by Sophocles
NEOPTOLEMOS
Reasonable words. Even so I wish
you’d trust the gods, trust my word,
and as a friend
sail with me away from here. 1550
PHILOKTETES
To Troy!? To the despicable sons
of Atreus? With this putrid foot?
NEOPTOLEMOS
To those who’ll save you and your pus-running foot
from the pain of rotting away.
PHILOKTETES
Meaning what? What’s behind that advice?
NEOPTOLEMOS
What I see ahead, if we do this, will be best
for both of us.
PHILOKTETES
Aren’t you ashamed? Saying such a thing
the gods can hear?
NEOPTOLEMOS
What shame? I’m helping out a friend. 1560
PHILOKTETES
Helping out the sons of Atreus? Or me?
NEOPTOLEMOS
You, I should imagine. Speaking as your friend.
PHILOKTETES
How’s that? If you’d turn me over to my enemies?
NEOPTOLEMOS
Seeing as you’re down, sir, you shouldn’t be so difficult.
PHILOKTETES
You’ll do me in, I just know it . . . talking that way.
NEOPTOLEMOS
I won’t, I’m telling you. You don’t understand.
PHILOKTETES
Don’t I know the sons of Atreus exiled me here?
NEOPTOLEMOS
They did. But now know how
they would save you!
PHILOKTETES
Never happen. Not if it means 1570
agreeing I’ll go back to Troy.
NEOPTOLEMOS
What will I do then, if I can’t convince you
of anything? Easier for me to shut up, and you
can live on as you are, with no way out.
PHILOKTETES
Let me suffer what’s mine. But you
with your hand in mine promised
you’d bring me home. Now, my boy,
you have to keep that promise.
No more talk of Troy. I’ve had enough
of cryings and sorrows. 1580
NEOPTOLEMOS
That’s what you want? . . . Let’s go then.
PHILOKTETES
Nobly spoken!
NEOPTOLEMOS
(offering help)
Step by step, now. Careful.
PHILOKTETES
What I can, I’ll do.
NEOPTOLEMOS
But how can I keep from being
blamed by the Greeks?
PHILOKTETES
Don’t give that a thought.
NEOPTOLEMOS
I have to. Suppose they attack my country?
PHILOKTETES
I’ll be waiting for them.
NEOPTOLEMOS
How can you help? 1590
PHILOKTETES
Herakles’ bow. That’s how.
HERAKLES appears on the rocks above them.
NEOPTOLEMOS
Meaning what?
PHILOKTETES
I’ll make them keep their distance.
NEOPTOLEMOS
Then kiss this ground good-bye. We’re going.
HERAKLES, still unnoticed by PHILOKTETES and NEOPTOLEMOS, steps nearer.
HERAKLES
Not yet! Not till you’ve heard
what I will say, son of Poias!
Startled, PHILOKTETES and NEOPTOLEMOS turn and look up.
The voice of Herakles, yes! and this
is his face. For you I’ve left
the heavens. To let you know
what Zeus plans—to keep you 1600
from going where you’re going,
and get you to listen to me.
First, know my own story—how
after many ordeals I achieved
as you now see
the glory that is deathless.
It’s certain your own sufferings
are destined to bring you, too,
to glory. Go with this man to Troy
where, first, you’ll be cured of this 1610
horrible disease. The Greek army
will choose you as its foremost
warrior. With my bow you will
kill Paris, who began all this misery.
You will sack Troy and be honored
with the choicest spoils. Bring these
home with you to the Oitan highlands
to please your father, Poias. The other
spoils such as common soldiers get
lay on my funeral pyre: as a tribute 1620
to my bow.
(to NEOPTOLEMOS)
This advice
goes for you, too, son of Achilles.
You’re not strong enough to take Troy
without him. Nor he to take it without you.
You’re like two lions prowling the same
grounds, each guarding the other.
(to PHILOKTETES)
I’ll send Asklepios
to Troy, to cure you of your disease,
for Troy is doomed to fall a second time 1630
beneath my bow. Yet remember, when
you sack Troy show piety toward all things
relating to the gods. To Zeus, nothing
matters more. The sacred doesn’t die
when men do. Whether they live or die,
holiness endures.
PHILOKTETES
Voice bringing back so much
I’ve longed for! You showing yourself
after so many long years! Your words
I will not disobey. 1640
NEOPTOLEMOS
And I the same.
HERAKLES
Don’t waste time then. Move.
The wind is fair and following.
The time to act is now.
HERAKLES vanishes.
PHILOKTETES
Come then, just
let me pay my respects to the land
I’m leaving . . . . Good-bye, cave, you
that watched out with me. Good-bye
you nymphs of the marshy meadows,
and you, O low groaning ocean 1650
booming thunder spume
against the headland—where deep
within the cave, how often my head
was drizzled by gusts of southerly wind,
how often the Mount of Hermes broke
my own mournful echoes back,
storming me with my sorrows.
But now you springs, and you
Lycean well sacred to Apollo,
I’m leaving you, at long last 1660
leaving—
I had never dared hope
for this.
Good-bye, Lemnos, surrounded by sea:
set me free and uncomplaining
with smooth sailing where
a great destiny takes me
by the counsel of friends
and, above all, the god who
subduing everything 1670
has brought this to pass.
CHORUS
Let’s all set off together
now, praying the nymphs of the sea
come take us safely home.
Elektra
INTRODUCTION
“HAVEN’T YOU REALIZED THE DEAD . . . ARE ALIVE?”
Dawn is breaking. From a hilltop in Mycenae, three men—the Elder, Orestes, and Pylades—look down on a palace haunted by three generations of kin murder. The trio has traveled a distance: for two of them this is a long-delayed homecoming.
The Elder, a trusted, forthright slave, has been a mentor to Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, hero of the Trojan War. Orestes was just a young boy when his father returned from battle. That day, during a celebratory feast, Agamemnon’s wife, Klytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, murdered Agamemnon, splitting his skull with an ax. Orestes’ sister Elektra, fearing for her brother’s life, entrusted O
restes to the Elder, who spirited him away to a safe exile. He grew up in northern Greece, sheltered by Pylades’ family. Elektra has since lived in misery, impatiently awaiting her brother’s promised return to avenge their father, while Klytemnestra and Aegisthus, now married, nervously rule Mycenae.
The Elder now impresses on both younger men the magnitude and urgency of the job ahead. He, too, is impatient with his young master. Their plans must be in place before the palace awakes. Prompted to take charge, Orestes calmly lays out a strategy, aware that Klytemnestra and Aegisthus fear he might at any moment descend on them. He instructs the Elder to pose as a messenger with news that Orestes has died in a horrific chariot accident. Then, their victims’ vigilance relaxed, Orestes and his accomplice Pylades, also in disguise, will carry out the killing. Despite Orestes’ apparent command of the situation, he grows uneasy. Faking his own death could prove a dangerous omen. What if pretending he’s dead precipitates the real thing? Shaking off the thought, he reveals that his motive is not revenge per se, but taking back the power and wealth Aegisthus and his mother have stolen from him.
For fifth-century Greeks, to “help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies” was an unquestioned maxim governing personal, political, and international conflicts. But Sophocles suggests—at first almost subliminally via the unattractive nature of his main characters—that cycles of revenge ravage those trapped within them as well as their enemies. By portraying Orestes as icily efficient and materialistic, and his sister Elektra as brave but nearly deranged with hatred for her mother and Aegisthus, Sophocles discourages his audience from accepting the looming act of vengeance as a sacred obligation that will ennoble those who undertake it.
The acrimonious and legalistic debates in the first third of the play, between Klytemnestra and Elektra, reveal the instability of the moral ground each invokes to justify homicide or revenge. Klytemnestra argues that killing Agamemnon was justified. A decade earlier, he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to placate the goddess Artemis and thus gain a favorable wind for the Greek army anxious to sail for Troy. Klytemnestra insists his blood relation to his daughter should have outweighed his obligation to prosecute a war. Elektra counters by saying that the sacrifice of Iphigenia was not criminal: it was a military necessity. Though both claim to argue from the talio, the concept of justice as an “eye for an eye, a life for a life,” each manipulates and ignores evidence and principle. Their legalisms cannot disguise the ferocity of their antipathies. Klytemnestra wanted Agamemnon dead so she could marry Aegisthus. Elektra hates her mother for killing the father she mourns. Sophocles makes clear that it’s impossible to sanction revenge, a gut issue for those involved, simply through analysis and debate. Revenge, the audience realizes, issues from hatred immune to logic or morality.
When the Elder brings news of Orestes’ ‘death,’ Elektra is devastated and Klytemnestra elated. Orestes and Pylades ratchet up the tension when they arrive with an urn they claim holds Orestes’ ashes and ask to present it to the queen. Moved by his sister’s despair and ravaged appearance, Orestes tells her, with excruciating deliberation, who he really is. But when her out-of-control joy threatens to alert their intended victims, Orestes tries to silence her. Elektra remains oblivious to danger. As her grip on reality grows increasingly tenuous, she confuses the Elder with her dead father and falls to her knees before him. The Elder, untouched, flares up. It seems Orestes and Elektra are too preoccupied with their reunion to realize they have to kill Klytemnestra before her husband and his men return. The Elder must keep them focused on the business at hand. For a moment, it seems doubtful the conspirators fully grasp the seriousness of what they’re doing.
Athenian audiences in the last half of the fifth century BCE were familiar with previous dramatic versions of Orestes and Elektra, especially Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy. Sophocles, departing from Aeschylus’ version of the myth, allows Elektra’s obsession with revenge to absorb and dissolve all other energies and desires. She is disturbed and disturbing. The Chorus of townswomen is by turns supportive and disapproving of her conduct, but to Elektra their sentiments are irrelevant. For her, revenge is an entrenched imperative, and she fully accepts that it has unbalanced her: “[H]ow could I be calm / and rational? Or god-fearing? / Sisters . . . I’m so immersed / in all this evil, how / could I not be evil too?” (343–347).
Sophocles’ most imaginative departure from Aeschylus involves the seeming omission of the Furies, the ancient, ugly, and relentless divinities who haunt and punish kin murderers. In Aeschylus’ version, they are grotesquely real, a terrifying swarm who appear as the eponymous chorus of his play The Eumenides (literally and ironically, “The Kindly Ones”). Aeschylus’ Furies chase Orestes across Greece until Athena domesticates them by granting them a less violent but more acceptable role. Although Aeschylus shows Orestes suffering the guilt that the Furies inflict on him, he’s eventually cleansed of pollution in Delphi and spared civil punishment by the Areopagus court. Sophocles, however, saw that while priests and jurors may absolve a murderer of public guilt, they cannot undo the mental damage that killing a relative inflicts on the killer.
R. P. Winnington-Ingram proposed that Sophocles intended his audience to perceive Elektra and Orestes—throughout the entire length of the action—as proxy Furies who pursue and take revenge on Klytemnestra and Aegisthus (1980, 236–247). By taking this revenge, the siblings become first “agents” and then ultimately “victims” of the Furies now embedded in themselves. They suffer a warping of their decency as they pursue a vengeance that in time will be visited on them when a new generation of avengers seeks them or their children out.
At various moments Orestes elaborates on his foreboding that using his faked death as a ploy to exact revenge will backfire—or, in Winnington-Ingram’s terms, that his role as an agent of revenge will make him its victim: first, he identifies with a soldier, mistakenly reported dead, who returns home alive to find himself revered; later, Elektra cherishes what she thinks are her brother’s ashes and he savors the effect of his death on others; and finally, Aegisthus realizes Orestes did not die in a chariot wreck, but is alive and about to kill him, a living metaphor of how those murdered emerge from death to exact vengeance.
Aegisthus flinches as he uncovers Klytemnestra’s body.
Orestes Scare you? An unfamiliar face?
Aegisthus These men! Have got me—I’ve stumbled
into a net with no exit. Who are they?
Orestes Haven’t you realized by now “the dead”—
as you perversely called them—are alive? (1787–1791)
The last scene evokes an image of Orestes (and Elektra as well) as victims of the revenge just taken:
Aegisthus . . . why force me inside? If what
you plan is just, why do it in the dark?
What stops you killing me right here?
Orestes Don’t give me orders. We’re going where
you killed my father! You’ll die there!
Aegisthus Must this house witness all the murders
our family’s suffered—and those still to come?
Orestes This house will witness yours.
That much I can predict.
Aegisthus Your father lacked the foresight you boast of.
[ . . . ]
Orestes Justice dealt by the sword
will keep evil in check. (1812–1821, 1831–1832)
Orestes might have the last word, but Aegisthus’ ominous prediction conveys an unwelcome truth: when it comes to Greek blood feuds, only the extinction of each and every antagonist ends them. Orestes believes killing Aegisthus and his mother will punish and discourage evil, but Aegisthus’ assertion—that Orestes and Elektra will remain subject to an implacable curse on the house of Atreus—reasserts the self-perpetuating nature of revenge. Newer Furies, Aegisthus is confident, will sooner or later attack and destroy his killers. The abrupt end of the play, which gives no sense of elation at the “mission accomplished” shared by the c
onspirators, leaves the audience to ponder what indeed do this brother and sister have to celebrate?
—RB
Elektra
Translated by Robert Bagg
CHARACTERS
ELDER, long-serving slave, teacher, and adviser to Orestes
ORESTES, son of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra
Pylades, noble companion of Orestes
ELEKTRA, daughter of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra, ragged, unkempt, and bruised
CHORUS of Mycenaean women
LEADER of the Chorus
CHRYSÒTHEMIS, daughter of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra
KLYTEMNESTRA, widow of Agamemnon, wife of Aegisthus, co-murderer of Agamemnon
Maidservant to Klytemnestra
Aide to Orestes, male
AEGISTHUS, husband of Klytemnestra, co-killer of Agamemnon
The ELDER, ORESTES, and Pylades appear on a backstage hilltop, looking out over the heads of the audience at the cityscape beyond. As the ELDER recognizes familiar landmarks, he directs ORESTES’ attention to them.
ELDER
And now, son of the man who commanded
our armies at Troy! Son of Agamemnon!
Look! You can see with your own eyes
the sight you have craved for so long:
the storied Argos of your dreams.
Hallowed country, over which
the horsefly hounded Io, that daughter
of Înachos Hera made a cow.
Look there, Orestes. The outdoor market
named after Wolfkiller Apollo. 10
On the left is that famous temple of Hera’s.
Believe it. What you see is Mycenae!
Gold city, with its house of Pelops
bloodied by all that death and mayhem.
Under orders from your sister,
I carried you away, even
as your father was being murdered.
I saved your life! Raised you to take
revenge—the strapping youth who gives
his dead father his honor back! 20
All right, Orestes—you too, Pylades,
our excellent new friend—our plan
of attack must be worked out quickly.