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 Choephoroe, 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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Thus the command of Apollo was clear, definite, and imperative; and the oracular utterance carried with it terrible penalties, should these two children of the murdered king dare to disobey. Yet we feel, all through Orestes’ speech, that the conflict is warring within him too. He cannot accept the mandate implicitly. In the emphasis that he lays on his authority, in the precise repetition of the very words of the oracle, in the horror with which he enumerates the threatened punishments, we know that he is trying to fortify himself against fear and horror at the deed. Now that he comes close to his actual purpose, a strange new questioning spirit arises which he strives to appease—a shuddering reluctance which compels him to throw himself back upon the divine mandate. “Was not this a word to be obeyed?” he asks; and then, “Yea! Were it not, the deed must yet be done.”

But struggle as Orestes may, the doubt will not be quelled. The crime of mother-murder which they contemplate starts up before them in all its hideous barbarity; and the burden imposed on Orestes is more than he can bear. As we know, it will lead him ultimately to madness. All through the kommos which follows, a long and sublimely mournful hymn chanted alternately by Orestes, Electra and the Chorus, the brother and sister seem to be battling with this question of the righteousness of their action. They appeal to Zeus and to the powers of the nether world: they cry to the spirit of their father: they remind each other of the cruelty and shamelessness of Clytemnestra: they recall the greatness of Agamemnon, and contrast it with his ignominious end: they dwell upon the wrongs done to Electra, and the sin of Egisthus, and the curse upon their house. The wave of emotion rises and falls. At one moment a solemn confidence reassures them that the vengeance is righteous; at another, the doubt sweeps back and shatters their assurance, and again they are driven to bewail their wrongs and invoke the name of Justice.

At this point is felt most strongly the undercurrent of doubt and horror. It brims and rushes, overwhelming for a time the confident sense of justice and trust in the oracle of the god. And here the Chorus, expressing, as its function is, the brooding meditation of an onlooker, echoes their inmost thought in sympathetic strains:

The resolution is taken at last. It remains now only to ask their father’s blessing, before putting it into effect. Orestes begs for power to rule well in Agamemnon’s stead, and promises rich sacrifices to his shade.

The real crisis of the tragedy is in this wonderful ode, although the action has all to follow. Doubts and fears are now subdued: Orestes and Electra have risen to a height of stern conviction which will carry them to the fulfilment of their purpose, although neither it nor the sanction of Apollo will save them from remorse. The action moves rapidly now, as though the revenge must be accomplished at once, in the heat of this terrible purpose. Orestes is told of Clytemnestra’s dream—that she had borne a serpent which had turned and rent her breast. He welcomes it gladly, as an auspicious omen for him; and forms a hasty plan of action. He and Pylades will apply for entrance at the palace gates, with a feigned story of Orestes’ death. Electra must make ready for them within, and secure their admittance. They will kill Egisthus first, and afterward complete the revenge by the murder of Clytemnestra.

It is not a very skilful plot, but it succeeds. Clytemnestra receives Orestes and his friend, believing them to be strangers from Phokis. She is grieved and shocked at their story of Orestes’ death; and goes out to apprise Egisthus of it. Presently Egisthus passes across the stage alone, on his way to give an audience to the guests and, though he does not know it, to pay the penalty for his crime. He goes into the palace, and an instant afterward he is heard to utter a dreadful cry. Attendants rush forth, calling upon the name of the queen.

Then there follows an awful scene between Orestes and Clytemnestra, as she grieves over the body of Egisthus.

For an instant these poignant words make Orestes waver; and he half turns to Pylades with an appeal for counsel. But the answer is a stern reminder of the oracular command; and the pitying moment passes.

So Clytemnestra falls at the hands of Orestes; but the vengeance has no joy for him. Before his mother’s mighty spirit has taken its way along the road to Hades, a torture of remorse has fallen upon her son. Even while he stands above the murdered body, her avenging Furies come thronging about him “with Gorgon faces and thick serpent hair” and he feels his reason totter.

He cries in anguish to Apollo to justify him; but there comes no answer from the god; and faster and faster crowd those grizzly spectre forms, rushing upon him in hideous multitudes, and menacing him with ghastly torments. And as the tragedy closes, we see Orestes fleeing before the rout of the Furies to find sanctuary at the shrine of Apollo, while the Chorus wails:

We hear no more of Electra from Æschylus. Measured by action, or even by language, the part she plays in his trilogy is quite a small one. It is significant, too, that this her first appearance in Attic Tragedy is not called by her name, but the Libation-bearers. Such a title, while it serves to remind us of a stage of Greek Drama when the Chorus was the whole play, indicates also the poet’s conception of the theme. To Æschylus, the religious act at Agamemnon’s tomb, with all that it implies, was of much greater import than the figure of the great king’s daughter. The force of destiny, the amazing mandate of the god and its conflict with filial love and duty, and the pursuit of the matricide by the Furies, constitute for him the essence of the tragedy. The spiritual aspect of the story transcends for him the human interest of it. Hence his characters, though sublimely great, are great in outline only; and hence the brief appearance of Electra.

But when we find that Sophocles and Euripides, who wrote about Electra afterward, have boldly made her the protagonist, and have called their plays by her name, we are prepared for a change of attitude. The story is now viewed from a more human standpoint. The protagonist is no longer a chorus, but a woman: the ruling passion is now not so much a principle, a moral, a duty, or any idea in the abstract; but strong human will, intense human love, and mortal hatred. The motive of the Drama is no longer a religious ceremonial, but the enactment of a tragic story. And the final result is not now that of a grand moral lesson conveyed through the lips of shadowy demi-gods, but a really dramatic drama.

It follows, therefore, that with this change the character of Electra has taken on a stronger and more complete individuality. In the version of Sophocles, she rises to her greatest height. She is a creature who can endure to the end and dare the uttermost: of absorbing love and strenuous hatred: tender and strong. Unbending and uncompromising, she is in conflict not only with the mother whom she loathes, but with the weakness of a sister whom she loves. Implacable to her enemies, she is capable of absolute devotion to the memory of her father and to the absent Orestes; and in these contrasted qualities Sophocles has made of his Electra a tremendously dramatic figure. For the finest drama, and for the most enthralling story we must go to him. But his purpose seems to have been merely artistic. He takes a hint from the old legend, and developing its possibilities to the utmost he evolves a play which is perhaps more powerful as drama and certainly more perfect as art than that of Æschylus or Euripides. But it has hardly any other significance. His conception of Electra, while finely complete and harmonious, is of a being untroubled by ethical considerations, and casting no fearful glance ‘before and after.’

With Euripides, on the other hand, the character of the protagonist becomes more deeply significant than even Æschylus had made her. For Euripides, the mandate of the god was false, and the vengeance taken was a stupendous crime against humanity. When Orestes and Electra, wrought up by passion, have accomplished it, Euripides makes reaction come to them as to any other mortal being. They are not pursued by visible Furies, from which they may flee to the sanctuary of Apollo, but by remorse and cankering doubt of their own motives. For him they are simply human creatures; and the touch of realism, animated as it is by a daring sceptical spirit, has laid a blight on much that was beautiful in the earlier conception of Electra’s character. To recover that, we must go back to the Libation-bearers of Æschylus.