Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES TO THE ELECTRA The chief characters in the play belong to one family, as is shown by the two genealogies: Tantalus Pelops Atreus Thyestes Agamemnon Menelaus Aegisthus ( = Clytemnestra) (=Helen) ( = Clytemnestra) Iphigenia Electra Orestes (Also, a sister of Agamemnon, name variously given, married Strophios, and was the mother of Pylades.) Tyndareus = Leda = Zeus Clytemnestra Castor Polydeuces Helen P. I, 1. 10, Son of his father's foe. Both foe and' brother. Atreus and Thyestes became enemies after the theft of the Golden Lamb. See pp. 47 ff. 1 P. 2, 1. 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 cav 6yot, to use the phrase attributed to Euripides in the Frogs (1. 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 Xeicrpbv, ' 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, andc.). Also it gives an opportunity of introducing the fine character of the peasant. He is an Airrovpyos, 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. 26,11. 367 390.) As Euripides became more and more alienated from...
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