Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/367

345 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 345 that the interest is entirely centered in the actions and feelings of this person. According- to iEschylus, Orestes had been driven from the house by Clytannnestra, and sent to Strophius of Phocis ; he appears in the paternal mansion as an expelled and illegally disinherited son. According to Sophocles, Orestes, then a child, was to have been put to death when Agamemnon was murdered, and it was only Electra who rescued him and put him under the care of his father's friend, Stro- phius,* by which she gains the credit of having preserved an avenger of her father, and a deliverer of the whole family. t On the other hand, Sophocles is obliged to omit the secret plot between Orestes and Electra, and their conspiracy to effect the murder, which is the leading incident in the play of TEschylus, because Sophocles did not set so much importance on making Electra a participator in the deed, as in exhibiting the mind of the high-souled maiden driven about by a storm of contending emotions. This he effects by some slight modifications of the story, in which he makes all possible use of his predecessor's ideas, but follows them out and works them up with such gentle and delicate touches that they fit exactly with his new plan. JEschylus had already hit upon the contrivance by which Orestes gets into the house of the Atridae ; he appeared as an ally and vassal of the house with the pretended funeral urn of Orestes; X but Electra had herself planned this device with him, and speaks in concert with him; consequently, the completion of the scheme commences im- mediately after the first leading division of the play. In Sophocles, where there is no such concert between him and his sister, Electra is herself deceived by the trick, and is cast down and grieved in the same denree as Clylaemnestra, after a transient outbreak of maternal affection, is gladdened and tranquillized by it.§ The funeral offerings of Orestes at his father's grave, which in .Eschylus lead to the recognition, in Sophocles only excite a hope in Chrysothemis, which is at once cast down by Electra, who refuses to take comfort from it. Her desire for revenge becomes only the more urgent when she believes herself de- prived of all help from man ; her grief reaches its highest point when she holds in her arms the sepulchral urn, which she supposes to contain her Agamemnon and his children, and therefore he names Fhanoteus, the hero of a state hostile to the Crisaeans, as the pers n who sends Clytsemnestra the message about her .son, although Strophius had collected and sent the ashes of Orestes. f Euripides, in his Electra, gives this incident up again, and supposes that Electra and Orestes were separated from one another as children. X Up to v. 548 of the Choephorce, Orestes wears the common dro-s of a traveller ; it is nut before v. 652 that he aj pears in a different costume as ie^ites of the house. § It was a kindly trait in Sophocles, which would never have occurred to JEs' chyhis, that Clytseninestra's first feeling, when she hears the news, is a natural emo- tion of love for the child, which she had borne with pain and travail, v. 770.
 * It is for this reason that Sophocles considers Strophius of Crisa as the friend of