Electra

The third episode is dominated by The Difference Between Justice and Revenge. It begins with news of the murder of Aegisthus and culminates with Clytemnestra walking into her son’s ambush. Electra greets the news that Aegisthus has fallen by invoking the gods and announcing that justice has “come at last” (771). The brightness and joy with which Aegisthus’s death is announced, however, quickly dims as the play begins to question whether the actions of Electra and Orestes are really just.

For one, it is by employing deceit that Electra and Orestes kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Moreover, the characters of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra come across very differently from what their enemies have said about them, especially Electra. In the Messenger’s account, Aegisthus cuts a very hospitable figure, insisting that the “strangers”—Orestes and Pylades—join him as his guests in the sacrifice and even granting the unrecognized Orestes the honor of butchering the sacrificed bull. Orestes thanks Aegisthus by stabbing him when his back is turned—he does not even cross swords with him in a fair fight. Afterward, he encourages Electra to deny Aegisthus a proper burial (considered a serious offense in the ancient Greek world), suggesting that they:

display him for the beasts to eat

or stick him on a stake as a toy for carrion birds

born of bright air (896-98).

Electra and Orestes are thus far from gracious in their victory, raising further questions about The Relationship Between Social Status and Honor, as they appear too bloodthirsty to behave with dignity.

Clytemnestra, like Aegisthus, is also unexpectedly nuanced in her behavior. When Electra confronts her about her past misdeeds, a conventional dramatic debate scene (or agon) is initiated as Clytemnestra defends herself. Clytemnestra, citing Agamemnon’s own savage mistreatment of her as her impetus for killing him, offers a spirited defense of her motives. Even more remarkably, though, Clytemnestra shows remorse for her actions, admitting, “I am not so happy / […] with what I have done or with myself” (1105-06), adding, “perhaps I drove my hate too hard against my husband” (1110). It is Electra who is harsh and pitiless, hardening her heart against her mother and luring her into Orestes’s trap.

As Clytemnestra meets her death, the Chorus sings, “Justice circles back and brings her to judgment” (1155), but by this point in the play the justice of Electra’s and Orestes’s actions appears more ambiguous than before. Even Orestes has challenged the oracle in which Apollo demanded he kill his mother, calling the oracle “brute and ignorant” (971) and dreading the pollution he will incur as his mother’s killer before resigning himself, at Electra’s prompting, to go through with a deed that he has come to see as “evil” (986). After killing Clytemnestra, both Electra and Orestes lament what they have done, finally beginning to realize The Difference Between Justice and Revenge. As the Dioscuri tell the killers, “Justice has claimed [Clytemnestra], but you have not worked in justice” (1244, emphasis added). The play suggests that there is therefore something unsavory in the way Orestes and Electra have operated in seeking to avenge their father.

The arrival of the Dioscuri brings the play to a close. The Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces, were heroes who were thought to have turned into gods after they died, and they would have appeared suspended over the stage by a large crane. This “god from the machine,” or deus ex machina, was a popular way of ending Greek tragedies; Euripides was especially famous for ending many of his tragedies this way. The Dioscuri tie together the loose strands of the drama, sending Orestes into exile and marrying Electra to Pylades—the kindly Farmer is forgotten by this point.

Pylades is a strange figure, present throughout the play but never speaking a single line. Traditionally, Pylades was Orestes’s companion and helper in his return and revenge, appearing in earlier retellings of the myth (such as Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers). Euripides’s Pylades is doomed to silence by the dramatic convention that there could be no more than three speaking actors in a play. For this reason, many roles in ancient dramas were performed by a single actor. Due, however, to the distribution of parts in Euripides’s Electra, Pylades could be played only by a “mute” actor, and thus has no lines in the play. This mute Pylades is chosen as the Farmer’s replacement as Electra’s husband. Mute as he is, his nobility makes him a more suitable match for the princess, at least in the world of Euripides’s play, where the virtues of the Farmer—though far from unacknowledged—are never enough to make him worthy of a royal bride. The casual discarding of the Farmer suggests that The Relationship Between Social Status and Honor ultimately remains firmly set up along traditional, hierarchal lines.

Fate, called a “compelling” (1301) force by the Dioscuri, also surfaces in the final scenes of the play. It was Clytemnestra’s fate to be killed, her children’s fate to kill her, and so on. Nevertheless, this fate does not negate human responsibility: Electra and Orestes must suffer for their actions, which they carried out of their own free will, even if they were on some level the pawns of fate and the gods. The crime of matricide, which flies in the face of Familial Relationships and Obligations, must be confronted through exile and the judgement in Athens before Orestes will be free of pollution.

The Dioscuri, who were recently human too, display compassion for their wayward relatives—Electra and Orestes, as the children of their sister Clytemnestra, are their niece and nephew. The Dioscuri even outline much of what is to happen next: Orestes’s pursuit by the Furies, his eventual trial and acquittal in Athens, and so on. Although fate is inescapable, human beings can also choose to behave virtuously, regardless of fate or station. As the Dioscuri reflect before they exit, the gods can tell good people from bad:

As we move through the open valleys of air

we champion none who are stained in sin,

but those who have held the holy and just

dear in their lives we will loose from harsh

toils and save them.

So let no man be desirous of evil

nor sail with those who have broken their oaths—

as god to men I command you (1349-56).

This closing speech, condemning those “who are stained in sin” and championing those who are “holy and just,” suggests that order can and must be restored after the anarchic familial bloodlettings that have taken place. The play thus suggests that it is justice and due process—as represented by the imminent trial in Athens—that is needed to bring peace and stability back, not further acts of vengeance.