But his Iphigeneia with welcoming grace,
As ’tis just to require, the daughter her sire
By the swift-flowing Ferry of Groans shall face
And with locked arms kiss and embrace him!”
The plays by the three dramatists dealing with the slaying of Clytemnestra by her son and the meeting and recognition of Orestes and his older sister Electra fill out many a detail of the Argive land and cities as they were seen or imagined in the fifth century. Although Sophocles lays the scene of his “Electra” at “opulent Mycenæ,” his allusions to the “renowned temple of Hera,” to the “Lycæan agora of the wolf-slaying god,” and to the “grove of the frenzied daughters of Inachus”—all as part of the immediate environment—seem to imply stage-setting which brought before the spectator the Heræum and Argos itself as well as Mycenæ. In all three plays the tomb of Agamemnon, around which the action goes on, seems to be outside of the city.
The scene of the “Electra” of Euripides is laid on the mountain frontier, by which way the exiled Orestes would naturally arrive from Phocis. Not only does this play give a feeling for the Argive landscape, changing little while Mycenæ rose and fell, but the simple and dignified peasant farmer, Electra’s husband in name only, is one of the dramatist’s noblest creations. The suggestion of his high-born though remote ancestry only emphasizes the chivalry, far removed from servility, with which he reverences his nominal wife as a princess of the land. When Electra, in the shadow of the “Night, dark foster mother of the golden stars,” goes to fetch water, like any peasant girl, with the water-jar poised on her head, he remonstrates with her, but divining her mood, withdraws his objection:—
“Nay, go thy way, an so thou wilt, not distant far
The fountains from our dwelling. I, when breaks the dawn,
Must with my oxen turn the furrows for the seed.”
In this play the horror of the mother-murder in the peasant home is sensibly heightened by the background of simple hospitality. The deed seems more inevitable in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus, in which Orestes goes in to slay his mother just where she had slain his father, and the knocking, knocking at the palace doors seems more like the hand of fate, or like the two outcries of the king in the “Agamemnon.” The play closes, as it should, just as the “wrathful hounds” of his mother have appeared to the matricide.[[36]] No assurance of the chorus that they are unreal fancies of his confused brain can help him. He must away over the mountains and the Isthmus by the long pathway to Delphi to seek the restoring purification of Apollo:—