“Torment of heart and blinding of the brain”: Electra bows down and buries her face in her hands. When she next looks up, there is an armed man like her father standing just above her father’s tomb. Note that she begins by refusing to believe. A motive which is afterwards deepened and elaborated by Euripides has been suggested by Aeschylus. See above. ↩
“Oh, Loxias shall not mock,” etc.: Orestes at the end of the play goes mad; before that certain of his speeches are strangely violent and incoherent. Scholars have generally supposed the text to be exceptionally corrupt, but I think it will be found that this particular tone of incoherence never comes except when there is a mention of Delphi and Apollo’s command. I think, therefore, that the wildness of these speeches is intentional, and the madness of the end does not come unprepared. It will be noticed in the last scene with what psychological daring as well as subtlety Aeschylus depicts the final collapse of his hero’s reason. ↩
“The wild bull’s way”: Ought Orestes to accept a money payment to atone for his father’s slaying, or, like a wild bull driven out from the herd, should he accept no peace but insist on a life for a life? The commutation of the blood-feud for a money payment was, of course, a softening of primitive manners. As such, it is elaborately provided for in various codes of early law. Yet, while it marks a social advance, at the same time it often involves a softening and weakening of the sense of duty in the individual. Orestes could probably have lived in comfort if he had been willing to accept a large blood-price from Aigisthos and say no more about it. He prefers, with all its misery and danger, the absolute fulfilment of his duty to his father. To us, and in this special case to Aeschylus, the rule of vengeance seems savage. We speak glibly of the “duty of forgiveness.” But it should be remembered that we expect the police to arrest the offender and the judge to see that he is hanged. In Orestes’ days men had to do justice on the wicked with their own hands, or else leave them unpunished and triumphant. ↩
“That bronze horror”: The meaning is not known. It may be some instrument of torture, but more likely it is something intended to make a noise, like the bell sometimes worn by lepers in the Middle Ages, to warn people of the presence of the Accursed One. ↩
The Invocation. This extraordinary scene is really the heart of the play and gives to the Choëphoroe a strange supernatural atmosphere which is absent from both the Electra plays. There is no invocation scene in Sophocles; there is a brief one in Euripides (Electra 671–685). It has great emotional effect but is only about 15 lines long and does not attempt to produce the cumulative impression of this scene, in which we feel human suffering and love gradually breaking through the barriers of death and earth and darkness. At the end the dead Agamemnon is awake, and Orestes hardly needs to think about the details of his dangerous plot. A power more than mortal is behind him. It will be noticed how the scene works up, like certain religious litanies, to a pitch of more and more overpowering and almost hysterical emotion: then, in the regular Greek manner, it descends again to something like calm. ↩
“Ah me, that word, that word”: The thought that he himself hates his mother is what pierces Orestes’ heart. In his next speech also he is bewildered. Not till l. 434, “All, all dishonour,” does he lose all scruple in the storm of his passion. ↩
“Ho, Mother; ho, thou, Mother, mine enemy!” First Electra tells of the shameful secret burial: this rouses Orestes to fury. Then the Leader tells of something worse. The murderess had mutilated the body; cut off the dead man’s feet so that he could not pursue, and his hands so that he could not lay hold of her. This would make Agamemnon helpless, and so leave Orestes without hope. The unexpected abomination breaks Orestes down.—This device of terrified murderers is a piece of primitive magic. It is attributed to Clytemnestra by Sophocles (Electra 445), and to the witch Medea by Apollonius Rhodius. ↩
The use of an em-dash before a line of speech indicates that a different individual of the Chorus is speaking each line in the stanza. —James Wright ↩
“The House hath healing,” i.e. the House itself can cure bloodshed by bloodshed, sin by vengeance. ↩
“Behold, ye have made a long and yearning praise”: The dead must surely now be satisfied. Even if neglected for years he has now had such a lamentation as requites him for all. ↩
“What power the Daemon hath which guardeth thee”: The word Daemon has no connotation of evil in classical Greek. ↩
“One dead and feeling not!”: Not strictly consistent perhaps with the invocation scene, but psychologically right. The dead are past feeling … unless something very extraordinary is done to
