of the playwright

La modernit é d’Euripide .

Chapter 8

1 Th
is change of setting provides the starting point for many interpretations
of the play: ‘Euripides’ Electra administers some calculated shocks . . . by

154

Notes to pp. 101–104
setting the play on a poor farm outside Argos’ (Vickers 1973, 588). For

Carey (2008, 99), the stage building as cottage ‘shrinks the heroic world
and creates a more human scale for the action to follow’. Bernard (1985,

245–49) and Rivier (1975, 119–24) focus on the opposition of chôra

(country) and polis (city / palace) in Electra .

2 In his welcome to the strangers, the Farmer ‘elevates’ his ramshackle
home by calling the doorway ‘gates’ ( pulas , 342 and 357). In tragedy,
this term usually refers to the double doors in the sk ê n ê building
representing the entrance to a palace (as in Aeschylus’s Choephori and

Sophocles’ Electra ). Th
e Old Man uses the same word, wondering what
will happen when Clytemnestra enters the ‘gates’ ( pulas , 661) of the
cottage. Electra responds, ‘From there it’s but a short trip to Hades’

(662). Th
eir exchange momentarily converts the Farmer’s shack into a
palace- like setting, suitable for aristocratic bloodletting that consigns
the victim to the underworld.

3 Recall the Chorus’s welcome to Clytemnestra: ‘We honour you as equal to
a god, / blessed for your wealth ( ploutou ) and great good fortune’ (994–

95). Ironies abound, for the Chorus know that this queen – far from
immortal, and far from fortunate – walks to her death in a smoke-
darkened cottage.

4 Ober (1989, 192–247, ‘Class: Wealth, Resentment, and Gratitude’; 248–92,

‘Status: Noble Birth and Aristocratic Behavior’); also Rosivach (1991) and

Denniston (1939, on 253).

5 Time and again, the play exposes the chasm between wealth and admirable
behaviour, demonstrating that noble birth does not equate to moral
superiority vis- à -vis the poor. See Carey (2008, 100–2), Gregory (1991,

123–24), Goldhill (1986, 161–65), and Jones (1962, 243–47).

6 As noted in Chapter 4, the actor returns in the roles of the Old Man, the

Messenger, and Castor. Th
e last part allows for some ironic play with the
fi rst, given that Castor instructs Pylades to take the Farmer with him and
provide him with ‘abundant wealth’ ( ploutou baros , 1287). Th
e audience
might remember the Farmer’s earlier rejection of wealth per se as a
criterion for happiness (426–31); perhaps he would prefer to stay and work
his own land. Were there a sequel 2,400 years later, perhaps the good life in

Phocis would fi nd the Farmer buying up farmland and orchards
for real- estate development, like Lopakhin in Chekhov’s Th
e Cherry

Orchard .

Notes to pp. 104–105

155

7 In their valuable commentary, Roisman and Luschnig (2011, on 137) make
an uncharacteristic error, stating that ‘the gods are not much on anyone’s
lips in this play’.

8 For the fi rst view, Th
ury (1985, 21) claims that ‘Th
e Dioscuri soothe the
troubled souls of Orestes, Electra and the chorus, providing each with
virtue in their own terms’. Compare this interpretation with Michelini

(1987, 226–27), who concludes that the gods oversee a ‘pitiful triumph,
representing not the saving of the house, but its collapse’.

9 As well as in Heracles , characters and Choruses accuse the gods of
lacking wisdom and worse in Euripides’ Andromache ( Andr . 1029–36
and 1165–66), Iphigenia among the Taurians ( IT 711–15), Orestes ( Or .

28–31, 160–65, 191–94, 416–17, 590–95), and Bacchae ( Ba . 1344–48).

Th
e dying Hippolytus wishes that humans could eff ectively curse the
gods ( Hipp . 1415). In Suppliant Women , Athena appears ex machina to
restore a cycle of warfare that the play had struggled so hard to bring
to an end ( Supp . 1213–26). Unlike the case in Electra, no one on
stage protests in Suppliant Women ; Euripides leaves that to the
audience.

10 For Lefk owitz (2016), Euripides’ gods do not diff er from those in

Aeschylus and Sophocles. Th
ey are distant, unpredictable, cruel, but
only seen from the limited perspective of humans. In her view, his plays
do not mount a fundamental attack on their validity or credibility. For
others, Euripides asks his audience why such gods should merit honour
and respect (Lawrence 1998; Yunis 1988, esp. 169–71; Kerferd 1981,

163–72; Whitehorne 1978; Vickers 1973, 319–25; Kitto 1961, 209–10).

According to Paley (1872, xxv), Euripides ‘took delight in showing
what a miserable set of deities men had formed for themselves out of
their own imagination’. Verrall (1895, 96) concurs: ‘Euripides presents
interactions between man and the creatures of anthropomorphic
fancy, saying the while to his audience, by all sorts of signs and
whispers, “Such are the creatures which they would have us believe
in, which they would make us adore. What kind of a fi gure do
you think they make?” ’

11 Electra echoes Orestes, who faults Apollo’s ‘obscure justice’ that condemns
him to banishment ( El . 1190–93). As Pucci (2016, 90) concludes, ‘Orestes
unwillingly condemns the belief in the anthropomorphic theology, and
weeps for himself as a victim of that belief ’.

156

Notes to pp. 107–109

12 See https://www.theoi.com / Cult / ZeusTitles.html ; also Cook (1914–40);
and generally Gould (1985) and Versnel 2011 (esp. Chapter 2, ‘Many Gods:

Complications of Polytheism’).

13 Cropp (2013, on 777–80) sees the place of Aegisthus’s feast as a locus
amoenus (Latin for ‘pleasant place’, literally ‘place without duty or
obligation’), which turns bloody. Th
e same pattern occurs in the two lyric
stasima , which begin in idyllic settings where the natural world seems at
peace (fl ute- loving dolphins, the mountain glens of Pan) before swerving
to Clytemnestra’s murder at the end of each ode. Th
is pattern continues
until ‘the countryside of Argos proves the scene of polluting murder’

(Morwood 1981, 369).

14 Electra’s change from ‘ten suns’ to ‘ten moons’ may point to Artemis

(traditionally linked to the moon), the goddess who oversaw childbirth

(Denniston 1939, on 1126).

15 Rehm (2002, 274–77); in Euripides’ Helen , for example, Menelaus
measures his long absence in terms of ‘thousands of suns’ ( Hel . 652).

16 Hannah (2002, 21–25). However, his claim that the ancients associated
the Hyades and Pleiades with bad weather is incorrect, for it depends
on the season when the star clusters appear and disappear, as well as to
whom – rain for the sailor in ancient Greece may bode trouble, but not for
the farmer.

17 ‘Pleiad, n.’ OED Online . Oxford University Press (December 2014.

Web. 20 January 2015); Hesiod, Works and Days 618–23; and

Th
eodossiou, Manimanis, Mantarakis, and Dimitrijevic (2011, on

‘heliacal rising’).

18 Rosivach (1978, 194–95) for Aegisthus; King (1980, 209) for Clytemnestra.

King observes that Clytemnestra seems to grow out of the Gorgon, Sphinx,
and Chimaera depicted on the armour, as if she were another female
monster that requires a male hero to slay her.

19 Outside of Epirus and Th
race in the north, most rivers in Greece –
including those mentioned here – were seasonal, dependent on rain and
snowmelt. Th
e appearance of the Hyades each year would signal their
coming back to life.

20 Tammuz (2005, 155–56) clarifi es the diff erence between open- water
navigation in the ancient Mediterranean (basically unrestricted) and
coastal navigation (extremely dangerous in the winter, December through

February). Th
e latter was important for those travelling by sea to the City

Notes to pp. 109–111

157

Dionysia, which began in the second week of March (modern calendar),
when sailing close to land became less hazardous.

21 Recall that Electra addresses the sun, the earth, and the night sky as
divinities (866–67), picking up her earlier lament to the night (54); see,
generally, Cole (2004, 7–19).

22 Cropp (2013, on 727–36); cf. Rutherford (2007, 15) who notes Euripides’

elliptical treatment of causality: ‘Which side is Zeus on? . . . not
inappropriate [to ask] in a play which so persistently explores moral
uncertainties’. In an earlier version of the myth (ignored or suppressed
by Euripides), the sun’s about- face signalled that Atreus was the rightful
ruler of Argos, forcing Th
yestes to give up his stolen power. Th
e Chorus
invoke the same myth in Euripides’ Orestes 1002–12 (Willink 1989,

253–58). Herodotus (2.142) describes the environmental eff ects of this
celestial change. In Euripides’ Medea , the Chorus imagine a more
earthbound reversal of the natural order, with rivers fl owing uphill to
their sources, upending the traditional story that women are unfaithful,
when men are the real culprits (Eur. Med . 410–30); compare

Clytemnestra’s comments on the masculine- driven double
standard (Eur. El . 1030–40).

23 Th
e Chorus seem to adopt Aeschylus’s version in Agamemnon (in which

Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon without the help of Aegisthus),
supporting Electra’s view that her mother was the agent in her father’s
death. As Grube (1941, 299) puts it, ‘To Electra the murderer is

Clytemnestra, with Aegisthus; to Orestes, it is Aegisthus, with

Clytemnestra’.

24 Describing the eff ect of the fi rst stasimon , Walsh (1977, 278) refers to

Brecht’s Verfremdungseff ekt (discussed briefl y in Chapter 4, note 26).

Euripides employs the same technique in the second stasimon , when the

Chorus pulls us into a mythic narrative only to step back from the story
and view it critically.

25 Wright (2008, 127). Goldhill (1986, 256) also notes the ‘uncertainty
surrounding . . . the paradigmatic status of myth’ in Electra .

26 Castor ‘refute[s] the entire myth upon which the play has been based’

(Hartigan 1991, 123). What the twin gods reveal about the Trojan War

‘belatedly subverts the whole background of the story, just as other details
of the play have subverted the plot- pattern of just revenge’ (Mastronarde

2010, 185–86). Euripides drew on the Palinode , a lost poem by Stesichorus,

158

Notes to pp. 111–115
in which Zeus sends a ‘phantom Helen’ to Troy aft er transporting the real
one to Egypt (Campbell 1991, 88–97; Finglass 2015, 93–96). In Helen (412
bc ), Euripides fl eshes out the story with surprising humour, but also with
the suggestion of tragedy behind the apparent romantic- escape (Rehm

1994, 121–27). In Orestes (408 bc ), Euripides reverts to the traditional
story that Helen went to Troy, but the reasons for the war remain those put
forward in Electra : Zeus wanted to decrease the human population and
lighten the burden that mortals impose on the earth (Eur. Or . 1639–42).

27 Something similar occurs at the end of Euripides’ Andromache , Ion , Helen ,

Orestes , and Iphigenia in Aulis , when a god or goddess tries to convert what
looks like trouble into a happy ending.

28 Frogs 958. Th
e second- century ad grammarian Athenaeus (561a) calls

Euripides the ‘philosopher of the stage’.

29 Burian (1997, 180). In a similar, but more cautious, vein, Scodel (1999–

2000, 144) concludes that ‘Euripidean theater could hardly fail to make its
audience more aware of the dangers of being manipulated, more conscious
of the need to distinguish a good performance from a worthy cause’.

30 Swinburne (1908, 36).

Chapter 9

1 From John Milton, Sonnet VIII (1642), in Th
e Complete Poems and Major

Prose , ed. M.H. Hughes, p. 140, New York: Th
e Odyssey Press (1957).

2 Plutarch, Life of Lysander , 15.2–3. Another passage in Plutarch ( Life of

Nicias , 29.2–3) describes how much the Sicilians loved Euripides. Th
e

Athenian prisoners they had captured (following the Sicilian expedition in

413 bc ) would recite speeches and sing choruses from his plays to gain
extra provisions, and sometimes their freedom.

3 As well as the frequent productions at the major dramatic festivals,
contemporary comic playwrights oft en refer to Euripides’ tragedies, and
the character ‘Euripides’ plays an important role in Aristophanes’

Acharnians (425 bc ), Th
esmophoriazusae (414 bc ), and Frogs (406 bc ). As
noted in Chapter 6, Aristophanes makes fun of the tragedian’s fondness for
rags, market- talk, democratic sentiments, clever (albeit suspect) rhetoric,
tonal incongruities, and self- referential humour (Roselli 2005). A famous

Notes to pp. 115–116

159
fragment from the comic poet Cratinus coins the term ‘Euripides-
aristophantize’ ( euripidarsitophaniz ô n ), pointing out the mutual interplay
of the two (Kassel and Austin 1983, fragment 342). Euripides infl uenced
the New Comedy of Menander as well, which features troubled
engagements and marriages, mistaken identities, a surplus of recognition
tokens, and domestic- fl avoured dialogue. See Revermann (2016, 14–16
and 19) and Knox (1979); more broadly, Seidensticker (1982, 89–248).

4 Easterling (1997, 225); more generally, Revermann (2016). Dunn (2017)

focuses on Euripides’ popularity in the fourth century bc , noting the many
references to his plays in Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric , in depictions on

Attic and South-Italian vases, and in theatrical productions across the

Greek- speaking world. Euripides’ Medea , Heracles , Trojan Women , and

Phoenician Women infl uenced the eponymous tragedies of the Roman

Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c . 4 bc –65 ad ), as did Hippolytus for

Seneca’s Phaedra . We know of seven diff erent Latin plays entitled Electra ,
but none are extant (Bates 1930, 91).

5 See Mastronarde (2017), on whom I have drawn extensively; also Cropp

(2013, 33–36) and Garland (2004, 39–94).

6 Murray loved the theatre (his wife was a relative of W.S. Gilbert, of Gilbert
and Sullivan fame); he wrote several (unsuccessful) plays; he was deeply
involved in politics, helping to found the League of Nations and chairing
its executive council aft er the Great War. Following the Second World War,
he served as president of the United Nations Association, and was an early
supporter of what later became Oxfam. See Stray (2007).

7 Macintosh (2016, 327–28).

8 As actor and director, Granville Barker’s theatrical passions extended to
many periods and styles. His play Th
e Voysey Inheritance (1905) has had
many successful revivals, and his Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927–46) remain
a valuable guide to a theatrical understanding of Shakespeare’s plays.

9 Electra was presented in repertory from January to March 1906, and

January to February 1907, under Barker’s direction. Gwendoline Bishop

(also credited as Mrs. Cliff ord Bax) appeared in the Chorus. Th
ree years
later, as member of the People’s Free Th
eatre for Poetic Drama, Mrs. Bax
directed (and played the title role) in a new production of Electra at several
locations in East London. Barker and Murray’s Court Th
eatre productions
clearly spawned new interest in staging Euripides’ play.

160

Notes to pp. 117–118

10 Shaw (1907, Act. 3, Scene 2, 906–7, 913–14, 917–20, 932). Frequently called

‘Euripides’ during the play, Cusins earlier quotes a passage from Euripides’

Bacchae (Act II , 871–80), using Murray’s own translation.

11 A former student of Murray, and his successor as Regius Professor of

Greek at Oxford, Dodds (1929, 97) describes Euripides and Shaw as

‘philosophical dramatists’. Albert (2016) explores the many connections
between the two playwrights, and between Major Barbara and Euripides’

Bacchae .

12 MacCarthy (1907, 10).

13 Describing a passage of Murray’s translation of Medea , T.S. Eliot (1928, 75)

concludes that ‘Professor Murray has simply interposed between Euripides
and ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language’.

14 Murray (1905, 3). For more accurate, and far more playable, English
translations of Electra , see Introduction, note 1, or consult mine, freely
accessed at this website: https://stanfordreptheater.com/electratranslation

(see Figure 5).

15 From 1910 to 1962, at least eight diff erent professional productions of

Euripides’ Electra used Murray’s translation. Th
e BBC broadcast Murray’s
translation as a radio play in 1929, 1948, and 1953, and ten university and
schools mounted his translation of Electra in the United States and

England between 1910 and 1955. See the Archive of Performances of

Greek and Roman Drama ( APGRD ) http://www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk / .

16 Consult the APGRD website (previous note) for productions and
adaptations of Euripides’ Electra in England, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall,

Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Spain, Italy, Iceland,

Israel, Jordan, South Africa, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the United

States, Cyprus, and Greece. Th
e most renowned Arabic translation is by

Ismail El-Banhawi: Ministry of Information, Kuwait, 1974, in the World

Th
eatre Series, Vol. 56 ( ﻱﻭﺭﻱﺏﻱﺩﺱ, ﺍﻝﺏﻩﻥﺍﻭﻱ, ﺍﺱﻡﺍﻉﻱﻝ. 1974. ﻡﻥ ﺍﻝﻡﺱﺭﺡ

ﺍﻝﻱﻭﻥﺍﻥﻱ ﺍﻝﻕﺩﻱﻡ. ﻡﻥ ﺍﻝﻡﺱﺭﺡ ﺍﻝﻉﺍﻝﻡﻱ, 56. ﺍﻝﻙﻭﻱﺕ: ﻭﺯﺍﺭﺓ ﺍﻝﺍﻉﻝﺍﻡ ).

17 Born in 1942, Tsianos joined other natives of Larissa to found the Th
essalian

Th
eatre (

Th
essaliko Th
eatro ) in 1975, and he directed many subsequent
productions at Epidaurus. For more on his Electra , see http://www.apgrd.

ox.ac.uk / productions / production / 1105 (accessed 22 August 2019).

18 Rontiris directed Sophocles’ Electra at Epidaurus that year, the
performance taking place during the day because the theatre lacked
electricity, a situation only corrected with the founding of the Epidaurus

Notes to pp. 118–121

161

Festival in 1955. Th
e fi rst modern staging of Euripides’ Electra in that
ancient theatre took place in 1969.

19 Koniordou (1953–) served as Greek Minister of Culture and Sports from

2016 to 2018. In an interview given on 16 March 2017, she addressed the
importance of theatre today, and one senses that she was channelling

Euripides: ‘[T]heatre is necessary today, more than ever. It was born in the

5th century B.C. to allow dialogue, freedom of thought and speech,
confl ict of ideas, acceptance of the other. Th
ese are basic values we need
today desperately, because democracy can never be taken for granted. It is
a living system that needs nourishing and protection from forces that may
use tools of manipulation and fear to turn it into a new kind of tyranny or
plutarchy ( http://mag.politismosmuseum.org / koniordou / ).

20 New York Times , review by Laura Cappelle, 2 May 2019. Played back to
back with no intermission, É lectre / Oreste opened in May 2019 in Paris and
then travelled to the Epidaurus Festival in July. Th
e trailer https://www.

youtube.com / watch?v= JXA p6w6FiYg gives a good sense of the
production in Paris. Th
e graphic qualities had far less impact in the large
outdoor theatre at Epidaurus. As the ancient Greeks knew, sound conveys
descriptive immediacy far better than visual eff ects viewed from a great
distance. In lieu of visual overkill, performances of Electra in ancient

Greek (Wellesley College 1976, Cambridge University 1980–81, Kings

College, London 1963 and 1993) tend to trust the words of the playwright
to convey the essential dramatic experience.

21 Jeff ers (1925).

22 Jeff ers (1925, 62). We recognize elements from Euripides in the dirt and
rags, and in the heroine’s lost status. As Laks (1995, 125) puts it, ‘Her fi lthy,
ragged clothes represent the ugliness of her situation: a girl of such tender
age, yet of such murderous hatred and able to dissemble with such fi nesse’.

23 Jeff ers (1925, 65). Compare Euripides’ Clytemnestra: ‘I forgive you,
daughter. Don’t think / I’m all that happy with the things I’ve done. / How
wretched have my own plans made me!’ ( El . 1105–6, 1109).

24 Jeff ers (1925, 77–78).

25 Jeff ers (1925, 81). Th
e ‘earlier fountain’ appears to mean the world of
nature, the ‘fi rst mother’, uncorrupted by humans. Th
is may represent

Jeff ers’ transformation of the city in Arcadia that Castor tells Orestes he will
found (Eur. El . 1273–75). Electra’s solitary return to the house anticipates
the ending of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra , discussed below.

162

Notes to pp. 121–124

26 New York Times , 27 November 1950. Th
e Tower beyond Tragedy ran for
thirty- two performances. Th
e public much preferred Jeff ers’ Medea , the
greatest success of a play based on a Greek tragedy in the commercial
theatre. As far as I can tell, Jeff ers’ Euripidean- infl ected play has never
been revived. In 1964, two years aft er Jeff ers’ death, Marian Seldes (the
original Electra) recorded two sections of Th
e Tower beyond Tragedy ,
including the powerful closing scene between Orestes and Electra

(available on Folkways Records, FW 09767, FL 9767).

27 ‘Working Notes and Extracts from a Fragmentary Work Diary’ (dated

‘Spring 1926’), in Clark (1947) 530.

28 O’Neill (1931, 1053). Anyone familiar with O’Neill’s tortured life will
recognize autobiographical elements merging with his story of Electra. Th
e
playwright spent his career turning his personal demons into drama, and

Greek tragedy proved a useful ally; see Sheaff er (1973).

29 O’Neill (1988a, 368; letter dated 28 August 1930). O’Neill had a long-
standing interest in Euripides – he loosely based Th
e First Man (1921) on

Medea , and he drew on Hippolytus for Desire Under the Elms (1925).

Although there is no direct evidence that he read Euripides’ Electra ,

O’Neill spent six days ‘studying Greek plays’ as he prepared the second
part of the trilogy (Black 2004, 171–72). His eldest son, Eugene O’Neill, Jr.

(1910–50) became a classicist and taught at Yale, Princeton, and other
universities, before committing suicide.

30 Freud and Jung reached back to Greek tragedy to name these concepts

(Colman 2015, ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘Electra complex’). Few today accept

Jung’s view that a girl’s initial anger with her mother comes when she
realizes she has been born without a penis. Th
e same goes for Freud’s belief
that all young boys unconsciously wish to sleep with their mothers, and
fear castration from their fathers. In Mourning Becomes Electra , these
complexes are not – in psychoanalytic terms – complexes at all, for

O’Neill’s characters state their desires overtly, and more than once.

31 Giraudoux (1937). É lectre opened at Th
é â tre de l’Ath é n é e in Paris on 13

May 1937, directed by the great French actor and director Louis Jouvet

(1887–1951), who frequently collaborated with Giraudoux.

32 Roisman and Luschnig (2011, 259–63) off er a useful summary of the many
connections between the two plays. Moreau (1997) provides an excellent
analysis of Giraudoux’s play, from its roots in Euripides to its place in the
pre-Second World War French theatrical scene.

Notes to pp. 124–127

163

33 Giraudoux (1964, 208). In Euripides’ Electra , we only hear from Castor that
these spirits of vengeance will pursue Orestes to Athens (Eur. El . 1252–57,

1342–46).

34 ‘ É lectre, like her Euripidean counterpart, is dangerously unbalanced’ (Laks

1995, 112).

35 In an interview in Le Figaro (11 May 1937), Giraudoux summarized his
approach to É lectre : ‘Th
e thesis of my play is this: that humanity, by its
ability to forget, and by a fear of complications, absorbs great crimes
against it. But in every epoch surge forth these pure human beings who
don’t want the crimes to be absorbed, and who prevent that absorption . . .

which only provokes more crimes and new disasters. Electra is one of
those beings. She attains her goal, but at the price of horrible catastrophes’

(Cohen 1968, 106).

36 In the United States when writing É lectre , and unable to return to Europe,

Yourcenar oversaw an amateur production of the play in 1944 on Mount

Desert Island, Maine, where she was living. Th
e professional premiere of

É lectre, ou La chute des masques took place in Paris in 1954, and the play
was published the same year. Revivals have been staged in Quebec (2007),
and in Italian translation in Rome (1986 and 2017) and Turin (2002 and

2012). Th
e analysis I present here draws extensively on Giove (2012).

37 Yourcenar (1971, 20), my translation. Yourcenar started Latin at 10, Greek
at 12, and her early interest in the Classics informed much of her later
work (Savigneau 1993, 50).

38 First quotation, Yourcenar (1984, Scene 4, p. 92); second, Yourcenar (1984,

Scene 1, p. 82).

39 Yourcenar honours the unity of place that French neoclassicists considered
an Aristotelian ‘rule’ for tragedy. Although Euripides does the same in

Electra (setting the action in front of the cottage), unity of place and time
does not apply to all Greek tragedies.

40 Yourcenar (1984, 109).

41 Yourcenar (1984, 113).

42 Elektra , 1962, was produced, directed, and adapted (from Euripides’

Electra ) by Michael Cacoyannis; music by Mikis Th
eodorakis;
cinematography by Walter Lassally. For further analysis, see Bakogianni

(2011, 153–94) and Chiasson (2013).

164

References

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e Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition , 2nd edition, revised by D. Yatromanolakis and P. Roilos , Lanham , MD : Rowman & Littlefi eld .

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180

Index

Achilles 10, 13, 28, 71, 97, 134 n.11,
scene shift s to palace 35, 38,

144 n.9, 144 n.15, 146 n.5,

151 n.17, 154 n.2

148 n.21, 151 n.19, 152 n.24.

Eumenides : Apollo 35, 87, 106;

See also under Electra

Chorus departure from

(Euripides), Chorus, ‘armour
orch ê stra , 131 n.14; Orestes’

of Achilles’

trial and ending 37, 40–42,

Aegisthus

137 n.15
before Aeschylus 33–34

Oresteia trilogy 12, 34–36,
in Aeschylus’s Oresteia 12, 35, 40,

42, 135 n.5; see also above,

61, 157 n.23
individual play titles
in Euripides’ Electra : banquet and

Suppliant Women 87
murder 13, 14, 15, 25, 26–27,

Agamemnon ( see also Cassandra; see

38–39, 41, 59–60, 72–73, 82,
also Iphigenia)

84–85, 141–42 n.36; burial 32;
in Aeschylus, see under Aeschylus,
mistreatment of Electra and

‘ Agamemnon ’

Orestes 19, 21, 30, 34, 36, 37,
in Euripides’ Electra : murder 18,

47, 48. See also decapitation;

19–20, 23, 28–30, 37, 39, 56, 61,
see also under Electra,

75, 105; raised by Old Man 8,

‘diatribe’; see also under Electra

21, 24, 28; tomb 21, 24, 36, 41,

(Euripides), ‘corpses’

49, 66, 75, 107, 147 n.14
in Sophocles’ Electra 37, 42–43, 96,
in Giraudoux’s É lectre 126

147 n.13, 148 n.21, 152 n.28
in Homer 13, 33, 135 n.3, 151 n.19

Aeschylus (523–454 bc ) 11, 86, 112,
in post-Homeric poetry 34

115, 122, 124, 143 n.4; see also in Sophocles’ Electra 13, 61
individual characters by name

Apollo: called on for help, 104,

Agamemnon : Agamemnon’s

146 n.4; oracle at Delphi
homecoming and murder

19, 144 n.11; prophecy on

34–35, 38–39, 127, 148 n.19,
matricide 28, 31, 40, 52–53,

157 n.23; included in

61, 62, 105–06, 111, 139 n.16,

Cacoyannis’s Elektra 127;

142 n.40, 155 n.11. See also infl uence on Jeff ers 120;
under Aeschylus, ‘ Choephori ’,
sacrifi cial imagery 34, 39, 98

‘ Eumenides ’

Choephori : Apollo 35, 40, 106;

Aphrodite 34, 94, 104
corpses on ekkukl ê ma 35,

Aristophanes (446–386 bc ) 6, 84,

130 n.5, 147 n.13, 148 n.22;

115; Acharnians 135 n.5,
kommos 53; matricide 35, 40,

147 n.11, 158 n.3; Frogs 12,

43, 54, 99, 153 n.32; opening

112, 135 n.5, 145 n.19, 158 n.3;
scene at Agamemnon’s tomb

Th
esmophoriazusae 158 n.3

35; recognition scene 36,

Aristotle (384–322 bc ): History of

134 n.12, 136 n.7, 136 n.9;

Animals 141 n.28; Poetics 17,

181

182

Index

45, 136 n.10, 145 n.1,159 n.4,

Cacoyannis, Michael (1922–2011):

163 n.39; Rhetoric 143 n.4,

Elektra 29 (Fig. 3), 83 (Fig. 4),

145 n.19, 159 n.4

102 (Fig. 6), 127–28; Iphigenia Artemis 34, 156 n.14

144 n.10

Athena: in Aeschylus’s Eumenides 35,

Cassandra: in Aeschylus’s

40–41; appears ex machina in

Agamemnon 35, 39, 93,

Euripides’ Suppliant Women

130 n.5, 148 n.19; in

155 n.9; in Euripides’ Electra

Cacoyannis’s Elektra 127; in

31, 87, 104, 111; helps Perseus Euripides’ Electra 28, 71, 96; in
slay the gorgon 86; statue in

Homer 13; in Pindar 34

Parthenon 143 n.3

Castor (and Polydeuces [‘Pollux’])

Athenaeus (2nd–3rd century ad )

31–32, 40–41, 62–63, 70–71;

158 n.28
arrival ex machina 7, 11; burial Athens: Acropolis 31, 62; class of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra
tensions 103; democracy 5,

32, 60; criticism of Apollo’s

15, 67, 103; law and law courts oracle and matricide 61, 104,

15–16, 29, 74, 95, 132 n.20; and

105, 106, 142 n.40, 146 n.4;
modern productions of Greek
exile of Orestes and Electra
tragedy 118; Peloponnesian

37–38, 54, 77, 144 n.8; Furies’

War 115, 145 n.2; Sicilian
pursuit of Orestes and trial in
expedition 62. See also City

Athens 80, 137 n.15, 151 n.16,

Dionysia; see also theatre

163 n.33; marriage of Electra
of Dionysus; see also under
to Pylades 54, 100, 153 n.36;

Electra (Euripides), ‘Athens
protecting sailors at sea 109,
and trial of Orestes’

142 n.39; revelations on Helen
athletics: importance in ancient
and Trojan War 32, 62–63,

Greece 14, 16, 72; Olympic

106, 111–12, 143 n.3, 151 n.18,
and other Panhellenic

157 n.26; role division 9, 48,
games 56, 72. See also Electra

133 n.6, 154 n.6; shamed by

(Sophocles); see also epinician
sisters Clytemnestra and Helen
odes; see also under Electra

29, 62; transformation into stars (Euripides), ‘athletic references’

(‘casterism’) 42, 86, 142 n.38

Atreus, see house of Atreus

Chekhov, Anton (1860–1904) 116,
audience (original) 6, 8–9, 14, 15,

154 n.6

36, 57, 70, 84, 89, 101, 129 n.1
chorus, see under Greek tragedy; see

(Chapter 1); see also theatre of
also under Electra (Euripides),

Dionysus

‘Chorus’

aulos and aul ê t ê s ( aulos -player) 10,

City Dionysia 5–7, 9, 11–12, 17, 34,

14–15, 17, 23, 56–57, 132 n.19,

42, 79, 84, 109, 115, 132 n.5,

141 n.28, 142–43 n.1; see also

145 n.1; see also Greek tragedy
under Electra (Euripides),

Clytemnestra

Chorus, ‘self-reference’

before Aeschylus 33–34, 135 n.3,

151 n.19

Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956) 18,
in Aeschylus’s Oresteia 12,

140 n.26, 157 n.24

60–61, 93, 134 n.14, 147 n.13,

Index

183

150 n.9, 157 n.23; see also diatribe over Aegisthus’s
under Aeschylus, Agamemnon ,
corpse 27–28, 66–67, 71,

‘Agamemnon’s welcome

88–90, 93, 149 n.32, 150 n.4,
and murder’; see also under

151 n.15; etymology of name

Aeschylus, Choephori,

34, 94, 135 n.4; false child

‘matricide’

ruse 15–16, 58, 97, 99, 107;
in Euripides’ Electra : arrival
identifi es with father as child
by horse cart 7, 39, 41, 84,

30, 61, 94; infl ated view of

107; burial 32; children with Orestes 27, 73–74, 92, 100;

Aegisthus 19, 96–97, 123;
marriage to Pylades and exile
matricide 16, 25, 30–31, 37, 53,

38, 54, 70, 77, 100, 140 n.23,

58, 62, 74–75, 85, 89, 94, 98–99,

153 n.36; married virgin

105; murder of Agamemnon

14, 71, 91–92, 94, 149 n.1;

18, 19–20, 23, 55–56, 110,
monody (solo song) 11,

157 n.23; promiscuity 71–72,

19–20, 68, 139 n.17; played

93, 95–96; role division 9, 48,
by protagonist 9, 63; rejects

63, 133 n.6; scene with Electra Chorus’s invitation 14, 20, 81,

15, 28–30, 50, 60–61, 67, 68, 69,

132 n.18; role in matricide

71, 99; wealth and luxury 21,

25, 31, 56, 94, 110–11,

28, 60, 81, 101, 103, 147 n.12,

136–37 n.12; self-dramatizing

154 n.3. See also under Electra

83, 112, 138 n.9, 139 n.11. See (Euripides), ‘corpse’

also under Clytemnestra; see
in modern versions and
also under Electra (Euripides)

productions 29 (Fig. 3),
passim

119–21, 125, 127–28
in modern versions and
in Sophocles’ Electra 14, 38, 42,
productions 118–28, 150 n.8,

43, 61, 96, 143 n.5, 152 n.27,

150 n.9

152 n.28
in Sophocles’ Electra 12, 14, 36, 37,

42–43, 106, 148 n.21, 150 n.6
decapitation 27, 72, 86–88, 134 n.17,
in Stesichorus’s Oresteia 34

148 n.23; see also under Electra in Xanthus 34

(Euripides), ‘Perseus’

Electra (Euripides) ( see also

Delphi and Delphic oracle, see Apollo
individual characters and gods

Dioskouroi (‘sons of Zeus’), see
by name )

Castor (and Polydeuces); see
animals: horses 7, 28, 30, 41,
also Zeus

72–73, 84, 107; lambs and dithyramb 5, 130 n.7
sheep 24, 25, 41, 57, 84, 98, 109,

146 n.6, 152 n.25; on shield of

Electra

Achilles 23, 66, 84, 87; oxen in Aeschylus’s Choephori 35, 37,

41, 79, 133 n.7; see also below

137 n.19

‘sacrifi ce’, also ‘Perseus’; see also
in Euripides’ Electra 48–51;

Pelops
aff ected by fear 21, 26, 55, 58,

Argive festival of Hera 14, 20,

95; clothing and appearance

55, 94, 105, 132 n.18, 133 n.7,

39, 81, 99, 101, 161 n.22;

137 n.17, 146 n.9; see also Hera

184

Index

Athens and trial of Orestes 12,
costume and clothing 20, 21, 24,

31–32, 40, 74, 144 n.11

30, 39, 49, 58, 66, 81–82, 85,
athletic references: and Orestes

99, 146 n.9, 147 n.12, 150 n.7,

14, 36, 39, 57, 73, 82, 92; similes

161 n.22; see also below

72, 74, 89–90; see also athletics

‘garlands’

children and child-birth, 15–16,
crowns, see below ‘garlands’

19, 25, 31, 61, 97, 98–99, 123,

Delphi, see Apollo

125, 150 n.2, 152 n.23,
earth ( g ê , gaia ) 104; Aegisthus

152 n.27; see also Clytemnestra
buried in 60; basis for

Chorus: ‘armour of Achilles’ (fi rst
agriculture 41–42; prayers to
stasimon ) 23, 55–56, 87, 97,

25, 27, 137 n.15, 157 n.21

108, 111, 140 n.26, 143 n.3,
exile: of Electra to rural farm 70,

157 n.24; ‘ebb and fl ow’ chorus

79; of Orestes by Aegisthus

30–31, 36, 69; epinician praise

9, 11, 18, 21, 50, 60, 69, 76; of of Orestes 14, 27, 57, 73, 82,

Orestes (and Electra) aft er

145 n.17; ‘golden lamb’ (second
matricide 32, 38, 53–54, 63, 70,
stasimon ) 25–26, 55–56, 84,

75, 81

96, 98, 109–10; kommos 11, 31;
garlands 14, 27, 39, 53, 54, 57, 72,
loyalty to Electra 21, 36, 55;

73–74, 82–83, 89, 147 n.15
mark a change of speaker 21,
gender identity and roles 91–96,

22, 24, 28, 133 n.8; on marriage

100, 150 n.4, 150 n.5

72, 77; ‘new music’ 140 n.26;
gods 104–07; Chorus praise of
parodos 20, 56, 115, 132 n.18;

24; Clytemnestra’s appeal
presence and departure from
to 30; doubts about their
orch ê stra 20, 32, 80, 131 n.14;
wisdom 32, 40, 111, 155 n.9,
reaction to deus ex machina

155 n.10; Electra calls on 19,

7, 31; reference to song and

49, 51, 68, 146 n.4; Farmer on dance 15, 56–57, 110, 131 n.15;
work vs. prayer 41, 76; Old
welcome to Clytemnestra 28,

Man tells Electra to praise

62, 154 n.3; see also under

69; Orestes’ changing views

Greek tragedy, ‘chorus’, also
of 27, 53, 110; pity for mortal

‘lyric metres’

suff ering 62. See also above , comic elements 36, 124, 136 n.10,

‘ cosmic upheavals’; also below

146 n.4

‘sacrifi ce’; see also individual
corpse: of Aegisthus 27–28, 39,
gods by name ; see also under

53, 67–68, 80, 85–86, 123,

Greek tragedy, ‘ m ê chan ê ’

133 n.6, 147 n.15, 149 n.32; of gorgon, see below ‘Perseus’

Clytemnestra 40, 61, 82, 98; of hair and head 49, 66, 81, 85–86,

Clytemnestra and Aegisthus

89; see also above ‘garlands’;
on ekkukl ê ma 7, 30–31, 40, 42,
also below ‘Perseus’; see also

70, 85, 130 n.5, 148 n.22. See decapitation
also under Electra, ‘diatribe
language: of birth and off spring
over Aegisthus’s corpse’

98–99; chromatic 65–66;
cosmic upheaval 25–26, 55–56,
describing bloodshed 74–76;

109–12, 157 n.22
mercantile and monetary

Index

185

103–04; proverbial 76–77,
river Inachus (Inachides) at

145 n.19; repetitious

Aegisthus’s sacrifi ce 25, 51, 60,

67–70, 141 n.29, 145–46 n.3;

68, 74, 84, 97, 104
rhetorical 49, 67, 82, 143 n.4,

Perseus and gorgon 23, 27, 31,

143 n.5; scene-setting 79–80,

85–87, 89, 108, 149 n.27,

145 n.1. See also under Greek

149 n.31
tragedy, ‘language’

physical labour 19, 21, 47, 79–80,
marriage 70–72, 91–92;

92, 146 n.6

Clytemnestra and Aegisthus
poverty 21, 22, 46, 47–48, 77, 99,

30, 36, 95; Electra and Farmer

101–3, 139 n.13, 147 n.12

14, 21, 37, 47, 48, 51, 68,
prayers, see gods

150 n.2; Electra and Pylades prologue 9, 17, 18, 31, 41, 91,

31, 100, 153 n.36; Iphigenia

101, 138 n.7, 144 n.8; see also and Achilles 28, 97, 144 n.9,

Farmer

152 n.24; proverbs about
props 83–85; Electra’s water jug

72, 76–77; suitors to Electra

18–19, 43, 68, 80, 133 n.6,

62, 94; yoking as metaphor

137 n.19; Old Man’s provisions

94, 153 n.37. See also below

41, 57, 80, 147 n.18; Orestes’

‘nymphs’

sword 31, 87, 89, 94, 126. See matricide 98–99, 110, 134 n.15;
also above , ‘corpses’

Electra shames Orestes into 51,
rape 25, 49, 94–95, 151 n.16; see

56, 120; Pylades silent before also hubris

54; resistance and revulsion
recognition scene 24, 36, 43,
towards 28, 31, 40, 50, 53,

46, 69, 80, 134 n.13, 136 n.7,

69–70, 105, 136–37 n.12;

136 n.9, 136 n.10, 146 n.10;
similar to Perseus’s slaying
see also under Aeschylus,
the gorgon 87, 156 n.18. See

‘ Choephori ’

also under Castor, ‘criticism of
rivers 108–9; Alpheus 73,

Apollo’s oracle’

134 n.19; Inachus 41, 47, 79,
messenger speech 13, 26–27,

97, 107; Tanaus 79, 145 n.2

58–59, 75, 80, 134 n.16,
sacrifi ce, 74–75, 137 n.17;

141 n.32, 148 n.2

Aegisthus’s to the Nymphs 13,
mothers 96–98; see also above

26–27, 38–39, 60, 97, 141–

‘children and childbirth’, also

42 n.36, 147 n.14, 148 n.20;

‘matricide’

Clytemnestra’s for Electra
mute characters 19, 24, 25, 27,
aft er childbirth 30, 39–40,

28, 54–55, 63, 85, 89, 133 n.6,

68, 153 n.30; of Iphigenia 28,

137 n.13; see also under

65, 71, 111, 144 n.9; Orestes’

Pylades
off erings at Agamemnon’s
naming 47, 104, 144 n.8
tomb 19, 24, 41, 84
night 18–19, 27, 65, 104, 107,
self-refl exive elements, see above

157 n.21
under Chorus, ‘reference to
nobility 22, 46, 52, 101–2, 138 n.6
song and dance’

nymphs: Hyades 108; Nereids (sea
setting (farm, hovel, rural
nymphs) 15, 23, 56, 104; of the environment) 18, 37–38, 42,

186

Index

47, 79–80, 101, 107, 136 n.10,
tragedies: Alcestis 131 n.14,

153–54 n.1; ‘transformed’

140 n.24; Andromache
into house of Atreus 22, 104,

141 n.29, 155 n.9; Andromeda

154 n.2

86, 148 n.26; Bacchae 11, 13,
slaves 7, 19, 27, 28, 30, 39, 51, 58,

58, 87–88, 89, 139 n.12,

59, 66, 73, 82, 84, 103

160 n.10, 160 n.11; Children of
stichomythia 21, 24, 25, 133 n.9,

Heracles 91, 140 n.24; Cyclops

134 n.15

87, 140 n.24, 147 n.17; Danae sun and dawn 27, 54, 65–66,

86; Dictys 86; Hecuba 87, 91,

107–8, 149 n.33, 157 n.21; see

139 n.17, 146 n.8; Helen 63, 91,
also above, ‘cosmic upheaval’

131 n.14, 142 n.39, 142 n.41,

Trojan War 23, 25, 28, 47, 55, 77,

148 n.26, 156 n.15, 157–

111, 141 n.34; see also under

58 n.26; Heracles 58, 87, 104,

Castor, ‘revelations on Helen

130 n.6, 140 n.24; Hippolytus and Trojan War’; see also Zeus

116, 155 n.9, 162 n.29; Ion wreaths, see above ‘garlands’

133 n.9, 139 n.17; Iphigenia

Electra (Sophocles): date 135–36 n.6;
in Aulis 11, 91, 139 n.18,
end of play 37, 43, 148 n.21;

141 n.29, 141 n.31, 144 n.10,
fi rst modern production at

151 n.10, 152 n.24, 158 n.27;

Epidaurus 160 n.18; funeral

Iphigenia among the Taurians
urn and recognition scene

91, 155 n.9; Medea 13, 121,

38, 43, 83, 136 n.9, 137 n.19;

157 n.22, 162 n.29; Orestes 110,
matricide defanged 42,

134 n.19, 136 n.8, 139 n.18,

147 n.13; 152 n.28; messenger

144 n.14, 149 n.28, 157 n.22,
speech 13–14, 144 n.14.

157–58 n.26; Phoenician

See also under individual

Women 91, 141 n.29, 153 n.32;
characters by name

Rhesus 130 n.6, 131 n.14;

Electra complex 122–23, 162 n.30

Suppliant Women 58, 87,

É lectre, see Giraudoux, Jean

155 n.9; Trojan Women 116,

É lectre, ou La chute des masques , see

130 n.6, 137 n.16, 139 n.17. See Yourcenar, Marguerite
also Electra (Euripides)

Epidaurus theater 118, 129–130 n.4
use of prologues 9, 18, 101,

Euripides (480–406 bc ) passim

138 n.7
career 11–12, 17, 131–32 n.16
and deus ex machina 104, 130 n.6;

Farmer 9, 18–19, 22–23, 38, 41,

158 n.27

47–48, 76, 91, 92, 138 n.8,
doubts about the gods 104–5,

154 n.6

155 n.9, 155 n.10

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939) 122–23,
inclusion of old characters 8,

162 n.30

141 n.29, 141 n.31

Furies: in Aeschylus’s Oresteia 35,
infl uence on Seneca 159 n.4

41, 42, 106; in Euripides’

not a misogynist 96, 151 n.20,

Electra 31–32, 42, 65, 80, 87,

152 n.23, 157 n.22

104, 137 n.15; in Giraudoux’s preference for female Choruses

É lectre 124; in O’Neill’s

55, 140 n.24

Mourning Becomes Electra 122;

Index

187
unmentioned in Sophocles’

parodos (entry chorus) 7, 139 n.17

Electra 43
plot 17–18, 45–46, 58, 157 n.26
prologue 17

Giraudoux, Jean (1882–1944) and
sk ê n ê building 6–7, 145 n.1,

É lectre 123–25, 126, 163 n.35

154 n.2

Granville-Barker, Harley (1877–
stasimon (‘standing’ song) 17

1946) 116–17, 159 n.8
stichomythia 9

Greek tragedy

See also City Dionysia; also
acting: charakt ê r 46; male actors theatre of Dionysus; see also

8, 46, 150 n.7; masks 6–7, 8, 85,
under Electra (Euripides); also

88, 130 n.7, 149 n.33; multiple under tragedians by name
roles (three-actor rule) 9, 48,

58–59, 63, 130 n.12, 133 n.6,

Hector 13, 84, 143 n.3, 148 n.21

154 n.6; ‘outside-in’ approach

Helen of Troy

8–9, 48, 89, 130 n.8, 131 n.11;
in Euripides’ Electra : sister of
prize 9

Castor and Polydeuces 7, 29,
chorus: function 10–11, 131 n.13,

62; never went to Troy 32,

140 n.27, 142–43 n.1; in

62–63, 76, 95, 97, 111, 127,
modern productions 20 (Fig.

141 n.34, 151 n.18; paragon 2), 118–20, 124, 127; non-of unfaithfulness 28, 71, 95,
tragic choruses 5, 14–15. See

150 n.5. See also Castor
also below ‘lyric metres’; see
in Euripides’ Helen 63, 91
also aulos
in Homer 13, 33
dialogue metre 9, 17–18, 20–21,
in Stesichorus’s Palinode 142 n.41,

130–31 n.9, 133 n.10,

157–58 n.26

142–43 n.1

Hera 25, 104; see also under Electra eisodoi (side entrances to

(Euripides), ‘Argive festival of
orch ê stra ) 7, 19, 24, 25, 27, 30,

Hera’

32, 85

Hermes 86, 108
ekkukl ê ma (‘roll-out’ machine)

Herodotus (484–425 bc ) 133 n.7,

7, 35, 40, 54, 85, 87, 130 n.5,

134 n.19, 148 n.23, 157 n.22

148 n.2

Hesiod (8th–7th century bc )

language 2, 8, 13–14, 131 n.11,

156 n.17

145 n.1, 145–46 n.3; see also Homer (8th–7th century bc ) deaths
above ‘dialogue metre’; also
in battle 141 n.36, 143 n.3;
below ‘lyric metres’, ‘messenger

Epic Cycle 34, 41; Iliad 33–34,
speeches’

134 n.11, 146 n.5, 148 n.21,
lyric metres 10–11, 17, 20, 132 n.3,

151 n.19; infl uence on tragedy

142–43 n.1, 151 n.13

12–13, 42; Odyssey 33–34, 35,
m ê chan ê ( deus ex machina ) 7; see

135 n.3, 136 n.9. See also under also Castor
individual characters by name
music, see aulos
house of Atreus: in Aeschylus’s
messenger speeches 13–14, 26,

Oresteia 12, 35; in Euripides’

58–59

Electra 10, 30–31, 32; in
orch ê stra 5–6, 7, 10, 84

Homer 33–34; in Jeff ers’ Tower

188

Index
beyond Tragedy 120–21; and

O’Neill, Eugene (1888–1953):

sexual infi delity 25–26, 55, 57,
infl uenced by Euripides

71–72, 95–96, 109–10. See also

162 n.29; life 162 n.28;
family members by name ; see

Mourning Becomes
also under Electra (Euripides),

Electra 121–23, 150 n.9,

‘setting’

161 n.25, 162 n.30; and hubris, hubrizein (‘outrage’, ‘violation’,

‘new theatre’movement

‘rape’) 85, 94–95, 148 n.21,

116

151 n.15; see also under Electra

Orestes

(Euripides), ‘rape’

in Aeschylus’ Oresteia 12, 35, 37,

40, 106, 136 n.11, 147 n.13,

Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906) 8, 116

148 n.22, 151 n.17

Iphigenia: in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon
in Euripides’ Electra 52–54,

34, 98; in the Cypria 34; in

80–82, 91, 139 n.19; actor and Euripides’ Electra 28, 61,
role-division 9, 48, 59, 63;

65, 69, 71, 97, 111, 144 n.9,

131 n.12, 133 n.6, 141 n.32;

149–50 n.1, 152 n.26; in
delivers 2nd prologue 9, 19;

Stesichorus’s Oresteia 34
disguise and deception 15, 50,

57, 68–69, 72, 144 n.7; future Jeff ers, Robinson (1887–1962), see
trial and exile 62, 63, 70, 87; in

Tower beyond Tragedy
kommos 11, 31, 51; resistance and response to matricide

Koniordou, Lydia 20 (Fig. 2), 118,

31, 51, 56, 61, 70, 98–99, 105,

161 n.19

110, 137 n.15; scar 24, 36, 46,

135 n.3, 136 n.9; unyoked from Mourning Becomes Electra , see under

Electra 100, 153 n.37. See also O’Neill, Eugene
under Aegisthus, ‘banquet and

Murray, Gilbert (1866–1957) 116–18,
murder’; see also under Electra,

159 n.6, 160 n.13, 160 n.15

‘infl ated views of Orestes’; see
myth 9, 16, 33, 42, 45, 55–56, 101,
also under Electra (Euripides),

109–11, 122, 123, 127,

‘athletic references’, ‘exile’,

134–5 n.1, 157 n.26

‘matricide’, ‘nobility’, ‘props’,

‘recognition scene’

Oedipus complex, see Freud,
in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis

Sigmund

139 n.18; in Orestes 139 n.18,

Old Man (Euripides’ Electra ) 7–8,

149 n.28

24–25, 36, 57–58, 141 n.30;
in Homer 33
actor 23, 48, 58–59, 133 n.6,
in Jeff ers’ Tower beyond Tragedy

154 n.6; arrival with food

120–21, 162 n.26

41, 98, 147 n.18; off erings at in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes

Agamemnon’s tomb 49, 66,

Electra (Orrin) 122–23

75; proverbial speech 77;
in Sophocles’ Electra 14, 37, 38,
recognizes Orestes 46, 52, 80,

42–43, 106, 136 n.11, 147 n.13,

92; as shepherd working land

148 n.21

107, 146 n.6
in Stesichhorus’s Oresteia 34

Index

189
in Yourcenar’s É lectre, ou La chute

Tantalus (father of Pelops) 25, 31,
des masques (Oreste) 126–27

134 n.18; see also house of

Atreus

Pelops (father of Atreus and
theatre of Dionysus (Athens) 5–7, 62,

Th
yestes) 72, 87, 134 n.18; see

107, 118, 129–30 n.4, 145 n.1;
also house of Atreus
see also Greek tragedy

Pindar (518–438 bc ) 34, 145 n.17

Th
yestes 25, 35, 47, 57, 71, 84, 96,

Plutarch (46–119 ad ) 115, 158 n.2

109–10, 157 n.22; see also Polydeuces (‘Pollux’), see Castor
house of Atreus

Pylades ( see also under Orestes,

Tower beyond Tragedy (Robinson
passim )

Jeff ers) 120–21, 150 n.9,
before Aeschylus 34

161 n.25, 162 n.26
in Aeschylus’s Choephori 35, 38,

Tsianos, Kostas (1942– ) 20 Fig. 2,

40, 54

118–19, 160 n.17
in Euripides’ Electra 54–55; at

‘three actor rule’, see under Greek

Aegisthus’s murder 26, 85;
tragedy, ‘acting’

crowned by Electra 14, 27, 39,

Trojan War 12–13; see also under

51, 74; mute 40, 63. See also Electra (Euripides)

under Electra (Euripides),

‘marriage’, ‘matricide’

Van Hove, Ivan (1958– ) 119–20,
in modern versions 122, 126,

161 n.20

127–28
in Sophocles’ Electra 38, 42–43

Xanthus (early 6th century bc ) 34,

94
sacrifi ce, see under Electra

(Euripides); see also Iphigenia;

Yourcenar, Marguerite (1903–1987)

see also under Aeschylus,
and É lectre, ou La chute des

Agamemnon , ‘sacrifi cial
masques 125–27, 163 n.36,
imagery’

163 n.39

Shakespeare (1564–1616) 1, 33, 65, 112,

130–31 n.9, 132 n.3, 159 n.8

Zeus 104, 106–7, 108, 146 n.9; father Shaw, George Bernard (1860–1950)

of Castor and Polydeuces

116–17, 160 n.11

62, 104; father of Perseus 86;

Sophocles (496–405 BC) 11, 12, 115,
father of Tantalus 25, 134 n.18;

122, 124, 135–36 n.6, 143 n.4,
prayed to by Orestes and

155 n.10; Ajax 87, 131 n.14;

Electra 25, 68, 105, 137 n.15;

Andromeda 86; Antigone 91,
reverses course of sun 25–26,

148 n.21; Oedipus Tyrannus

55, 109, 157 n.22; ‘sacred

58, 91; Philoctetes 83; Women marriage’ to Hera 146 n.9;
of Trachis 83, 152 n.26. See also sanctuary at Olympia 26,

Electra (Sophocles)

74; sends phantom Helen to

Stesichorus (6th century bc ) 34, 42,

Troy 32, 62–63, 76, 106, 111,

142 n.41, 157–58 n.26

157–58 n.26

190

191

192

193

194

Document Outline

- Cover page
- Halftitle page
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Theatrical Background
- 2 What Happens and How

- 3 Euripides’ Electra and Myth Reflecting and Re-fashioning Tradition

- 4 In Order of Appearance Characters (and Actors) in Electra

- The Farmer
- Electra
- Orestes
- Pylades
- The Chorus
- The Old Man
- The Messenger
- Aegisthus
- Clytemnestra

- Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioskouroi (‘Sons of Zeus’)38

- 5 Language

- 6 Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

- 7 Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles Maleness, Mothers and Offspring

- 8 Highs and Lows in Electra Rich and Poor, Gods and Mortals, Sky and Earth

- 9 Electra through the Looking Glass
- Notes
- References
- Index

Table of Contents

- Cover page
- Halftitle page
- Series page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Introduction
- 1 Theatrical Background
- 2 What Happens and How

- 3 Euripides’ Electra and Myth Reflecting and Re-fashioning Tradition

- 4 In Order of Appearance Characters (and Actors) in Electra

- The Farmer
- Electra
- Orestes
- Pylades
- The Chorus
- The Old Man
- The Messenger
- Aegisthus
- Clytemnestra

- Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioskouroi (‘Sons of Zeus’)38

- 5 Language

- 6 Setting, Costumes, Props and Bodies

- 7 Gender, Sex and Reproductive Roles Maleness, Mothers and Offspring

- 8 Highs and Lows in Electra Rich and Poor, Gods and Mortals, Sky and Earth

- 9 Electra through the Looking Glass
- Notes
- References
- Index