THE ELECTRA OF EURIPIDES TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE WITH 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 _(All rights reserved)_ PERFORMED AT THE COURT THEATRE, LONDON IN 1907 _Printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers Ltd., Woking_ Introduction[1] The _Electra_ of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the best abused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies. "A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;" "the very worst of all his pieces;" are, for instance, the phrases applied to it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of conventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any different conclusion. For it is essentially, and perhaps consciously, a protest against those standards. So, indeed, is the tragedy of _The Trojan Women_; but on very different lines. The _Electra_ has none of the imaginative splendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It is a close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragic conventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its _psychology_ reminds one of Browning, or even of Ibsen. To a fifth-century Greek all history came in the form of legend; and no less than three extant tragedies, Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_ (456 B.C.), Euripides' _Electra_ (413 B.C.), and Sophocles' _Electra_ (date unknown: but perhaps the latest of the three) are based on the particular piece of legend or history now before us. It narrates how the son and daughter 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 and grandly, without moral questioning and without intensity. The atmosphere is heroic. It is all a blood-feud between chieftains, in which Orestes, after seven years, succeeds in slaying his foe Aegisthus, who had killed his father. He probably killed his mother also; but we are not directly told so. His sister may have helped him, and he may possibly have gone mad afterwards; but these painful issues are kept determinedly in the shade.