Page:Electra of Euripides (Murray 1913).djvu/102

86 not likely to have been wantonly invented by him. It was no doubt an existing legend—an, to use the phrase attributed to Euripides in the Frogs (l. 1052). He may have chosen to adopt it for several reasons. First, to marry Electra to a peasant was a likely step for Aegisthus to take, since any child born to her afterwards would bear a stigma, calculated to damage him fatally as a pretender to the throne. Again, it seemed to explain the name "A-lektra" (as if from "bed;" cf. Schol. Orestes, 71, Soph. El. 962, Ant. 917) more pointedly than the commoner version. And it helps in the working out of Electra's character (cf. pp. 17, 22, &c.). Also it gives an opportunity of introducing the fine character of the peasant. He is an, literally "self-worker," a man who works his own land, far from the city, neither a slave nor a slave-master; "the men," as Euripides says in the Orestes (920), "who alone save a nation." (Cf. Bac., p. 115 foot, and below, p. 26, ll. 367–390.) As Euripides became more and more alienated from the town democracy he tended, like Tolstoy and others, to idealise the workers of the soil.

P. 6, l. 62, Children to our enemy.]—Cf. 626. Soph. El. 589. They do not seem to be in existence at the time of the play.

Pp. 5–6.]—Electra's first two speeches arc admirable as expositions of her character—the morbid nursing of hatred as a duty, the deliberate posing, the impulsiveness, the quick response to kindness.

P. 7, l. 82, Pylades.]—Pylades is a persona muta both here and in Sophocles' Electra, a fixed traditional figure, possessing no quality but devotion to Orestes. In Aeschylus' Libation-Bearers he speaks only once, with tremendous effect, at the crisis of the play, to rebuke Orestes when his heart fails him. In the Iphigenia in Tauris, however, and still more in the Orestes, he is a fully studied character.

P. 10, l. 151, A swan crying alone.]—Cf. Bacchae,