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35 pages 1 hour read

Euripides

Orestes

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 409

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Lines 717-1245Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Lines 717-1017 Summary

Orestes feels deserted and outraged. Pylades, whom Orestes had promised Electra in marriage, rushes in. Orestes tells him he and Electra “are ruined,” and Pylades pledges his loyalty (164). Orestes explains that Menelaus has betrayed them, promising to help but only as “cowards” do, and that Tyndareus is against them. Pylades asks if they can escape into exile, but sentries are posted everywhere to prevent this. Pylades reveals that his father has banished him for helping a matricide. They consider their options and determine that Orestes must present himself at the council, hoping they will see his cause as just and/or pity him. Orestes refuses “to die a coward’s death” (166). They agree not to tell Electra and to stop at Agamemnon’s grave on the way to ask for help.

The Chorus sings about the curse on the house of Atreus and Clytemnestra’s murder. Electra enters looking for Orestes, and the Chorus tells her he has gone to speak in his defense at the Argive council. A messenger enters with news that the council has voted: Electra and Orestes must die on this day. Proclaiming himself loyal to Agamemnon, the messenger recounts the meeting. Talthybius spoke against Orestes while King Diomedes spoke in favor of banishment rather than death. A third man, acting at Tyndareus’s behest, argued for stoning the siblings to death. A fourth speaker argued on Orestes’s behalf since he avenged his father’s murder by “a godless, worthless, adulterous woman” who made men fear going to war, worried their wives would be seduced and their families destroyed (171). Finally, Orestes addressed the council, offering traditional norms and customs as his defense and suggesting that punishing him for murdering his mother would encourage women to kill their own husbands. He was found guilty, however, and avoided being stoned only by promising that he and Electra would kill themselves on this day. The messenger exits.

The Chorus sings a lament for the land and the line of Pelops. Electra sings about the curse on her family traveling down their line and “finding fulfillment at last” in herself and her brother (173). The Chorus chants a description of Orestes and Pylades as they enter.

Lines 1018-1245 Summary

Electra is distraught that they are together for the last time, but Orestes urges her to calm herself, accept their fate, and choose how they will die, by the sword or by hanging. Electra asks Orestes to kill her, but he will not consent to have her blood on his hands. Both become emotional as Electra asks to embrace him. Electra asks if Menelaus helped, and Orestes tells her he did nothing, again encouraging her to “die bravely” (175). He asks Pylades to oversee their funeral arrangements, but Pylades begs him to stop, saying he does not want to live if his best friend is dead. He helped Orestes kill his mother and should share his punishment. He will not return home having abandoned his duty to his best friend and wife (as he refers to Electra), leaving them to die. He suggests finding a way to make Menelaus suffer by murdering Helen.

Pylades lays out his plan. They will go into their house, where Helen has now stationed herself, on the pretext that they are going to kill themselves, then lock up the slaves, leaving the path to Helen clear. Pylades asserts that it is not a crime since they will be punishing her on behalf of the “fathers and sons she murdered, whose wives she widowed”; all Hellas will rejoice and thank them for killing Helen, “who killed so many men” (178). If she manages to escape, they will burn down the house. The Chorus leader affirms that all women hate Helen for “disgrac[ing] our sex” (178). Orestes praises Pylades and reaffirms his commitment to hurting those who have betrayed him and caused his suffering.

Electra tells Orestes that she has a “way out for us all!” (179). She suggests they take Hermione as a hostage when she returns from pouring libations on Clytemnestra’s grave on Helen’s behalf. If Menelaus tries to hurt them after they kill Helen, they can threaten to slit Hermione’s throat. Orestes praises Electra, and Pylades affirms his wish to make her his wife. Orestes instructs her to guard the door and watch for Hermione while they go inside to murder Helen. All three call on Agamemnon to help and save them, and Pylades prays to Zeus. He and Orestes exit into the palace.

Lines 717-1245 Analysis

Myths in antiquity had both stable and variable elements. In the case of the House of Atreus, Agamemnon is always the leader of the Achaean expedition to Troy. He is always murdered upon his return home, and his son always avenges his father’s death by murdering his mother. Other aspects of the myth could be altered, as suited the occasion. Myths, in their festival context, were reshaped to speak to their time and to win prizes. Innovation was expected, possibly rewarded and, paradoxically, enabled the tradition to be preserved. One of Euripides’s innovations, seemingly unique to him, is the plan that Pylades introduces to murder Helen, as well as the kidnapping of Hermione and the presence of the Phrygian enslaved to Helen.

The plan is outrageous, as is Pylades and Orestes’s justification for it. They believe that murdering Helen is another act of justice, since she, by launching the Trojan War, caused the death of countless Achaean lives. Electra’s observation early in the play, that Helen returned to Argos at night to avoid facing the Argives’ wrath, becomes a way for Pylades and Orestes to convince themselves that the Argives will forgive and celebrate Orestes for committing yet another unsanctioned murder. Helen’s role in the Trojan War was god-directed, making Pylades and Orestes’s justification of it inexplicable.

Pylades is portrayed as a devoted friend but one whose judgment is not better than Electra or Orestes’s. Orestes’s fixation on not dying “a coward’s death” seems out of place and inappropriate given that he is facing punishment for murdering his mother, further evidence of his inability to face the reality of his circumstances (166). He is fashioning himself as a version of the Trojan War hero who achieves fame by performing outrageous deeds, only Orestes is not a hero but a tormented, confused young man who lacks guidance and a sense of occasion and proportion.

Set against the events of Athens in 408 BC, when the play was produced, the trio’s increasingly illogical and brutal plans may be mirroring for Athens what the city has become in its desperation to retain its crumbling empire.

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