by Aeschylus
And some it swoops down on
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suddenly in the bright day;
some it waits for, tensing,
in the twilit shadows, and some it grabs
only after black night
has wrapped them in its useless shroud.
Because the earth that nurses life
Strophe 3
has drunk up so much blood,
the gore clots, vengefully hard,
and will not wash away.
And sickness worms its slow and ever
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painful course all through
the guilty’s person’s heart and brain
till he is nothing but
his own disease.
Defile a virgin’s bed, and there’s
Antistrophe 3
no remedy at all.
And even if all streams could flow
into a single stream
to clean the blood-stained hand, the hand
would stay red while the blood
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reddened the water.
For me, however, since the gods cinched tight
Epode
the noose the army
strung around my city, and led me from
my father’s house
here into slavery, what can I do
now but obey
the ones who rule me, whether right or wrong,
obey and beat
down all the hatred that I feel—obey
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and weep discreetly,
behind my sleeve, for my masters’ pointless fate,
while grief in secret freezes
deep in the heart.
ELECTRA You servant women who keep the house in order,
since you’ve come here to pray with me, tell me,
please, what you think I ought to do. What should
I say as I pour these sad libations? What words
would cheer my father, what prayer would move him?
Do
I say they come from a devoted wife?
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From her? My mother? That I’ll never do,
and yet I don’t know what else to say when I pour
this honeyed stream out on my father’s tomb.
Should I speak the customary prayer?
“Bring equal honors to the ones who bring
these honors to you.” What a worthy gift
for all their evil! Or do I say nothing,
just stand here in disgraceful silence, the way
my father died, and pour these offerings out
for the dirt to drink, and then just go away
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like someone dumping filth, some foul remains,
my head averted as I toss the cup aside?
Help me decide what I should do, my friends.
We hoard a common hatred in this house.
Don’t be afraid to tell me what you think,
One destiny is waiting for us all,
free man and slave alike. So tell me, please,
tell me if you’ve a better idea than mine.
CHORUS LEADER Your father’s grave is like an altar to me.
I’ll tell you my deepest feeling, just as you wish.
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ELECTRA Say it, with all your reverence for his tomb.
CHORUS LEADER Say blessings as you pour for all your friends.
ELECTRA And who among us should I call my friends?
CHORUS LEADER You first, and then whoever hates Aegisthus.
ELECTRA You mean I’m praying for the two of us?
CHORUS LEADER You know. You don’t need me to spell it out.
ELECTRA Who else can we consider on our side?
CHORUS LEADER Remember Orestes, though he’s far away.
ELECTRA Orestes, yes. That’s excellent advice.
CHORUS LEADER As for the murderers, be sure to say—
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ELECTRA Say what? I’m just a child, untutored. Tell me—
CHORUS LEADER A prayer for some god or man to come against them—
ELECTRA Someone to judge them, or do justice to them?
CHORUS LEADER Say it straight: someone who’ll take a life for a life.
ELECTRA Can it be right for me to ask this of the gods?
CHORUS LEADER Can it be wrong to pay back hurt with hurt?
ELECTRA Greatest herald of the world above,
and world below, O Hermes of the dark
earth, help me now. Call on the nether spirits,
the spirits who oversee my father’s house,
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to hear my prayers. Call on the very earth
herself who gives birth to all things, nurtures them,
makes them strong, then gathers what she grows
back to herself again. And as I sprinkle
these waters on the dead, I call on my father,
“Pity me, pity our own Orestes, make him
a saving light you kindle in the house.
For we are homeless now, mere drifters, sold
by our mother who bartered us away—for that
husband of hers, Aegisthus, who helped her kill you.
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I live a slave’s life, and Orestes, stripped
of all he owns and cast out, lives in exile,
while they are wallowing in the bed of wealth
your labors bought.
O Father, can you hear me
praying? Bring Orestes home to us
somehow or other, and me—make me more chaste,
more decent than my mother, and in all
I do more pure. This is my prayer for us.
And for our enemies, I pray that someone soon
appear and avenge you, father, killing the killers,
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exacting justice, paying life for life.
So in the middle of my prayer for good
I place this prayer for evil against them both.
For us, however, draw up your blessing now
into the daylight, graced by the gods, by the earth,
and by justice that brings triumph in the end.”
These are my prayers.
Over them I pour libations.
And now it’s your task to wreathe them with the
flowers
of mourning, to sing praises of the dead.
CHORUS Shed tears, let them fall and die
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for our dead lord,
into this earthwork of the good
that turns back
evil, the spreading stain of evil,
now that we’ve poured
these offerings out. Hear me O lord!
O majesty hear
from your muffled shade-enshrouded spirit!
OTOTOTOI, oh
let him come soon, poised with spear,
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savior of the house,
the Scythian bow bent backward in his hands
to scatter arrows,
or a very Ares, hilt held firm
and bright blade flashing!
ELECTRA My father has received what the earth has swallowed.
(noticing a lock of hair on the tomb)
What’s this? There’s news here, friends. Come here
and see.
CHORUS LEADER Tell me. My heart is leaping up with fear.
ELECTRA A lock of hair—see? see it?—on the grave.
CHORUS LEADER Is it a man’s or a slim-figured girl’s?
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ELECTRA Easy enough—anyone can tell.
CHORUS LEADER Then tell me. Let the old learn from the young.
ELECTRA Nobody could have cut this hair but me.
CHORUS LEADER Yes, those who should’ve cut theirs are his foes.
ELECTRA And from the look of it it almost seems—
CHORUS LEADER Like whose? Whose hair? That’s what I want to know.
ELECTRA Like mine. It’s hard to tell the two apart.
CHOR
US LEADER You mean Orestes? A secret gift from him?
ELECTRA It does seem like his. Who else could it be from?
CHORUS LEADER How in the world could he have risked returning?
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ELECTRA He sent it here in honor of his father.
CHORUS LEADER Then there’s even more to grieve for, if you’re right:
to think he won’t step foot here on this ground again.
ELECTRA Yes, the salt-surge of bitter bile sweeps up
through me too, it’s as if a rough blade splits me
open;
tears flood wildly from my eyes that cry
their own thirst for this lock of hair I see.
For how can I think that anybody else,
one of the townsmen, has such hair? Could she
have cut it, the murderer herself, my mother
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who is no mother to her children now?
And yet for me to say without a doubt
that it’s the precious gift from him, the most
beloved of all men to me, Orestes. . . .
No, no, hope’s playing me for a fool. If only
this lock could speak to me like a messenger,
so that my mind was not turned, pushed, pulled
this way and that, and knew once and for all
that I should throw it away, that it was cut
from a head I hate, or that it came from him,
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my brother, and could sorrow with me here,
an honor to our father and his grave.
We call on the gods who know well the storms
that batter us like sailors lost at sea.
And if we manage to come through somehow
to safety, from a small seed there just might spring
a giant tree.
(noticing the footprints)
Wait! Look! Another sign,
these footprints, see? They match each other, and
they look like mine. Two outlines, yes, two pairs,
his own and a companion’s. The heel and the
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ball of the foot, and the arch, too, when I step
beside them are the same as mine. Oh god,
this is unbearable, I don’t know what to think!
ORESTES and PYLADES emerge from their hiding place.
ORESTES As you now thank the gods for the fulfillment
of old prayers, pray for success in what’s to come.
ELECTRA Give thanks? Why? What have I won yet from the
gods?
ORESTES The sight of him you’ve prayed so long to see.
ELECTRA And how would you know who that man might be?
ORESTES I know Orestes, what he means to you.
ELECTRA And how is that an answer to my prayer?
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ORESTES Because I’m here, the one who loves you most.
ELECTRA What is this, stranger? Some snare to catch me in?
ORESTES If so, then I ensnare myself as well.
ELECTRA Can you be laughing at me, at my pain?
ORESTES At my own pain only, if I laugh at yours.
ELECTRA Are you really—can I use the name—Orestes?
ORESTES You see me in the flesh and don’t believe it,
yet when you saw the hair I cut in mourning
and traced my footprints, your heart jumped,
quickened,
and you believed it was my very self you saw.
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Here lay this lock back on the spot I cut it from,
you’ll see how well it matches yours. And here,
look at this piece of weaving your own hand made,
striking the loom, the beasts you pictured there!
Now careful! Don’t forget yourself with joy!
Our closest kin will kill us if they get the chance!
ELECTRA Most precious darling of your father’s house,
hope of saving seed, much missed, long wept for,
trust in your strength and you’ll win your father’s
house
once more.
Bright face in which four faces shine:
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face of the only father I now have;
face of the only mother I can love
now that I justly hate the face of the one
who bore me; loved face of the sister, too,
so cruelly slaughtered, and, finally, trusted face
of a true brother who coming back to me
gives back my self-respect.
May Power and Justice
and Zeus the third, supreme, be on your side!
ORESTES Zeus, Zeus, guide everything we do. Look down
on the unfledged orphans of a father eagle—
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killed in the viper’s coils, her tangling lust;
see the unfathered nestlings starve, too young,
too weak to hunt, to bring the prey back to the nest
the way their father did. See us, my sister
Electra and me, two young ones robbed of our father,
cast from the house, and if you let us die,
the nestlings of a father who never failed
to sacrifice to you, who gave you all
the honors you deserved, who’ll pay you homage
with holy banquets opulent as his?
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Allow the eagle’s brood to perish and
no one will ever trust your signs again.
Allow the royal family, like a great tree,
to wither away, and it won’t serve your ox-
strewn altars on the days of sacrifice.
Look after it, and you can raise the house
back up to greatness, though it lies low now.
CHORUS LEADER Hush, children, hush! You’re the last to save
your father’s hearth. Someone might hear you,
someone
who loves to gossip and might repeat all this
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to those in power. O may we see it soon:
their bodies hissing as the black pitch burns!
ORESTES Apollo’s great oracle never will betray me,
ordering me to see this dangerous work
through to the end; with sharp cries it described
the arctic ills that would blow in against me,
piercing my warm heart, if I failed to kill
my father’s killers—spurred to a savage rage
by being stripped of all I own—to kill the two
of them as they killed him, in the same way.
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He said that otherwise I’d pay the debt
with my own life, and it would be a life
of torment that would never end. He revealed
to me all the secrets of the angry spirits
below the earth, the plagues they send against us:
he spoke of sores and chilblains, boils that swell
on the flesh, and burst, and eat away at it
till all the living tissue’s been devoured,
and over the oozing pus a white fur forms.
He warned of how the Erinyes would come
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to torture me in other ways as well,
worse ways, and all brought to fulfillment by
my father’s blood. For he can still see me, my father,
even in darkness his glance is following me.
No one can escape that upward shower
of arrows from the spirits underground,
aimed by the murdered kin who call for vengence;
it’ll drive you mad, night terrors you can’t explain
or shake won’t let you sleep, and you’ll be harried,
hounded from the city, a brass goad
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lashing your flesh raw. Men like that
have no part whatsoever in the festal bowl,
in the drink poured out in friendship. Their father’s
wrath
comes upon them, uns
een, out of nowhere,
and drives them far away from any altar,
so that shunned everywhere, with every door
closed shut against them, honorless and loveless,
they die a slow, cruel, painful, withering death.
Why shouldn’t I trust oracles like these?
But even if I didn’t, I’d still be driven
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to carry out the work, for many longings
move inside me toward a single end:
the god’s commands aside, there’s the great sorrow
I feel for my father, and the way the loss
of my possessions eats away at me;
and then there’s also seeing how the people
of the most glorious city in the world,
the very ones, so proud in heart, who brought
Troy to her knees, now kneel before a pair
of women—for he has a woman’s heart,
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and, if he doesn’t, we’ll know it soon enough.
CHORUS Now, far reaching Fates, let it
Kommos
be done, accomplished
now, by the will of Zeus, even
as Justice takes the path she takes,
crying aloud for what is owed her:
“Let words spit out in hate be paid
with words spit back.
Let blow atone for deadly blow.
Who does shall suffer.”
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So it goes, the story three times old.
ORESTES Father, unhappy father, what
Strophe 1
word can I say, what act perform
to reach you like a favoring breeze