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Shame, Honour and the Hero in Sophocles’ Electra

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

A.S. McDevitt
A.S. McDevitt*
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Extract

‘O seed of Atreus, after how many sufferings have you come forth with difficulty into freedom, perfected by this present enterprise.’

In these words the Chorus expresses a typically choral summation of the action. By the murder of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus, Electra and Orestes have at last won through to freedom; they have put an end to the long history of violence and vengeance which has plagued the house of Pelops from the beginning. The morality of the matricide is not in question. The Chorus regards it simply as both necessary and just, however dreadful it may seem to dispassionate reflection. For the Chorus, the justice of the matricide is self-evident, as it was necessary to restore Orestes to his rightful throne, to bring an end to the chain of violence and retribution and to restore the house of Atreus to its proper condition. In these final words the Chorus betrays no sense of unease; there is no suggestion that the matricide may have repercussions in the future. There is nothing, in short, in these words, other than the happy anticipation of a life, from this point on, of prosperity and freedom. The Pelopid curse has run its course, the chain is broken, and all has come to a satisfactory and just conclusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 17 , 1983 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1983

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References

1 The phrase δι' έλευδερίας εξήΧΰες is difficult, but can be understood as a compressed, and, so to speak, proleptic expession, i.e., ‘You have come out through (many difficulties, so as to emerge into) freedom’. Kamerbeek’s interpretation (The Plays of Sophocles, Vol. 5 [Leiden 1974], 193, note on 1508–10) can hardly be right: ‘You have triumphed by means of freedom’. If this means ‘by an act which asserted your freedom’, the expression is tautologous; if it means ‘by maintaining your independence’, that is, by refusing to be ground down by your enemies for so many years, it is much less apt, looking back as it does to the past and to the reason for the triumph, rather than forward to the enjoyment of the newly achieved freedom. Such a view would, besides, destroy a typically Sophoclean irony. The Chorus speaks with simplistic joy of this new freedom, of an end to the troubles of the house of Pelops, but the play contains much which would cast a shadow over this happy optimism

2 This is what is meant by , although the word certainly carries ironic overtones to which the Chorus is oblivious.

3 Whitman, C.H.Sophocles (Harvard 1951), ch. 8; and see especially pp. 152 f.Google Scholar On the justice of the matricide and Apollo’s endorsement of it, see also Hester, D.A. ‘Some Deceptive Oracles: Sophocles’ Electra 32–7’, Antkhthon 15 (1981), 15–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Whitman 161.

5 Whitman 153.

6 See Winnington-Ingram, ‘The Electra of Sophocles: Prolegomena to an Interpretation’, PCPhS 183 (1954–5), 20–26.Google Scholar

7 Johansen, H.F. ‘Die Electra des Sophokles: Versuch einer neuen Deutung’, CM 25 (1964), 8–32.Google Scholar See also the answer to Johansen by Alexanderson, B. ‘On Sophocles’ Electra’, CM 27 (1966), 79–98.Google ScholarAlexanderson, however, adds little that is new, reverting merely to the conventional interpretation of e. g. Bowra, and he does not see the real importance of the motif.

8 Johansen 32.

9 Many other passages could be cited to illustrate Electee’s preoccupation with nobility as against shame. This says nothing, of course, for Sophocles’ own view of the matricide; it shows only that he wanted us to be certain that Electra regarded it as καλόν and not αισχρόν.

10 Which the Chorus again expressed with emphatic parallelism in both strophe and antistrophe: üπεστί μοι dápoos κτλ. (479): προ τώνδε τοι άρσος κτλ. (495).

11 Cf. Eur. Or. 990 f: Μυρτίλου φόνον δικών ès όϊδμα πόντου … 'όόεν δόμοισι roîç έμοίς ηλδ' άρα πολΰστσνοϊ.

12 The word αΐκεία means something like ‘violent outrage’, and may not in itself connote the idea of ‘shame’. But even if this is so, it certainly acquires such a connotation from its repetition as a keyword and its association in this context with the phrase quoted: αίσχίσταΐΐ έν αικε'ιαιξ.

13 Pind. 01. 1,65 f.

14 Besides the passage of Electra under discussion, see Eur. Helen 386 f., Orestes 989 f., and schol. See also Paus. 8. 14. 10–12; Hyginus, fab. 84 (which may reflect the Oinomaos of Euripides); Apollod. Epit. 2,3; and, for the earliest evidence, Pherekydes, frr. 37a and 37b (in Jacoby, F Gr H 1; see also Jacoby's commentary, p. 403). For further details, references and discussion, see Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. Myrtilos, and Roscher, Lexikon der Mythologie, s.v. Myrtilos.

15 Cf. schol. C on Eur. Or. 990; probably also in Pherekydes.

16 Contra Paus. 8. 14; Pind. 01. 1; Apollod. Epit. 2.3; and perhaps Ap. Rhod.; see schol. Ap. Rhod. 1. 752.

17 There is perhaps further evidence of a similar conflation of mainland and Lesbian versions in Pherek. fr. 40, where the mother of Pelops is given as Klytia, daughter of Amphidamas, a remarkable allusion, as Jacoby says, in a story which otherwise has a Lydian Pelops come to the Greek mainland via Lesbos.

18 For the sources see above, note 14.

19 Of course Oinomaos, as he died amid the wreckage of his chariot, cursed his treacherous charioteer, and the murder of Myrtilos fulfilled that curse. But the violence of Pelops was only the means whereby that curse of Oinomaos was fulfilled; it was not entailed by it, and the two episodes remain distinct.

20 The unity of the episodes is perhaps also assisted by the use of the word Ίττπεία, which must of course refer to the chariot race, but is vague enough to include the driving over the Aegean afterwards, especially when picked up by δίφρων εκριφόεις.

21 Except indirectly, perhaps, in the phrase ποτανόν δίωγμα πώλων; see above.

22 Cf., in the same play, Or. 1546: δια το Μυρτίλου πεσημ' εκ δίφρου.

23 See also Dale’s, A.M. note on 388–90 in her edition of the Helen (Oxford 1967).Google Scholar

24 Jacoby, FGrH 1. fr. 133.

25 By, for example, Kamerbeek (note on El. 504–15), who speaks without further discussion, of the #x2018;subtle correlation with the story of Orestes#x2019; fictitious death#x2019;. Cf. also Webster, T.B.L.Introduction to Sophocles2 (London 1969), 105#x2013;6;Google ScholarMusurillo, H.The Light and the Darkness (Leiden 1967), 99;Google ScholarGellie, G.H.Sophocles, A Reading (Melbourne 1972), 113.Google Scholar

26 Myrtilos was indeed ‘submerged in the sea, hurled from the golden chariot’. If παγχρύσων were an ornamental epithet only, then conceivably δίφρων could be a metaphor for a ship, but given the existence of the Pindaric version of the story, this seems improbable. The passage is not mentioned, probably rightly, in Bergson, L.L’Epithète ornamentale dans Eschyle, Sophocle, et Euripide (Uppsala 1956).Google Scholar Pausanias, however, refers to Myrtilos falling from a ship (8. 14).

27 See van Nes, D.Die maritime Bildersprache des Aischylos (Groningen 1963), esp. 107, 152–3.Google Scholar

28 Note also that the nautical imagery of the epode is prepared for in the antistrophe, in κατασχήσει (‘put in to land’).

29 E.g.: παν δ' επίμπλατο / ναυαγίων ΚρισαΊον ιππικών πεδον (729–30); κλύδων εφιππον (733). Cf. also the words of Aegisthus: βίον / λελοιπόΰ' Ίππικοίσιν εν vauayíois, 1443–4.

30 Jebb, on El. 510, notes that the plural δίφρων for a single chariot recurs in the paidagogos’ speech at 750 (cf. also 742, and 50).

31 Those who distrust interpretations based on or supported by supposed verbal echoes of this sort should consider that πρόρριζος occurs in the extant works of Sophocles only in these two passages of Electra.

32 See Woodard, T.M. ‘Electra by Sophocles, the Dialectical Design’, HSCP 68, (1964), 163–205 (at 180).Google Scholar