The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Electra of Euripides, by Euripides

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Title: The Electra of Euripides

Author: Euripides

Release Date: December 10, 2004 [EBook #14322]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

ELECTRA

OF

EURIPIDES

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY

GILBERT MURRAY, LL.D., D.LITT.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

FORTY-SECOND THOUSAND

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1

_First Edition, November_ 1905
_Reprinted, November_ 1906
" _February_ 1908
" _March_ 1910
" _December_ 1910
" _February_ 1913
" _April_ 1914
" _June_ 1916
" _November_ 1919
" _April_ 1921
" _January_ 1923
" _May_ 1925
" _August_ 1927
" _January_ 1929

_(All rights reserved)_

PERFORMED AT
THE COURT THEATRE, LONDON
IN 1907

_Printed in Great Britain by
Unwin Brothers Ltd., Woking_

Introduction[1]

The _Electra_ of Euripides has the distinction of being, perhaps, the best
abused, and, one might add, not the best understood, of ancient tragedies.
"A singular monument of poetical, or rather unpoetical perversity;" "the
very worst of all his pieces;" are, for instance, the phrases applied to
it by Schlegel. Considering that he judged it by the standards of
conventional classicism, he could scarcely have arrived at any different
conclusion. For it is essentially, and perhaps consciously, a protest
against those standards. So, indeed, is the tragedy of _The Trojan Women_;
but on very different lines. The _Electra_ has none of the imaginative
splendour, the vastness, the intense poetry, of that wonderful work. It is
a close-knit, powerful, well-constructed play, as realistic as the tragic
conventions will allow, intellectual and rebellious. Its _psychology_
reminds one of Browning, or even of Ibsen.

To a fifth-century Greek all history came in the