P. 2, l. 34, Must wed with me.]--In Aeschylus and Sophocles Electra is unmarried. This story of her peasant husband is found only in Euripides, but is not likely to have been wantonly invented by him. It was no doubt an existing legend--an [Greek: ôn logos], 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 [Greek: lektron] "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 [Greek: Autourgos] 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 are 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_, p. 152, "As yearns the milk-white swan when old swans die." P. 11, ll. 169 ff., The Watcher hath cried this day.]--Hera was an old Pelasgian goddess, whose worship was kept in part a mystery from the invading Achaeans or Dorians. There seems to have been a priest born "of the ancient folk," _i.e._, a Pelasgian or aboriginal Mycenaean, who, by some secret lore--probably some ancient and superseded method of calculating the year--knew when Hera's festival was due, and walked round the country three days beforehand to announce it. He drank "the milk of the flock" and avoided wine, either from some religious taboo, or because he represented the religion of the milk-drinking mountain shepherds.