*40 The Alpheus flows through Olympia, the sanctuary of Zeus in the Peloponnese. The precinct of the Pythia is Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi.
*41 Iole, daughter of Eurytus. Heracles, son of Alcmene (fathered by Zeus), sacked Iole’s hometown, Oechalia, to win her as his mistress (and slave). Sophocles tells this story in his play The Women of Trachis.
*42 Semele, whom Zeus loved. When he granted her wish to see him in his true form, he appeared as a lightning bolt, striking and killing her. From her womb he snatched her fetal son, Dionysus (Bacchus), and gestated him in his thigh, thus making him “twice-born” (see the prologue to Euripides’ Bacchae in this volume.
*43 The text is emended here.
*44 This line tells the audience that the Nurse had extracted from Hippolytus an oath to keep her information secret.
*45 A similar complaint from the woman’s perspective is found in Euripides’ Medea (lines 231–33 in this volume).
*46 Lines 625–26 have been deleted; they seem to be an interpolation referring to the custom of the bridegroom’s payment of a sum to the bride’s father: “and now to bring an evil into our house, / we pay out our wealth.” This interpolation might have been an attempt to “correct” the anachronism of the dowry for the dramatic time of the play, when there were no dowries.
*47 Four lines following this one have been omitted. They are thought to be an interpolation, as they irrelevantly address the subject of in-laws.
*48 The line following this has been omitted; it repeats the idea expressed in line 661.
*49 The following line, claiming that Hippolytus will also tell Pittheus, has been omitted as an interpolation.
*50 In myth, the Eridanus is a river at the far western reaches of the known world, although here Euripides places it farther east, in the Adriatic. But the story he places there is that of Phaethon, the son of Helios (the Sun), who requests to drive his father’s chariot across the heavens. He loses control and Zeus strikes him with a lightning bolt to save the world from being destroyed by the heat of the sun. Phaethon plunges to his death in the far west, where his sisters turn into poplar trees who weep tears of amber. The text has been slightly emended in the following lines.
*51 The Garden of the Hesperides, a kind of Eden, is also thought to be in the far western reaches of the world. Heracles travels to bring back golden apples from the trees there, and there also Atlas holds up the sky on his shoulders.
*52 The text in this stanza has been emended.
*53 Crete.
*54 Munychia is a hill in the port of Athens.
*55 The Chorus imagine Phaedra hanging herself, as that is the usual form that a woman’s suicide took.
*56 When something terrible is happening inside the house, the Chorus in tragedy often debate what to do, as, by convention, they cannot leave the stage and run to help.
*57 The text is corrupt here.
*58 The Chorus keep their promise to Phaedra to reveal nothing of what they know.
*59 In his next two speeches, Theseus alternates between singing and speech, as indicated by indented (sung) lines.
*60 The text is uncertain here.
*61 The text is corrupt here.
*62 The text is corrupt here and cannot be securely emended.
*63 The text of the Chorus’s song is uncertain in various places, and some iambic lines seem to be a later addition. The translation is therefore conjecture to some extent.
*64 Lines 871–73 and line 875 have been deleted as interpolations.
*65 Two lines have been deleted as likely interpolations.
*66 Theseus claims that merely being in Hippolytus’ presence has exposed him to the danger of being polluted by his wrongdoing, and so he doesn’t fear to approach him face to face. The Greeks believed that until a wrongdoer has been purified by certain rites, he can spread the consequences of his wrongdoing to others and therefore musn’t be greeted or touched.
*67 Theseus lists characteristics of certain esoteric sects whose practices for purifying the soul, such as not eating meat, were unconventional. One of those sects was devoted to Orpheus. He isn’t necessarily saying that Hippolytus belongs to such a sect but rather that he makes extraordinary claims for his own purity.
*68 Sinis and Sciron were among the foes whom Theseus defeated in his youth. They plagued travelers on the road between Troezen and Athens. The latter kicked travelers over a cliff to rocks below when they were washing their feet at his command. Theseus gained his reputation as a heroic civilizer by such feats.
*69 The text is questionable in various places in the next five lines.
*70 The Greeks held athletic contests at various sites, including Olympia and the Isthmus of Corinth. To compete and win in these games was a mark of great distinction.
*71 Line 1029 has been omitted as an interpolation.
*72 Line 1050 has been omitted as an interpolation. It is very close in sense to line 1047.
*73 The extreme western and eastern limits of the world.
*74 The oath he gave the Nurse not to reveal what she tells him.
*75 The word Hippolytus uses here, nothos, refers in Athenian law to someone whose father is a citizen but whose mother is foreign and who therefore doesn’t have the rights of citizenship.
*76 Artemis.
*77 Erechtheus was the founding king of Athens. Hippolytus assumes his exile extends to Athens, since that, too, is Theseus’ home.
*78 Another name for Artemis.
*79 See note to line 231.
*80 Artemis.
*81 The Messenger imagines the dense pine forest on Mount Ida turned into tablets like the one on which Phaedra wrote her accusation of Hippolytus. Mount Ida is probably the mountain near Troy spoken of in the Homeric poems. It would be familiar to the audience as a vast mountain range.
*82 The text here is corrupt.
*83 Because Hippolytus knows himself to be innocent, he imagines that his suffering is in payment for some wrong done by a member of the family in earlier generations. Theseus makes a similar supposition at line 820.
*84 Gods are often recognized by their scent, as in the Homeric hymn to Demeter or Aphrodite, for example.
*85 As is often the case at the end of a tragedy, Euripides connects the events of the play to a ritual known to or practiced by the audience. There was a cult practice in which young girls dedicated locks of hair to Hippolytus before their marriage. There was also a sanctuary honoring Hippolytus on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, but we know nothing about the ritual performed there.
*86 Sanctuaries of the gods, and the gods themselves, had to be kept apart from human death, which was considered unclean. Apollo makes the same point in Alcestis, lines 22–24.
*87 Lines 1452–56 have been slightly rearranged to make clearer sense.
*88 Hippolytus refers here to his status as the child of a foreign mother (see note 74). In the play this illegitimacy is translated into his not having the same status as Phaedra’s children.
*89 These last lines of the Chorus are of uncertain origin. By convention the Chorus speaks the last lines of the play, but it is not clear whether this convention was Euripidean or a later development. These lines are particularly suspect.
INTRODUCTION TO EURIPIDES’ ELECTRA
Electra is the center of this play, as she was in Sophocles’ Electra, and as with that Electra, her resentment and anger here propel Orestes to kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Both this Electra and the one by Sophocles—perhaps written at about the same time, though neither can be securely dated—are recastings of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, and both feature realistic characters who are not particularly laudable. In Euripides’ drama, both Electra and Orestes are more interested in recovering their patrimony and their aristocratic way of life than in accomplishing the justice of Zeus. They spend more time plotting the murders than summoning Agamemnon’s ghost, a reversal of the pattern by which Aeschylus had displayed the piety of his heroes.
Euripide
s introduces a new element into his Electra by giving his main character a husband—a peasant her mother has forced her to marry as a way of demoralizing and disempowering her. She is ashamed of the hovel where she lives, and she is obliged to keep house and fetch water, chores ordinarily performed by slaves. Her dirty hair is cropped short (long, carefully dressed hair was a luxury only noblewomen could afford). But her husband, a man so lowly he is not even given a name, treats her with kindness and honors her as a princess, in a marital relationship Euripides portrays with great tenderness.
When Orestes first sees his sister, he assumes she is a peasant, returning with her jug of water from the spring. She assumes he is a criminal, until he tells her that he has news about her brother. And in some ways Agamemnon’s children are criminals, and the peasants to whom they feel superior seem more intelligent and honorable than they. Orestes is impressed by the noble nature of Electra’s husband, who offers him such hospitality as he can. Suspense continues to build while the Chorus sing a long song about the Trojan War, glorious Achilles, and the leader of the army who was killed by Clytemnestra’s adultery.
As Sophocles did in his drama, Euripides makes Orestes’ old tutor an important agent in his plot, and he casts this man (rather than Electra) as the one who had taken young Orestes away from Argos long ago. The old tutor now enters and recognizes Orestes almost immediately. Electra, however, unable to believe that her brother has returned, rejects the tokens of recognition that had featured so prominently in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers: How could Orestes’ locks of hair and footprints be similar to her own? How could he still be wearing cloth that she once wove for him—since she was only a child when he left, too young to weave? She accepts that the old tutor is right only when he points out a scar near Orestes’ eyebrow, incurred when he fell while he and Electra were chasing a fawn.
The tutor now helps Electra and Orestes plot their revenge. Orestes and Pylades will go to the place where Aegisthus is sacrificing to the nymphs. Electra will send a message to Clytemnestra that she has given birth to a son (in fact her marriage is a chaste one, owing to the peasant’s great reverence for her). The Chorus meanwhile sing of the quarrel between Atreus and Thyestes: Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife and stole a golden lamb from Atreus’ flocks; Zeus reacted by reversing the course of the sun and depriving North Africa of rain. The Chorus react to the story with the kind of skepticism Euripides’ characters often express about such traditional tales about miracles, but they insist that they have not lost their faith in the gods, even though the gods seem to have done nothing to stop the succession of crimes in the family.
A messenger brings the news that Orestes and Pylades have killed Aegisthus. But what he describes is not a heroic confrontation; rather, an ignoble ambush. Aegisthus was the perfect host, welcoming the two strangers to a sacrifice, and suspecting that something was wrong only when he discovered that the liver of the sacrificial victim had no lobe, an evil portent. As Aegisthus was bending over the entrails of the sacrificial animal, Orestes struck him from behind, smashing his vertebrae, leaving his body twitching. Nonetheless, Electra brings victory garlands to Orestes and Pylades as if they had won a fair and open victory in battle, and she delivers a long, triumphant speech over Aegisthus’ dead body.
That leaves Clytemnestra for Orestes to deal with. Remarkably, the young man pauses to wonder whether the oracle he received at Delphi really was spoken by an avenging deity. But Electra will not allow him to shirk. The murder of Clytemnestra, as portrayed by Euripides, is a sordid affair, in that the victim is portrayed far more sympathetically than in other versions. Although Clytemnestra arrives at the peasant’s humble dwelling in a chariot, accompanied by her Trojan slaves, she treats Electra with kindness, and she explains that she hated Agamemnon because he killed her daughter Iphigenia and came home with Cassandra as his concubine—behavior that even a model wife like Penelope could hardly have approved. When Electra dismisses these arguments, Clytemnestra seems almost to apologize to her: “I’m not too comfortable with what I’ve done. / Those plots and schemes I made! It was too much, / that rage against my husband. I regret it.”
In Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ versions of the story, the details of Clytemnestra’s murder are not reported. But in this play, Electra and Orestes offer horrifying descriptions of how they killed their mother in the peasant’s house. They saw her bare her breast and heard her plead with them not to kill her. Electra helped the hesitant Orestes thrust his sword through their mother’s neck. Once the deed is done, they both express regret: Electra takes pity on Clytemnestra as she lies dead, putting the clothes back on the body of “our unkind kin, the enemy we loved.”
As she prepares her mother’s body for burial, Electra states: “This is the end of the sorrows of our house.” But just at that moment, the twin gods Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux), Clytemnestra’s divine brothers, appear atop the roof of the palace, and Castor (who speaks for both) makes it clear that those sorrows will continue:
…we saw
your mother, and our sister’s, ritual slaughter.
Her death was right, but you were wrong to do it.
Apollo—he’s my master, so I must
keep silence—. But he gave you bad advice,
despite his wisdom. Still, now yield to Fate,
and do what Destiny and Zeus command. (1240–48)
Electra, they decree, is to marry Pylades and leave Argos (her unconsummated marriage to the Peasant is now considered annulled); Orestes must flee to Athens, pursued by the avenging deities known as Kēres (virtually synonymous with Aeschylus’ Erinyes). There he will be acquitted of his mother’s murder, as in the Oresteia. Then Orestes must go to Arcadia, where he will found a city that will be named after him. Pylades must take Electra’s peasant ex-husband along with them and “reward him with a pile of wealth.” When Orestes and Electra ask why the twin gods did nothing to prevent their sister’s murder, the answer, as so often from gods in Euripides’ dramas, only explains the obvious: it was fated, and Apollo had ordered it through his oracle; the curse on her family had made it inevitable. Electra and Orestes now realize that they will never see each other again, and Castor and Polydeuces depart, on their way to save mortals who love piety and justice—a painful contrast to their role in this play.
Interestingly, in this deus ex machina epilogue, Castor, who had been a mortal before Zeus raised him from the dead and made him divine, for a brief moment takes pity on Orestes and his suffering. But since he is now a god, he no longer feels the need to comfort his mortal niece and nephew. Like Apollo and the other gods, he and Polydeuces live at their ease and let humans do their dirty work for them. Agamemnon’s death has been avenged, but Orestes must suffer before he can find happiness. In the realistic world depicted in Euripides’ drama, a grim matricide brings no triumphant procession and no release from troubles.
As in the case of Sophocles’ Electra, no definite date can be assigned to this drama. Because Euripides tended to use more short syllables in his lines of iambic dialogue as his style evolved, scholars have used the percentage of short syllables as a way to roughly date his plays, and this metric suggests that Electra was produced around 420 B.C. Perhaps the central role Euripides assigns to Electra was influenced by Sophocles’ version of the story, but there is no way to know which play came first.
Euripides’ Electra was the basis of a 1962 film by Michael Cacoyannis. An Academy Award nominee, it depicted vividly the harsh life led by farmers in the Greek countryside and the brutality of the murders of Agamemnon, along with those of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. The film ended with Orestes and Electra both leaving the land they had sought to regain, but without the explanation given in Euripides’ plays by the twin gods.
ELECTRA
Translated by Emily Wilson
This translation is based on the text in J. Diggle, ed., Euripidis Fabulae (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994); I have also consulted M. J. Cropp, ed., Euripides, Electra (Ed.2; Oxford, Ar
is and Phillips, 2013) and H. M. Roisman and C.A.E. Luschnig, Euripides, Electra: A Commentary (Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press, 2011).
CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
PEASANT, husband of Electra
ELECTRA, daughter of the dead king of Argos, Agamemnon, and the wife who murdered him, Clytemnestra
ORESTES, exiled brother of Electra
OLD MAN, loyal servant and long-ago tutor of Agamemnon
MESSENGER
CLYTEMNESTRA, mother of Electra
AEGISTHUS, lover of Clytemnestra and co-murderer of Agamemnon; in possession of the throne of Argos
CASTOR (with POLLUX, nonspeaking role), brothers of Helen and Clytemnestra, who have become gods
PYLADES, friend of Orestes (nonspeaking role)
CHORUS of women of Argos
Setting: The play takes place in rural Argos, outside the hut of the Peasant.
PEASANT: (emerging from hut)
Look! Here’s ancient Argos, river Inachus,*1
where Agamemnon raised the rage of War,*2
sailing a thousand ships against great Troy.
He killed the king of Ilium, Lord Priam,
and took the famous city of the Dardans,
and came back here to Argos, where he filled
the lofty temples with the heaps of spoil,
taken from foreigners. So far, so good.
But then he died, at home, by his wife’s tricks.
10
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus killed him.
He’s gone, and left behind the ancient scepter
of Tantalus.*3 Aegisthus rules the land.
He’s got the old king’s wife, Tyndareus’ daughter.*4
As for the children left here when the king
set sail for Troy, Orestes and the girl,
Electra; well, his father’s old attendant
saw that Aegisthus planned to kill the boy,
and took him to the king of Phocis, Strophius,*5
The Greek Plays Page 70
