LEADER OF CHORUS.
Dwellers in our native Thebè, fix on Oedipus your eyes.
Who resolved the dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise.
Like a star [his envied fortune mounted beaming] far and wide:
Now he sinks in seas of anguish, whelmed beneath a raging tide.
Therefore, with the old-world sages, waiting for that final day,
I will call no mortal happy, while he holds his house of clay,
Till without one pang of sorrow, all his hours have passed away.
[page 129]
ELECTRA
THE PERSONS
- An Old Man, formerly one of the retainers of Agamemnon.
- ORESTES, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.
- ELECTRA, sister of Orestes.
- CHORUS of Argive Women.
- CHRYSOTHEMIS, sister of Orestes and Electra.
- CLYTEMNESTRA.
- AEGISTHUS.
- PYLADES appears with ORESTES, but does not speak.
SCENE. Mycenae: before the palace of the Pelopidae.
[page 130] Agamemnon on his return from Troy, had been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus, who had usurped the Mycenean throne. Orestes, then a child, had been rescued by his sister Electra, and sent into Phocis with the one servant who remained faithful to his old master. The son of Agamemnon now returns, being of a full age, accompanied by this same attendant and his friend Pylades, with whom he has already concerted a plan for taking vengeance on his father’s murderers, in obedience to the command of Apollo.
Orestes had been received in Phocis by Strophius, his father’s friend. Another Phocian prince, named Phanoteus, was a friend of Aegisthus.