Plays 4: Elektra, Orestes and Iphigeneia in Tauris

by Euripides, Kenneth McLeish (Translator)

"Euripides, the Athenian playwright who dared to question the whims of wanton gods, has always been the most intriguing of the Greek tragedians. Now, with translations aimed at the stage rather than the page, his restless intellect strikes the chord



This volume contains some of Euripides' most famous Elektra, which reverses previous notions of 'heroic' behaviour; Orestes, in which almost all the characters are driven by base motives of cowardice or revenge; Iphigeneia in Tauris who presumes her brother Orestes dead and her mother Klytemnestra and stepfather Aigisthos still living, is visited by a surprise guest.

Elektra, Oresetes and Iphigeneia in Tauris were performed together as Agamemnon's children at The Gate Theatre in 1995 and show the consequences of Agamemnon's "sacrifice" of his daughter at the start of the Trojan war.

Genres: Plays, Classics

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 23, 1997

About the author

Euripides (Greek: Ευριπίδης) (ca. 480 BC–406 BC) was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete (Rhesus is suspect). There are many fragments (some substantial) of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. He also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of William Shakespeare's Othello, Jean Racine's Phèdre, of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg," in which "imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates". But he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
His contemporaries associated him with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism. Both were frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence. Ancient biographies hold that Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia, but recent scholarship casts doubt on these sources.

Reviews

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

These three plays were written at different times of Euripides' life, but they are all related to the aftermath of Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigeneia in Aulis, and are presented in this volume in chronological order. In Elektra, Elektra and her brother Orestes kill their mother Klytemnestra and her lover Aigisthos. In Orestes, Orestes struggles with guilt and his mother's furies, and is sentenced by the people of Argos to death. In Iphigeneia at Tauris, Orestes, who has been acquitted by the Athenians, rescues Iphigeneia and obtains the statue of Artemis that rids him of the furies.

Though related by common events, the three plays present the characters in very different lights. Orestes is heroic in Elektra, vicious and mad in Orestes, and loyal and generous in Iphigeneia in Tauris. Elektra is a bitter play and Orestes an extremely hostile one, but Iphigeneia in Tauris is filled in warmth and goodwill. They represent different periods of Euripides' life and different moods. Interestingly, the three translations in this book were combined into a single production titled Agamemnon's Children and performed at the Gate Theatre in London in 1995.

Elektra
The prologue is given by the farmer. After Agamemnon returned from defeating Troy, his wife, Klytemnestra, and her lover, Aigisthos, killed Agamemnon, banished her son Orestes, and married Elektra to the farmer so that she would not produce royal sons to claim the throne. The farmer is poor but kind, and has not slept with Elektra to avoid defiling her. Elektra mourns for her father, and works hard to help her husband. Orestes and his friend Phylades arrive, sent by Apollo to kill Klytemnestra and Aigisthos. He pretends to be a friend of Orestes, and Elektra doesn’t recognise him until the old man, a servant of Agamemnon’s recognises Orestes. Elektra and Orestes unite, and Orestes kills Aigisthos off-stage. Elektra tricks Klytemnestra into visiting her by pretending to have a newborn baby. There is a confrontation where Klytemnestra insists she killed Agamemnon because he killed her daughter Iphigeneia to help Menelaos reclaim Helen, and then returned from Troy with a mistress, Kassandra. Elektra rebuts that Klytemnestra had an affair with Aigisthos long before Iphigeneia was killed. Elektra and Orestes kill Klytemnestra, but their triumph is mixed with guilt. Finally, Kastor and Polydeukes appear and announce that Apollo was wrong, and Orestes will be banished and put to trial in Athens, but the guilt will be assigned to Apollo, and then Elektra is to marry Phylades. 

Elektra’s meeting with Orestes is marked by an amusing passage that pokes fun at Aeschylus. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Elektra recognises Orestes by his hair, his footprints, and a garment she made for him. In Euripides’ play, Elektra asks how her hair or footprints could match Orestes’ when he is a man and she is a woman, and how he could be wearing any garment she made for him when they parted as children. Aristophanes later wrote a play, Frogs, in which Euripides and Aeschylus square off. 

As always Euripides builds characters with complex motivations. For most of the play, we are told that Klytemnestra was evil for killing Agamemnon, but we feel sympathy for her when we learn that Agamemnon killed her child and brought home a mistress. She then shows some signs of love for her children, and there is a hint that she had no control over the fates dealt to them by Aigisthos. The scene in which the children kill Klytemnestra is an emotionally complex one, summed up in Elektra’s statement: “Sleep now, sleep. We loved you. We killed you. Sleep.” Orestes' guilt becomes the focal point of the next two plays.

Orestes
6 days after killing their mother, Elektra and Orestes are in hiding form the angry Argives. Orestes, haunted by his mother’s furies, is sick and has frequent fits. Elektra cares for him. They hear than Helen and Menelaos have returned from Troy, and eagerly await Menelaos’ help. First Helen appears with fake sympathy, then Menelaos appears. While the Orestes pleads for his help, Tyndareus, Menelaos and Agamemnon’s father, appears as accuses Orestes, threatening to incite the people to kill him by stoning. After he leaves. Menelaos refuses to protect the siblings. Orestes’ friend Pylades turns up to support Orestes. The people sentence Orestes and Elektra to death by stoning. They want to flee, but cannot. Pylades then advises Orestes to kill Helen and use her daughter Hermione as a hostage to protect himself from Menelaos. The plan is executed, but Helen disappears before Orestes can kill her. There is then an angry confrontation between Orestes and Menelaos, with Hermione as hostage, but before any killings occur, Apollo appears and orders peace.

Euripides wrote this towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. Athens had been fighting Sparta for over 20 years, and Euripides’ disillusionment about war is clearly shown. This is an angry play, with violent, murderous characters whose only response to injustice or shame is to kill, and they fail to see that death does not right any wrongs. 

The appearance of Apollo at the end as a deus ex machina was unexpected and jarring. Just as it seems inevitable that the play will end in tragedy, Apollo appears to stop the fight, proclaim peace, and instruct Orestes to marry Hermione and Elektra to marry Pylades. Perhaps this was a reflection of Euripides’ feeling of defeat, that the war was trudging along with no end in sight, and the only way he could foresee it stopping was if a god intervened. 

The chorus is interestingly used in a way that creates commotion and confusion. Even when they first appear, Elektra pleads with them to be quiet, but they wake Orestes up anyway. It feels like Euripides was poking fun at the function of the chorus and highlighting how incongruous it is for a group of singing women to be in a scene where they don’t belong. 

Iphigeneia in Tauris
When Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigeneia in Aulis, Artemis replaced her with a deer, without the Greeks' knowledge, and brought Iphigeneia to Tauris where she serves Artemis as a priestess sacrificing Greeks. She yearns for home. Orestes and Phylades sail to Tauris. It is revealed that when the Athenians' voted regarding Orestes' charge for killing his mother, the votes were equal, and Athene voted for his innocence, thus acquitting him. However Orestes is still haunted by the furies, and Apollo has instructed him to bring his twin sister Artemis' statue from Tauris to Athens to rid himself of the furies. Orestes and Phylades are caught by herdsmen and brought to Iphigeneia to sacrifice to Artemis. When Orestes and Iphigeneia meet, they both speak obliquely, refusing to reveal their identities. Iphigeneia finds out that Orestes is from Argos and asks questions of the Argive soldiers and her family. She then proposes that Orestes deliver a letter to Argos, while she sacrifices Phylades. Orestes however insists that Phylades deliver the letter and survive instead of him. It is then revealed that Iphigeneia's letter is to Orestes, informing him that she is alive and asking him to rescue her. The siblings unite. Iphigeneia tells Thoas, the ruler of the island, that Orestes and Phylades are unclean due to the matricide, and she needs to wash them in the sea. They escape from Thoas on a ship, and just as Thoas is ordering his sailors to chase after them, Athene appears as a deus ex machina and orders him to stop.

After the aggressiveness of the previous two plays, this play is a relief to read. The characters are more agreeable, the central conflict is not about hatred but rather a misunderstanding from Iphigeneia and Orestes' refusal to reveal their identities, and the play ends on a note of hope. In particular, after reading the three plays, we have hope that Orestes finally finds his peace.

It is curiously similar to the play Helen, which is presented in the 3rd volume of this series. Both Helen and Iphigeneia were saved by gods and transported to islands where they survive without their families' knowledge. Both are rescued by their loved ones, Menelaos and Orestes respectively, and both help their loved ones escape on a ship by tricking the ruler of the island. Another of Euripides' plays, Andromeda, which is lost, was performed with Helen in 412, and various scholars use this as arguments for or against Iphigeneia in Tauris being performed in 412 as well.