THE

ELECTRA

OF

EURIPIDES

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSEWITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY

GILBERT MURRAY, LL.D., D.LITT.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FORTY-SECOND THOUSAND

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1

First Edition, November 1905
Reprinted, November 1906
    " February 1908
    " March 1910
    " December 1910
    " February 1913
    " April 1914
    " June 1916
    " November 1919
    " April 1921
    " January 1923
    " May 1925
    " August 1927
    " January 1929

PERFORMED ATTHE COURT THEATRE, LONDONIN 1907

Printed in Great Britain byUnwin Brothers Ltd., Woking

Introduction[1]

The Electra of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the bestabused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies."A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;" "thevery worst of all his pieces;" are, for instance, the phrases applied toit by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards ofconventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any differentconclusion. For it is essentially, and perhaps consciously, a protestagainst those standards. So, indeed, is the tragedy of The Trojan Women;but on very different lines. The Electra has none of the imaginativesplendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It isa close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragicconventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its psychologyreminds one of Browning, or even of Ibsen.

To a fifth-century Greek all history came in the form of legend; and noless than three extant tragedies, Aeschylus' Libation-Bearers (456B.C.), Euripides' Electra (413 B.C.), and Sophocles' Electra (dateunknown: but perhaps the latest of the three) are based on the particularpiece of legend or history now before us. It narrates how the son anddaughter of the murdered king, Agamemnon, slew, in due course of revenge,and by Apollo's express command, their guilty mother and her paramour.

Homer had long since told the story, as he tells so many, simply andgrandly, without moral questioning and without intensity. The atmosphereis heroic. It is all a blood-feud between chieftains, in which Orestes,after seven years, succeeds in slaying his foe Aegisthus, who had killedhis father. He probably killed his mother also; but we are not directlytold so. His sister may have helped him, and he may possibly have gone madafterwards; but these painful issues are kept determinedly in the shade.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sophocles, although by his time Electra andClytemnestra had become leading figures in the story and the mother-murderits essential climax, preserves a very similar atmosphere. His tragedy isenthusiastically praised by Schlegel for "the celestia

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