Special interest clings to this play, because here only can we see Euripides traversing precisely the same ground as Æschylus (in the _Choephorœ_) and Sophocles (in the _Electra_), This similarity of subject long damaged Euripides’ play in the eyes of critics. It was assumed that the youngest poet was imitating his forerunners, and it needed small acumen to observe that the imitation was bad. Whereupon, instead of wondering whether perhaps Euripides was after all not copying others, critics proceeded to write cheerful nonsense about “frivolity” and “a profound falling off in art and taste”.[642] The fact simply is that each of these three tragedians discussed the story from a different viewpoint. Æschylus treated it as a religious fact, Sophocles as an emotional fact, Euripides as an ethical fact. Æschylus is on the side of Apollo, Sophocles on the side of Electra, Euripides on the side of no one. He asks himself what circumstances, what perversions of character, can result in this matricide. Hence his careful study of Clytæmnestra, Electra, and Orestes, so careful that a reader at first supposes the poet a partisan of Clytæmnestra. Not so; he has merely tried to understand her. A placid woman of quick but shallow affections, she was abandoned by her husband for ten years to the memory of a murdered daughter. Delightfully characteristic is her argument: “Suppose Menelaus had been stolen from home; would it have been right for me to slay Orestes that Helen might regain her husband?”[643] Vigorous and damaging, this is yet tinged with comedy by its raw novelty and precision. One almost overhears the _commèrages_ of the street-corner. When Agamemnon brought back openly a concubine to his home, Clytæmnestra assisted[644] her lover in anticipating the king’s revenge by murdering him. From this act she has drifted into condoning cruelty against her unoffending children; throughout she has acted wickedly and acquiesced in worse conduct by others. Nevertheless, she is no figure of tragedy; she only suggests tragedy because she is the mother of her executioners. Her chief love is placid domesticity; if this can be obtained only by murdering those who threaten it, that is very terrible, but the world is notoriously imperfect. Clytæmnestra cannot, and will not, meet Electra on the tragic plane. Her daughter’s great outburst and threat of murderous vengeance she meets in this comfortable fashion: “My child, it was always your nature to love your father. It often happens so. Some favour the male side, while others love their mother rather than their father. I forgive you: for in truth I rejoice not greatly, child, in the acts that I have done.... But you!—unwashed and shabby in attire!” ... And so forth. Clytæmnestra is almost as ill-tuned to the atmosphere which Electra constantly and deliberately creates as Sancho Panza to the high converse of his master. The queen has been summoned to her daughter’s cottage by report of a newly-born infant.