Part 8

“_If you must have it so, let some one loose The shoe that like a slave supports my tread; Lest, trampling o’er these royal dyes, some god Smite me with envious glances from afar._“[15]

He has a consciousness of what he is doing, and his mind misgives him; but he who could deny to the mother the life of her child, cannot refuse this indulgence to his pride. Clytemnestra, in exultation that she can hardly conceal, reassures him. In lines of exquisite poetic beauty, but weighted with a meaning that he does not see, she declares that this honour is his due; that it is a sacrifice for his return. Then, as Agamemnon passes within the palace, she remains for one instant outside. The fire of exultation dies away. She forgets the people standing round, the need for dissimulation, the danger of discovery. One thought sweeps everything else away—the thought of the stupendous deed that she is about to attempt, its horror and its peril. She raises her hands and utters an awful prayer:

“_Zeus—thou fulfillest all—fulfil my prayer! And take good heed of all thou doest herein!_“[15]

Then she follows Agamemnon into the palace. But there remains one person whom she has overlooked, Cassandra, priestess and prophetess of Apollo. As the Chorus takes up a lovely song full of foreboding, the queen returns and calls to Cassandra to come within. But there has fallen upon Cassandra a prophetic vision of the crime. She is distraught with fear and horror, and can find no answer to the imperious queen. Clytemnestra, to whom every moment is of infinite importance, suddenly loses all her dignity in mere rage at the silent, helpless girl.

“_I have not time to waste out here with her. By this the victims at our midmost hearth Stand ready for the slaughter and the fire;— Rich thank-offerings for mercies long despaired. ... I’ll not demean myself By throwing more words away._“[15]

As Clytemnestra passes a second time within doors, the poor captive begins to wail a prophecy of what is about to be enacted there. She mourns for the awful curse upon the house.

“_There bides within A band of voices,—all in unison, Yet neither sweet nor tuneful, for their song Is not of blessing. Ay, a revel-rout, Ever emboldened with new draughts of blood, Within these walls, a furious multitude, Hard to drive forth, keep haunt, all of one kin. They cling to the walls; they hymn the primal curse, Their fatal hymn._”

She foresees the death of Agamemnon, and her own fate beside him. Twice she approaches the palace and twice recoils in horror. But at last, committing herself to Apollo, she rushes within; and instantly there rises a dreadful cry. It is the voice of the king.

“_Ah! Ah! I am mortally stricken, here, in the palace!_”

The old men stand paralysed with fear; and before they can move a step to help, the agonized voice cries a second time:

“_Oh me! Again I am smitten, to the death!_”

There is an instant uproar and outcry. The palace becomes noisy with hurrying feet and clamorous voices; the old men feebly rush this way and that, unable to decide, in their weakness and senility, how to act. In the midst of the disorder, the doors of the palace are thrown open, and Clytemnestra is revealed, weapon in hand, bending over the body of Agamemnon. A dreadful hush falls; and the queen, drawing herself up before the people, deliberately confesses to the deed and declares her motives.

“_I, who spake much before to serve my need, Will here unspeak it, unappalled by shame. ... Time, and thought still brooding On that old quarrel, brought me to this blow. ‘Tis done, and here I stand: here where I smote him!— I so contrived it,—that I’ll ne’er deny,— As neither loophole nor defence was left him.... Such—O ye Argive elders who stand here,— Such is the fact. Whereat, an if ye will, Rejoice ye!... Such a cup of death He filled with household crime, and now, returning, Has drained in retribution._”

But to the Senators only one thing is clear. A terrible crime has been committed: their king has been foully slain. All Clytemnestra’s pleas in extenuation of the deed are wasted words. To them the situation is tragically simple: her guilt is plain; there is but one word that fits her—murderess. There is no question for them of reason or of motive. What she claims to be a righteous judgment upon Agamemnon, they declare to be a crime demanding punishment. But they are not strong enough to enforce their will; and when they threaten Clytemnestra with banishment, she answers with scorn.

“_That is your sentence. I must fly the land With public execration on my head. Wise justicers! What said ye, then, to him Who slew his child, nor recked of her dear blood More than if sacrificing some ewe-lamb From countless flocks that choked the teeming fold, But slew the priceless travail of my womb For a charm, to allay the wind from Thrace?..._”

“_Then hear my oath. By mighty Justice, Final avenger of my murdered child, By Atè and Erinys, gods of power, To whom I sacrificed this man, I look not For danger as an inmate, whiles our hearth Is lightened by Aegisthus, evermore, As hitherto, constant in love to me; My shield, my courage!_“[15]

Then, as the elders mourn the death of the king and the demon of vengeance that haunts the house, Clytemnestra, in passionate conviction, declares that she has been merely an instrument of that spirit of vengeance.

“_But I Here make my compact with the hellish Power That haunts the house of Atreus. What has been, Though hard, we will endure. But let him leave This roof, and plague some other race henceforth With kindred-harrowing strife. Small share of wealth Shall amply serve, now I have made an end Of mutual-murdering madness in this hall._“[15]

She comforts herself with the thought that now at last the Furies are appeased. No doubt of her own motives assails her: no warning hint that crime is not cancelled by fresh crime. In the first glow of triumph she has no premonition of the return of an avenging son. She proposes to herself a reign of peace with Egisthus which shall erase all memory of the past.

“_Might but this be all of sorrow, we would bargain now for peace.... I and thou together ruling with a firm and even hand, Will control and keep in order both the palace and the land._“[15]

On this note of false security the _Agamemnon_ closes; and for the fate of Clytemnestra, which now becomes bound up with the story of Electra, we must go to the second drama of the trilogy, the _Libation-bearers_.

Footnote 13:

From Professor J. S. Blackie’s translation of the _Agamemnon_ (Everyman’s Library).

Footnote 14:

From Professor G. Murray’s translation of part of the _Agamemnon_ in his _Ancient Greek Literature_ (William Heinemann).

Footnote 15:

From Professor Lewis Campbell’s translation of the _Agamemnon_ (Clarendon Press).

_Æschylus: Electra_

The Æschylean Trilogy pauses at the point of Clytemnestra’s triumph. The first drama, the _Agamemnon_, ends there. We left the queen tasting the joy of revenge, but by no means gloating heartlessly over Agamemnon’s fall. She was conscious of the magnitude of the event; and the awfulness of her deed would have daunted even her strong spirit had she not been confident that she was the instrument of destiny in striking down the proud and cruel king.

The friends of Agamemnon, the loyal faction which should have risen against her, must have been few and weak. They were evidently soon subdued. They could not stand against the force of her powerful will; and, moreover, she combined with her strength a wise tact and a keen sense of justice. Doubtless these qualities had gone far to establish her government in Agamemnon’s long absence. Her sway was no new thing to the people of Argos; and when she resumed it with Egisthus as her consort, she took up the thread of her former life, with little outward sign to mark the change.

Underneath the surface of national life, wrath and horror at the murder of the king must have smouldered. Inside the palace itself, as we shall see presently, there was a small party ardently devoted to his memory and to the cause of his absent son, Orestes. But they were no match for Clytemnestra; and she in her turn, having shaken off the nightmare of fear in which she had lived for so many years, proposed to herself a future that should cleanse and sweeten all the past. Her first emotion was one of intense relief, not only from the long strain of suspense, but from the fact that now, as she firmly believed, the old curse upon the house of Atreus had at last been fulfilled. Her hand had dealt the final blow; the last life demanded by that implacable spirit had now been offered up. Henceforward it only remained to wipe out the past by just rule and sober living.

So for a time—we do not know quite how long—she lulled herself in false security. Years may have passed in this ominous calm: memory fell asleep, and she lived serenely in a present that was full of such interest and action as her mind delighted in. In such a mood, she would not observe, or would disregard, small signs of disaffection around her. Day by day she would see the sad face of her daughter Electra; but until some shock came to awaken her sleeping soul, Electra’s accusing eyes would fall upon her unheeded. The awakening came at last, however; and it is at this point that Æschylus opens the second part of his Trilogy, in the drama called the _Choephorœ, or Libation-Bearers_.

The scene is laid outside the Royal Palace at Mycenæ, before that tomb of Agamemnon which archæologists within recent years have brought to light on the ancient site of the city. The time is morning, and two young men, who have evidently travelled far, approach the tomb. One is Orestes, the son of Agamemnon whom Clytemnestra had sent away as a child. The other is his dear friend Pylades. Orestes has returned secretly to Argos, bidden by the oracle of Apollo to avenge his father’s death. But he has no army: he does not know that he has a single friend in Mycenæ; and his purpose is fraught with extreme danger. How he will accomplish it he cannot yet imagine; but he must first try to discover if there are any in the palace who will befriend him.

As they reach the tomb, Orestes calls upon Hermes, the god who guides the shades of the dead, and invokes his father’s spirit.

“_O Hermes of the Shades, that watchest over My buried father’s right, be now mine aid. I come from exile to this land. Oh save me!_

· · · · ·

_Father, here standing at thy tomb I bid thee Hear me! Oh hear!_“[16]

Then, according to a solemn custom of the heroic age, Orestes begins to clip the locks of hair from his head and place them upon the tomb as a votive offering. As he is thus engaged, a train of mourning women slowly emerge from the palace, carrying vessels in their hands with libations for the dead. They are slaves, captive Trojan women whom the poet uses as the Chorus of his Drama; and they are followed at a little distance by the drooping figure of a girl, whom Orestes rightly believes to be his sister Electra. They are coming to pour offerings at the tomb of the king. This in itself is a sign of encouragement to Orestes. But he dare not show himself until he is assured that they are friendly to his cause; and he and Pylades hastily withdraw, where they may hear and see the ceremony without being seen.

The women are singing; and as their lovely parodos rises and falls, we learn why they are coming thus early to the neglected tomb of the murdered king. The astounding fact reveals itself that they are sent by Clytemnestra. Clearly, the awakening has come to her at last. In the night that has just passed she had been visited by a dream that seemed to her a dreadful portent. She had started from her bed, screaming with horror, and had called for lights. But the crowding women with their lamps could not drive away the vision of the fearful serpent-birth that had turned and rent her breast. And Clytemnestra, her conscience suddenly shaken into life, had sent for the interpreters. They had no comfort for her, however, in their reply:

_They cried, aloud, by heavenly sureties bound,— “One rages there beneath Menacing death for death....”_

So the interpreters confirmed her fear, that this dream was an omen sent from the unquiet spirit of her husband. Remorse assailed her. The shade of Agamemnon, neglected hitherto, must be propitiated. As soon as daylight came, libations should be poured upon the tomb; and that they should be acceptable, Electra should perform the rite. She might not herself call upon that dread spirit in the underworld; but Electra, with her grief-marred face and her loyal love to her father, would be a fitting suppliant.

Thus it happens that Electra, in the first light of early morning, stands at the tomb. Her heart is filled with bitter grief. She loathes the task that she is commanded to perform—the rite which, after years of callous neglect, is only now offered to the injured shade because some beginning of fear has come into her mother’s mind. In all this time, none of the dues that are sacred to the dead had been permitted for Agamemnon. No libations had been poured, no locks had been shorn from the head; and even the mourning of Electra and her women had had to be hidden away from sight and sound of the queen. Now, suddenly, from no motive of love or reverence to the dead, from no sense of tenderness to her daughter, from no reason that Electra can perceive save a premonition of danger to herself, Clytemnestra orders that the proper ceremonies shall be observed.

Electra cannot see the real motive which sways the queen. Partly from her very youth and innocence, partly because there is in her a tinge of the iron temper of her father, she is blind to everything but Clytemnestra’s guilt. She sees her mother in the light of one fact only—the murder of the being whom she had loved most dearly. And looking back upon the past, all its events are viewed through that harsh light. There was the banishment of her brother Orestes; the coming of the strange man Egisthus whom, for some reason that she could not then comprehend, she had always loathed; the return and death of her father; her own subsequent misery and degradation. With the hardness of youth, she can conceive of nothing which could explain her mother’s action, much less palliate it. Her sister Iphigenia she could not clearly remember; and if the story of her sacrifice was known to Electra, her absolute devotion to her father accepted it unquestioningly. In no case could she apprehend how that crime would wound her mother; just as she could not see or understand the darker side of Agamemnon’s character. Only one thing was painfully realized—that the great king who was her father, and who had known how to be tender to the little girl he left at home in Mycenæ, had been done to death by the woman she called her mother. And now this woman, whom the years had taught Electra to hate, commanded her to supplicate the wronged dead for peace. Electra cannot, and will not, entreat the dead in terms like these; and her first speech is awful with the bitterness in her heart. She turns to the slaves, the Trojan women who are attending her:

“_Ministrant women, orderers of the house, Since ye move with me to this suppliant rite, Be ye my counsellors, how I must perform it. When I pour this tribute at the grave, What words will be in tune? What prayer will please? Shall I say, Father, from a loving wife This comes to thy dear soul: yea, from my mother?’ That dare I not.—I know not how to speak, Shedding this draught upon my father’s tomb. Or shall I say, as mortals use, ‘Give back The giver meet return?—to wit, some evil’? ... Be kind, and speak._“[16]

Grief and anger make her speech broken and barely coherent, as her thoughts are. But below the emotion, and almost unconsciously, there is a hint of some purpose forming. Once for all she puts aside her mother’s orders; but she is not clear what will take their place. The dawning thought has not taken shape yet; and the vague counsels of the women do not at first help her. But presently they speak the name of Orestes, and bid her look for help to him. She is startled at the name, and the gleam of hope it brings lights up the underlying thought. She realizes suddenly what it means.

ELEC. _Well said and wisely! That most heartens me._

CHO. _Then think of those who shed this blood, and pray—_

ELEC. _How? Teach me; I am ignorant. Speak on._

CHO. _Some power, divine or human, may descend——_

ELEC. _To judge or execute? What wilt thou say?_

CHO. _Few words, but clear. To kill the murderer._[16]

Here then is the thought of her own brain, clothed in words and echoed back to her from the women whom she has implored to advise. But put thus into cold language, they have a dreadful sound from which she recoils in horror.

ELEC. _But will the gods not frown upon such prayer?_

CHO. _Do they not favour vengeance on a foe?_[16]

In this tense dramatic moment, we are shown what the theme of the Drama is to be. We are shown too, as vividly and almost as rapidly as in a lightning-flash, the clear outlines of Electra’s character. The beautiful devotion to her father’s memory: the blind hatred of Clytemnestra: the desire for revenge vaguely forming, and leaping full-grown at the first prompting from without; but—and here is the crux—that desire held in check by a profound religious sentiment. This reverence for the gods makes the whole tragedy, for Electra and Orestes both; it provides the dramatist with the inevitable inner conflict round which the action will revolve; and, most important of all, it has an ethical significance which will sanctify the revenge of Electra and Orestes. For while the mere human impulse with them both is to strike back rapidly and without mercy for the blow that has killed their father, a higher sense restrains them; and it needs an imperious mandate from Apollo to nerve them to the deed. This reluctance for the shedding of blood is a new thing in the age-long record of the house of Tantalus. When Electra asks whether the gods will not frown upon a prayer for vengeance, there is the birth of a holier spirit which will atone for and purify all those old crimes.

But first the final retribution must fall. Electra now lifts her voice in solemn prayer to the awful gods of the underworld and to the spirit of her father. She prays for a wiser heart and purer hand than her mother’s. With almost faltering words—literally constrained thereto, she says—she prays for vengeance; and she implores that Orestes may return and claim the throne now occupied by the hated Egisthus.

It is at this moment, just as the prayer closes in the Choral hymn, that Electra sees the locks of hair upon the tomb. She is amazed, almost alarmed. There is only one creature in all the world who should bring such an offering. If any other has placed it here, it is an act of sacrilege. She takes up the hair, examines it, and speaks about it rapidly and anxiously to the women. Gradually the conviction dawns that it can be no other than a votive lock shorn from the head of Orestes himself. Then he has been here? But where is he now? The thought that he has indeed returned, that he may even be near at hand at this moment, drives wild hope and fear alternately through her mind. Holding the lock within her hand, she says:

“_Ah! could it but speak, and tell me Kind news, I were not shaken thus and cloven, Thinking two ways: but either with clear scorn I would renounce it, as an enemy’s hair; Or being my brother’s, it should mourn with me, And pay sweet honours at our father’s tomb._“[16]

Meantime, Orestes in his hiding-place had verified the fact that Electra was his sister. He had reassured himself, too, on another vital point. What he had heard and seen had convinced him that this group of women at least was friendly to his cause. And at its head, holding out against great odds, and suffering extreme ills in consequence, was this brave spirit of Electra who, with all her tender and loyal devotion, was strong enough to dare the uttermost with him. He need no longer delay to reveal himself. He had heard Electra’s prayer for his return, and for vengeance on his father’s murderers; and, stepping forward, he came like an instant answer to her petition.

ORES. _First tell the gods thy former prayer is heard. Then pray that all to come be likewise good._[16]

But Electra cannot recognize in this tall young man the boy who left their home so many years before. She is startled and incredulous; and there follows a curious little scene which, if it occurred in a modern play, would simply cause derision. Orestes gives such quaint evidence of his identity—the colour of his hair, which matches her own; the length of their footprints, which is similar; the embroidery on the robe that he is wearing, which he says was wrought by her own hands before he went to Athens. The poet is not very much concerned with probabilities. He has a great religious purpose which dominates all other considerations; and in the sublime onward sweep of the tragedy we are not troubled by minor inconsistencies. At this point they are simply lost sight of, in the keen dramatic interest of the scene when Electra is at last convinced that this is indeed her brother. What is proof to her is more than ample proof to us.

ELEC. _Shall I, in very truth, call thee Orestes?_

ORES. _You see myself ... Nay, be not lost in gladness! Curb thy heart We know, our nearest friends are dangerous foes._

ELEC. _Centre of fondness in thy father’s hall, Tear-watered hope of blessings yet to be, Faith in thy might shall win thee back thy home! Oh how I joy beholding thee! Thou hast_ _Four parts in my desires, not one alone. I call thee Father: and my mother’s claim Falls to thy side, since utter hate is hers. And my poor butchered sister’s share is thine. And I adore thee as my own true brother. But oh! may holy Right and Victory, And highest Zeus, the Saviour, speed thee too!_[16]

Then Orestes plainly declares the reason for his return, and taking up Electra’s prayer to Zeus, he cries for help in the vengeance to be accomplished for his father. He claims that he has a direct mandate from Apollo.

ORES. _... Apollo’s mighty word Will be performed, that bade me stem this peril. High rose that sovran voice, and clearly spake Of stormy curses that should freeze my blood, Should I not wreak my father’s wrongful death. He bade me pay them back the self-same deed Maddened by loss of all: yea, mine own soul Should know much bitterness, were not this done._