The ‘Electra’
The plot of the Electra corresponds, in the main, with that of the Choephoroe of Aeschylus. It is regrettable that we do not possess the companion plays in which Sophocles represented, dramatically, the murder of Agamemnon and the trial of Orestes, but we may infer from the similarity of the Electra to the Choephoroe that these plays followed the Aeschylean model. We have said[10] that the trial of Orestes at Athens for the slaying of his mother at Argos is not legally intelligible unless we assume that Orestes fled to Athens with the intention of residing there, in the event of acquittal, until such time as the avenging Erinnyes permitted his return to Argos. But there is no evidence for this assumption in the Homeric story,[11] which merely implies that Orestes came from Athens to avenge his father’s death. Aeschylus, therefore, is following the Attic legend rather than Homer when he suggests that Orestes went to Athens after, not before, he slew his mother, and that it was from Phocis, not from Athens, that the avenging Orestes came. In Sophocles also it is from Phocis that Orestes comes. Moreover, we are definitely told that Phocis had been the place of Orestes’ exile since his expulsion from Argos.[12] With Athens, then, Orestes was not associated before he slew his mother! Aeschylus is not quite so precise upon this point, but from the words which Orestes utters when he arrives at Athens[13] after he had slain Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus, we cannot infer that he had ever been there before. Sophocles, therefore, and Aeschylus seem equally to have ignored an important element of the Homeric narrative in their close adhesion to the Attic legends, in which the trial of the matricidal Orestes at Athens was an outstanding essential fact. The only reason which we can suggest for this strange omission is the fact that in post-Homeric times the legend was so completely permeated by the dominant figure of Apollo that Phocis, not Athens, came to be regarded by certain legend-makers as the natural refuge and place of residence of Orestes before he slew his mother. It is not, of course, altogether impossible to suppose that Orestes had lived for a time in Phocis, and for a time at Athens. The command of Apollo could have been issued to a pilgrim from Athens as well as to a resident of Phocis. But it is strange that Aeschylus and Sophocles do not emphasise this point. The story of Orestes’ trial at Athens must, we think, have been based, if the legend-makers had any care for legal issues, on the assumption that Orestes intended to reside at Athens after he had slain his mother. This assumption is implied in the story that an Apolline oracle directed him to Athens for trial. The Homeric narrative does not justify though it is not inconsistent with such an assumption. If therefore this narrative was ignored by Attic legend-makers, it must have been because the prestige of Apollo had obscured the Homeric story in a variant of the legend which we may call the Phocian legend of Orestes, and because this variant, though not originally identical with the Attic legend, became nevertheless at some time fused with it.
If we happened to possess the non-extant drama which contained Sophocles’ account of the trial of Orestes, we feel sure that the plea of Orestes would have been identical with the Aeschylean plea, namely that of justifiable matricide. Thus, in the Sophoclean Electra Orestes says[14]:
I, when I visited the Pythian shrine
Oracular that I might learn whereby
To punish home the murderers of my sire,
Had word from Phoebus which you straight shall hear:
‘No shielded host, but thine own craft, O King!
The righteous death-blow to thine arm shall bring.’
The post-Homeric doctrine of pollution appears in the following words of Electra, who sees in the cohabitation, within her home, of two polluted murderers a horrible crime which well-nigh obscures their incestuous adultery.[15]