Euripides: ‘Orestes’

 Like Electra, Orestes is a melodrama, not a tragedy, based on character drawing, not plot. That’s the verdict of Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies.

His point is that the play has no tragic conception, no tragic point. It was made not to impart a high moral lesson but to be a rollicking good show. The chief character, Orestes, is mad, pursued by the Furies who are enraged that he’s killed his mother. He and his sister Electra are waiting to hear their fate from the Argive Assembly: death or banishment.

The play begins in hopelessness and goes downhill from there.

From hopelessness, Orestes descends into folly. He identifies possible allies and picks quarrels with them. He goes before the Assembly and provokes them, converting those who had argued for banishment into death-penalty advocates.

From folly, Orestes descends into “criminal recklessness,” as Kitto puts it. One plot leads to another. The fates of Orestes, his friend Pylades and Electra are intertwined, and they are all thinking badly. Since Menelaus failed to come to their aid, they decide to make him suffer by killing his wife, Helen. Better yet, they decide to take Menelaus’ little daughter Hermione hostage. Better yet, if all must die, why not burn down the ancestral home? Why go out in a metaphorical blaze of glory when you can have the real thing?

It’s a descent into nightmare.

Orestes blames everyone but himself for his predicament. The succession runs from the god Apollo to his uncle Menelaus and then on to his grandfather Tyndareus and his mother, Clytemnestra. Orestes’ reasoning is so ironic, his lines appall you while making you laugh.

There are wonders in the play.

With no tragic conception to emphasize, the chorus no longer has a role and is nuisance. Euripides makes it a nuisance — a chorus of women, who are threatening to awaken Orestes with their singing and must be hushed by Electra.

And there’s the breathless speech of the terrified Phrygian slave, reporting on the attempt to kill Helen, given in the broken Greek of a barbarian. Here’s a sample:

 

Into palace

a pride of lions, Greekers, twins;

One of general Agamemnon, son;

other Pylades, man of plots, evil, bad;

loyal, yes, and bold, bold,

skills for war, and killer-snake.

God darn him dead

for plotty sneaks,

I hope.

 

It’s marvelous. I could imagine a genre of poetry in that style.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Orestes is on pp. 366-71. Orestes, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides IV in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 105-208. The quotation is on p. 191.