Throughout the play, there is not a hint that a son who slays his
mother is liable to the Erinyes. This silence cannot be explained by
the plea that Sophocles was concerned only with the vengeance
itself. For, although the pursuit of Orestes by the Erinyes was not
to be included in the plot, still the play shows him both when he
was meditating the deed, and after he has done it. Yet he neither
shrinks from it in prospect, nor feels the slightest uneasiness when
it has been accomplished. From first to last, his confidence is as
cheerful as the morning
sunshine in which the action
commences. When he comes forth with dripping sword, this is his
comment; ‘All is well in the house, if Apollo's oracle
spake well.’ How could an Athenian poet of the fifth
century B.C. venture thus to treat the subject before an Athenian
audience, whose general sentiment would assuredly be that of the
Choephori, and in the forefront of which sat
priestly exponents
1 of the religious view which was so signally ignored?
Euripides is here, at least, at one with Aeschylus. True, Sophocles
has been careful to remind us, again and again, how completely
Clytaemnestra had forfeited all
moral claim to a son's
loyalty. The question here is, however, not moral but religious; a
matter, not of conduct, but of kinship. It may also be granted that
the Sophoclean oracle of Apollo differs from that in the
Choephori. It is a brief command to do a
righteous deed; it threatens no penalties, and so implies no reason
for reluctance. Still, that does not alter the fact of the
matricidal stain upon Orestes. I do not know any adequate solution
of this difficulty, which seems greater than has generally been
recognised: I can only suggest one consideration which may help to
explain it. The Homeric colouring in the
Electra is
strongly marked; thus the
Odyssey is followed in the
version of Agamemnon's murder as perpetrated at the
banquet,—there are even verbal echoes of it
2; the chariot-race in
the
Iliad (book XXIII) has furnished several traits
to the narrative of the disaster at the Pythian games
3. Sophocles seems to say to his audience,
‘I give you, modified for drama, the story that Homer
tells; put yourselves at the Homeric stand-point; regard the act of
Orestes under the light in which the
Odyssey presents
it.’ The Homeric Athena declares that Orestes has won
universal praise by slaying the villainous Aegisthus. The final
scene of Sophocles is designed to leave a similar impression; the
tyrant is exhibited in all his baseness,—insolent and
heartless; he is driven in to meet his just doom; Orestes points the
moral; and the Chorus welcome the retribution. Having resolved to
limit his view by the epic horizon, Sophocles has executed the plan
with great skill. But his plot labours under a disadvantage which no
skill could quite overcome. He could not, like his Homeric original,
dispense with Apollo: the Apolline thread had long ago become so
essential a part of the texture that he could not get rid of it.
But, the moment that Apollo is introduced, the thought of the stain
upon Orestes becomes importunate, since the very purpose for which
Apollo first came into the story was that of showing how the supreme
arbiter of purity could defend his emissary against the claim of the
Erinyes. Stesichorus and Aeschylus had deeply impressed this on the
Greek mind; and it would have been hard for Athenians, familiar with
the lyric and the dramatic
Oresteia, to feel that the
story, as told by Sophocles, reached a true conclusion. His Chorus
might, indeed, close the play by describing the house of Atreus as
“
τῇ νῦν ὁρμῇ τελεωθέν”.
But would not many spectators have ringing in their ears the last
words of the
Choephori?
“
ποῖ δῆτα κρανεῖ, ποῖ καταλήξει
μετακοιμισθὲν μένος ἄτης”;
