An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides
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But I for one propose to swear a truce with the demon of this house.
I’ll be content with where we’ve got to now, hard though it is to bear.
Let the demon go grind out murders on some other family.
I’m happy with a tiny share of the wealth here if I can stop us all killing one another.
[Enter AIGISTHOS.]
AIGISTHOS : O welcome day of justice! Now I can say the gods are handling miscreants as they should, when I see this fellow lying in robes that the Furies wove—
it’s payback for his father’s crimes.
I am oh! quite pleased.
For Atreus you know, who was ruler of this land and this man’s father, drove Thyestes, who was my father and this man’s brother—am I making myself clear?—
out of his city and away from his home.
Then when he (Thyestes) returned as a suppliant to his (Atreus’) hearth
Atreus set before my dad, with hospitality more zealous than kind, a merry meal of his own children’s flesh.
The toes and fingers he chopped up especially small.
Thyestes took a chunk and ate it, not knowing.
That meal ruined our family, as you can see.
He suddenly saw what he’d done, shrieked aloud, fell back
vomiting carnage and called out a curse upon this house, kicking over the table to emphasize it:
May the entire race of Pelops perish this same way!
So that’s why you see this man lying here dead.
I planned it. Righteously.
For he exiled me too, along with my poor father, when I was quite young.
Justice brought me back.
From exile I laid my finger on this man, devising every detail of his doom.
And you know, even death would be sweet to me now
I’ve seen him caught in the nets of Justice.
CHORUS : Aigisthos, your roostering repels me.
You say you intended to kill this man, plotted his pitiful murder all alone.
And I say you’re a candidate for stoning. Know it.
The people will bring you to justice.
AIGISTHOS : Don’t squawk at me from your seat on the lowest rowing bench:
I run this ship. Know it.
You may be old but you’ll learn to control your impulses.
Bondage and hunger are wonderful teachers.
Have you eyes? Don’t you see? If you kick against the pricks, you’ll hurt yourself.
CHORUS : Woman! You skulk at home while men are off at war.
You foul the bed of our king and plot his death!
AIGISTHOS : You’ll be sorry you said that.
You’re the opposite of Orpheus, whose voice could charm.
Your silly yelping infuriates me.
But you will be rendered acquiescent.
CHORUS : As if you could ever be my master—you who dreamed of a king’s murder but had not the nerve to do the deed yourself!
AIGISTHOS : Well, no. To entrap him was the wife’s work, obviously.
An old enemy like me would have been instantly suspicious.
But with his wealth I plan to rule this state and whomever does not obey me
I’ll yoke to a heavy collar. Hunger and darkness will break him down.
CHORUS : Given the rot in your soul, why not kill the king yourself?
Instead a woman has polluted our land and our gods.
Does Orestes somewhere look upon the light?
I pray he come back and put you two to death!
AIGISTHOS : If that is your attitude, you’ll soon learn—
CHORUS : Come! Men! There’s work to do!
AIGISTHOS : [To his guards.] Swords up!
CHORUS : Death, you say! We’re ready.
AIGISTHOS : Good, you’ll soon taste it.
KLYTAIMESTRA : No, no, no, no, my dear darling, no more evil.
The harvest is in: we have enough pain, enough bloodshed.
Venerable elders, go back to your homes, before you suffer.
What we did had to be done.
And if it ends here, we’re content.
Some demon of luck has clipped us with a sharp hoof.
That’s a woman’s opinion, for what it’s worth.
AIGISTHOS : You mean these creatures are permitted to pelt me with insults heedlessly, randomly, treating it like a game?
CHORUS : You won’t see men of Argos cringe before a coward!
AIGISTHOS : I’ll come after you!
CHORUS : Not if the gods bring Orestes back!
AIGISTHOS : Empty hope! The food of exiles!
CHORUS : Go on, be yourself, grow fat, pollute justice, now is your chance!
AIGISTHOS : One day you’ll pay.
CHORUS : Brag away! You’re like a cock beside his hen.
KLYTAIMESTRA : Ignore their yelpings.
You and I, as masters of this house, will dispose all things as they should be.
Beautifully.
[Exeunt.]
ELEKTRA
by Sophokles
INTRODUCTION
HER
Her name sounds like a negative adjective: “alektra” in Greek means “bedless, unwed, unmarriageable.” Her life is a stopped and stranded thing, just a glitch in other people’s plans. Her function and meaning as a human have been reduced to one activity—saying no to everything around her. No to her father’s murder at the hands of her mother, no to her mother’s adultery with Aigisthos, no to going on with her life as if nothing were wrong, no to breaking off her lament.
People sometimes say of Elektra that her mourning is excessive. She would not disagree. Early in the play she confesses to the chorus:
Women, I am ashamed before you: I know
you find me extreme
in my grief.
I bear it hard.
But I tell you I have no choice.
(338–42)
She has no choice, because she has no other self than the one that mourns. She is clear about this:
I cannot not grieve.
(181)
Locked between the two negatives of this despairing sentence is the whole range of her options as Elektra. Again her clarity:
I need one food:
I must not violate Elektra.
(494–95)
What does it mean to “not violate Elektra”? Her sense of self is amazing. Pressure comes from every side, from everyone around her, to acquiesce in the crimes of her mother and keep outrage quiet. Pressure has partly succeeded: she is deformed. Psychologically and morally she has no room to breathe or move. And she knows this. She says to the chorus:
Evil is a pressure that shapes us to itself.
(424)
Later, more bitterly, to her mother:
I am the shape you made me.
Filth teaches filth.
(836–37)
To “violate Elektra” would be to stop saying no to evil and filth. Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax. These characters usually express defiance in some heroic action—Antigone buries her brother, Ajax falls on his sword. Elektra has the same kind of raw, stubborn, scandalous soul, but her circumstances are different: Elektra is deprived of action.
The play begins with two men center stage making a plan that will change her life and deciding not to tell her about it, although she is hovering just inside the door (they hear her weeping). The play ends with two men center stage marching into the house to complete the revenge plot while Elektra is left outside to follow after them or stand and wait, no one seems to care. The play’s centerpiece is a deception scene in which two men manipulate Elektra with lies to a point of near hysteria. She is an adult but unmarried female in the house of a mother who hates her and she has neither social function nor emotional context. She seems to squat on the doorstep of the house rather than live inside. Her sister calls her a maniac and waves h
er ideas away. Her brother treats her as superfluous to his plans—he finds her wild, emotional, depressing. She is a woman stranded at doorways and passivity is killing her.
There is only one thing she can do.
Make noise.
So Elektra talks, wails, argues, denounces, sings, chants and screams from one end of the play to the other. She is onstage almost every minute and has one of the longest speaking parts in Greek tragedy. Sounds of every kind emerge from her, articulate and inarticulate. Her power of language is fantastic; she can outtalk anyone in the play. Her vocabulary of screams is so rich that I chose to transliterate her cries letter for letter—OIMOI! instead of the conventional Alas! or Woe is me! 7 This is not a person who would say Woe is me! She is a torrent of self. Actionless, yet she causes things to happen and people to change. Hopeless, yet she keeps Elektra going. There are moments when she transcends herself in words, as in her opening prayer to light and air:
O holy light!
And equal air shaped on the world—
(116)
There are moments that condense her to pure hate, as when she hurls at her mother:
Call me
baseminded, blackmouthing bitch! if you like—
for if this is my nature
we know how I come by it, don’t we?
(815–18)
She is no Antigone—not noble or lovable or “deserving of golden honor,” as Sophokles says of that other lone female. But she is always worth listening to.
PLAY
Overall it is “a play without comfort,” as Fiona Shaw said when she undertook the part of Elektra.8 In particular she found the deception/recognition scene between Elektra and Orestes “unspeakably impossible to play.” Critics and scholars (and translators) agree, this scene is a hard nut to crack. Why does Orestes decide to trick his sister into thinking he’s dead? Why does he give it up in the middle? What does Sophokles want to achieve here? The alternation of lies and truth, high emotions and low, is bewildering and cruel, the tug-of-war over an empty urn almost bizarre. Fiona Shaw describes it this way:
To have decided your brother is dead and then to hear he’s alive and then to hear he’s dead again and then to hear he’s alive again scrambles the brain. There cannot be any recovery from it … It’s like playing a very low note and suddenly playing a very high note and you break the voice on the way. You break everything.9
Despite its difficulty, she says the scene proved exceptionally moving in performance. Audiences wept. Audiences also wept in the fourth century B.C. when the celebrated actor Polos played the part. According to ancient gossip, Polos had only recently lost by death a beloved son when he was invited to do Sophokles’ Elektra in a revival of it at Athens. This was his approach:
Having costumed himself in the mourning garb of Elektra, Polos took from the tomb the ashes and urn of his son, embraced them as if they were those of Orestes and filled the whole place not with the appearance and imitation of sorrow but with genuine grief and unfeigned lamentation. It seemed the play was being acted but this was in fact real heartbreak.10
This story is probably just a story. But it gives me pause, I think because it draws out a strand of uneasiness that is already present in Sophokles’ construction of the scene. I mean his play with fakery. For isn’t it deeply odd that Elektra’s profoundest emotional outpouring, the lament for Orestes during which “you break everything,” as Fiona Shaw says, should be evoked by a fake object—this funeral urn that is supposed to contain Orestes’ ashes but in fact contains nothing? What does “in fact” mean in such a context? The “fact” that Polos is exploiting and the “fact” that Sophokles is staging are facts of different orders, yet they fit one within the other within theatrical experience. Sophokles may have constructed the urn scene to question this fit. I doubt he would have approved Polos using his own son’s death to get a strong performance, but he seems (in other plays as well as Elektra) very alert to the boundary between art and reality and sometimes inclined to fiddle with it himself.11
To look at the matter from another angle: Could the recognition scene have been staged differently? We have a good example. Orestes’ story is a standard myth told and retold by poets from Homer to Euripides. But Sophokles’ closest model was probably Choephoroi (Libation Bearers), the second play of Aiskhylos’ Oresteia, staged in 458 B.C.: here we see a recognition scene between brother and sister that it is straightforwardly joyful—no deception of Elektra, no tormenting her with a fake funeral urn, no ironic byplay. Emotions run easy and true to their goal, vengeance seems justified in the eyes of (at least some of) the gods, and two murderous children are (arguably) redeemed by mutual love. In Sophokles’ replay, all this is displaced and estranged. He subtracts redemption and leaves justice vague. Focus is on Elektra—shattered and elated, manipulated and suppressed by turns, her poor soul subject to someone else’s script, her responses coerced by their staging. “You have used me strangely,” she says to Orestes finally (1754).
We can say for pretty sure that Sophokles was thinking of Aiskhylos when he composed his Elektra, because he quotes him. The death scene of Klytaimestra in Sophokles’ play echoes the death scene of Agamemnon in Aiskhylos’ Agamemnon, even down to reiterating the death cries that emerge from the house in each case. Elektra’s horrific command to Orestes
Hit her a second time, if you have the strength!
(Sophokles’ Elektra 1885)
is a direct quotation of her father’s pitiful
Again! I am hit a second time!
(Aiskhylos’ Agamemnon 1014)
It’s as if the whole family were there, knee-deep in blood, and Elektra is killing her mother with her father’s words. Why would Sophokles do this? To emphasize Elektra’s awful command of language as a weapon? To remind us of Klytaimestra’s crime and close the cycle of vengeance in this house? To reopen Agamemnon’s wounds and suggest that vengeance here will never end? To trump Aiskhylos? To pay homage to Aiskhylos?12 Perhaps all these at once. Sophokles is a complex poet working in a complex tradition. His audience enjoys all kinds of play with masks. All kinds of uses of urns. They do not come to the theater for comfort.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
(in order of appearance)
OLD MAN servant and former tutor of Orestes
ORESTES son of Klytaimestra and Agamemnon
CHRYSOTHEMIS daughter of Klytaimestra and Agamemnon
ELEKTRA daughter of Klytaimestra and Agamemnon
KLYTAIMESTRA queen of Argos
AIGISTHOS paramour of Klytaimestra
CHORUS of Mykenaian women
PYLADES Orestes’ silent friend
SETTING: Before the palace of Agamemnon in Argos.
[Enter the OLD MAN and ORESTES with PYLADES.]
OLD MAN : You are his son! Your father marshaled the armies at Troy once—child of Agamemnon: look around you now.
Here is the land you were longing to see all that time.
Ancient Argos. You dreamed of this place.
The grove of Io, where the gadfly drove her.
Look, Orestes. There is the marketplace named for Apollo, wolfkiller god.
And on the left, the famous temple of Hera.
But stop! There—do you know what that is?
Mykenai. Yes. Look at it. Walls of gold!
Walls of death. It is the house of Pelops.
I got you out of there out of the midst of your father’s murder, one day long ago.
From the hands of your sister
I carried you off. Saved your life. Reared you up—to this: to manhood. To avenge your father’s death.
So, Orestes! And you, dear Pylades—
Now is the time to decide what to do.
Already the sun is hot upon us.
Birds are shaking, the world is awake.
Black stars and night have died away.
So before anyone is up and about let’s talk.
Now is no time to delay.
This is the edge of action.
The signs of goodness shine from your face.
Like a thoroughbred horse—he gets old, but he does not lose heart, he pricks up his ears—so you urge me forward and stand in the front rank yourself. Good. Now, I will outline my plan. You listen sharp. If I’m off target anywhere, set me straight.
You see, I went to Pytho to ask the oracle how I could get justice from the killers of my father.
Apollo answered:
Take no weapons.
No shield.
No army.
Go alone—a hand in the night.
Snare them.
Slaughter them.
You have the right.