Menacing death for death....”
So the interpreters confirmed her fear, that this dream was an omen sent from the unquiet spirit of her husband. Remorse assailed her. The shade of Agamemnon, neglected hitherto, must be propitiated. As soon as daylight came, libations should be poured upon the tomb; and that they should be acceptable, Electra should perform the rite. She might not herself call upon that dread spirit in the underworld; but Electra, with her grief-marred face and her loyal love to her father, would be a fitting suppliant.
Thus it happens that Electra, in the first light of early morning, stands at the tomb. Her heart is filled with bitter grief. She loathes the task that she is commanded to perform—the rite which, after years of callous neglect, is only now offered to the injured shade because some beginning of fear has come into her mother’s mind. In all this time, none of the dues that are sacred to the dead had been permitted for Agamemnon. No libations had been poured, no locks had been shorn from the head; and even the mourning of Electra and her women had had to be hidden away from sight and sound of the queen. Now, suddenly, from no motive of love or reverence to the dead, from no sense of tenderness to her daughter, from no reason that Electra can perceive save a premonition of danger to herself, Clytemnestra orders that the proper ceremonies shall be observed.
Electra cannot see the real motive which sways the queen. Partly from her very youth and innocence, partly because there is in her a tinge of the iron temper of her father, she is blind to everything but Clytemnestra’s guilt. She sees her mother in the light of one fact only—the murder of the being whom she had loved most dearly. And looking back upon the past, all its events are viewed through that harsh light. There was the banishment of her brother Orestes; the coming of the strange man Egisthus whom, for some reason that she could not then comprehend, she had always loathed; the return and death of her father; her own subsequent misery and degradation. With the hardness of youth, she can conceive of nothing which could explain her mother’s action, much less palliate it. Her sister Iphigenia she could not clearly remember; and if the story of her sacrifice was known to Electra, her absolute devotion to her father accepted it unquestioningly. In no case could she apprehend how that crime would wound her mother; just as she could not see or understand the darker side of Agamemnon’s character. Only one thing was painfully realized—that the great king who was her father, and who had known how to be tender to the little girl he left at home in Mycenæ, had been done to death by the woman she called her mother. And now this woman, whom the years had taught Electra to hate, commanded her to supplicate the wronged dead for peace. Electra cannot, and will not, entreat the dead in terms like these; and her first speech is awful with the bitterness in her heart. She turns to the slaves, the Trojan women who are attending her:
“Ministrant women, orderers of the house,
Since ye move with me to this suppliant rite,
Be ye my counsellors, how I must perform it.
When I pour this tribute at the grave,
What words will be in tune? What prayer will please?
Shall I say, Father, from a loving wife