Electra

The second episode advances the plot considerably within a very short span. Over fewer than 300 lines, Orestes is recognized, Electra celebrates her reunion with her brother, and Electra and Orestes plot the murder of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. The brisk pace of this episode reveals a great deal about Electra and Orestes, who after their reunion never stop to question their decision to murder Clytemnestra—their own mother—and her lover Aegisthus. Neither do they pause to consider The Difference Between Justice and Revenge, assuming that avenging one murder (that of their father) by another is the best course of action.

The issue of whether or not nobility is a matter of birth or behavior is explored through the sibling duo, whose behavior on the whole subverts some typical expectations of heroism and, at times, even the expectations of the other characters in the play. When the Old Man first suggests that Orestes has returned to Argos, for example, Electra doubts that her brother, “who is brave and bold / would come to our land in hiding, frightened by Aegisthus” (525-26)—yet this is exactly what Orestes has done. Not only has he come in hiding, but he has even lied to Electra about his identity, for reasons that he never actually explains to her.

Orestes’s behavior complicates the theme of Familial Relationships and Obligations and begins to recall the Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey, returning to his home in disguise to infiltrate and kill those who pose a threat to him. Even the way he is recognized is highly evocative of the way in which Homer’s Odysseus is recognized in Ithaca when, in Book 19 of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s old enslaved servant Eurycleia recognizes her disguised enslaver by a scar from a childhood hunting accident. Just like Odysseus, Orestes is recognized by an enslaved person who knows him by an old scar.

However, Orestes is far from the hero Odysseus was: Odysseus almost single-handedly massacred a gang of suitors while Orestes kills a lone and more-or-less defenseless man and then, a little later, a completely defenseless woman. Odysseus receives help directly from the goddess Athena, Orestes only from his sister and an Old Man. Even the source of Orestes’s scar is illuminating, received when “he slipped and drew / blood as he helped [Electra] chase a fawn in [his] father’s court” (573-74), whereas Odysseus received his scar while going after a boar.

Electra, like Orestes, proves less than impressive. She completely fails to recognize Orestes when he arrives and does not even suspect the stranger’s identity. Her moral code is ambiguous and ill-defined. She lacks the cunning or compassion that defines many of Homer’s heroines, such as Penelope. The moral ambiguity and mediocrity of Electra and Orestes suggest that the post-Trojan War Greeks have fallen a long way from Homer’s heroes, to a world where high birth means very little and duplicity is more important than open valor. As the Old Man says about Clytemnestra and Aegisthus: “often a noble face hides filthy ways” (551).

Euripides’s play does not only echo Homer. In the second episode Euripides also alludes extensively to Aeschylus, who had dramatized the very same myth several decades before in his Libation Bearers (See: Background). The entire recognition scene is really a tongue-in-cheek allusion to Aeschylus’s treatment of this key moment. In Aeschylus’s play, Electra realizes that her brother has returned to Argos when she finds a lock of his hair and one of his footprints near the tomb of their father Agamemnon. The color of the hair, Electra exclaims, is an exact match to the color of her own hair, and her foot fits perfectly into the stranger’s footprint. In Euripides’s play, this reasoning is introduced not by Electra but by the Old Man, who urges Electra to compare her hair color and foot size to that of a recent mystery visitor who came by Agamemnon’s tomb. Euripides, evidently poking fun at his predecessor, has Electra laugh at the Old Man:

How could a lock of his hair match with mine?

One from a man with rugged training in the ring

and games, one combed and girlish? It is not possible (527-29).

And also:

How could rocky ground possibly receive

the imprint of a foot? And if it could be traced,

it would not be the same for brother and for sister,

a man’s foot and a girl’s—of course his would be bigger (534-37).

This sustained engagement with Homer and Aeschylus has interested scholars, who have interpreted Electra as a highly metaliterary play, responding to and reworking earlier literature. This metaliterary tendency is a marked feature of Euripides’s more mature works.

The second stasimon that follows the scene, like the first stasimon, initially appears inorganic and unrelated to the plot, but there are parallels between the myth of Atreus and Thyestes and the story the play tells. Thyestes’s seduction of Atreus’s wife, for example, mirrors Aegisthus’s seduction of Clytemnestra. Then there is the continuation of the myth, which the Chorus leaves unspoken: Namely, how Atreus killed and cooked Thyestes’s children, whom he tricked Thyestes into eating—a savage revenge that mirrors the one just set into motion by Electra and Orestes.