Through the long leagues of
fiery blue,
With saving; not to souls unshriven;
But whoso in his life hath striven
To love things holy and be true,
Through toil and storm we
guard him; we
Save, and he shall not die!—Therefore,
O praise the lying man no more,
Nor with oath-breakers sail the sea:
Farewell, ye walkers on the shore
Of death! A God hath counselled ye.
[CASTOR and
POLYDEUCES disappear.
CHORUS.
Farewell, farewell!—But
he who can so fare,
And stumbleth not on mischief anywhere,
Blessed on earth is he!
The chief characters in the play belong to one family,
as is shown by the two genealogies:—
TANTALUS
|
Pelops
__________|__________________
| |
Atreus Thyestes
_________|__________ |
| | |
Agamemnon Menelaus Aegisthus
(=Clytemnestra) (=Helen) (=Clytemnestra)
_____|________________________
| | |
Iphigenia Electra Orestes
(Also, a sister of Agamemnon, name variously given,
married Strophios, and was the mother of Pylades.)
Tyndareus = Leda = Zeus
____________________| ____|_________________________
| | | |
Clytemnestra Castor Polydeuces Helen
P. 1, l. 10, Son of his father’s foe.]—Both
foe and brother. Atreus and Thyestes became enemies
after the theft of the Golden Lamb. See pp. 47
ff.
P. 2, l. 34, Must wed with me.]—In Aeschylus
and Sophocles Electra is unmarried. This story
of her peasant husband is found only in Euripides,
but is not likely to have been wantonly invented by
him. It was no doubt an existing legend—an
[Greek: on logos], to use the phrase attributed
to Euripides in the Frogs (l. 1052). He
may have chosen to adopt it for several reasons.
First, to marry Electra to a peasant was a likely step
for Aegisthus to take, since any child born to her
afterwards would bear a stigma, calculated to damage
him fatally as a pretender to the throne. Again,
it seemed to explain the name “A-lektra”
(as if from [Greek: lektron] “bed;”
cf. Schol. Orestes, 71, Soph. El.
962, Ant. 917) more pointedly than the commoner
version. And it helps in the working out of Electra’s
character (cf. pp. 17, 22, &c.). Also it gives
an opportunity of introducing the fine character of
the peasant. He is an [Greek: Autourgos]
literally “self-worker,” a man who works
his own land, far from the city, neither a slave nor
a slave-master; “the men,” as Euripides
says in the Orestes (920), “who alone
save a nation.” (Cf, Bac., p. 115 foot,
and below, p. 26, ll. 367-390.) As Euripides became
more and more alienated from the town democracy he
tended, like Tolstoy and others, to idealise the workers
of the soil.
