The scene described above, in which Talthybius once
Literary evidence. |
“δοίη τις ἀνδροκμῆτα πέλεκυν ὡς τάχος: εἰδῶμεν ἢ νικῶμεν ἢ νικώμεθα”.
But there is no time for her to obtain the weapon; at that moment Orestes confronts her. Her futile cry rather indicates that Aeschylus had in mind some earlier version which actually armed her with an axe at a similar crisis. And in Sophocles, too, we find that the axe is prominent. The murder of Agamemnon by the guilty pair is thus described (v. 99): “σχίζουσι κάρα φονίῳ πελέκει”. Still more significant is the passage in which Sophocles describes the axe itself as resenting the deed of which it was made the instrument (482 ff.):—
“οὐ γάρ ποτ᾽ ἀμναστεῖ γ᾽ ὁ φύσας σ᾽ Ἑλλάνων ἄναξ, οὐδ᾽ ἁ παλαιὰ χαλκόπλακτος ἀμφάκης γένυς, ἅ νιν κατέπεφνεν αἰσχίσταις ἐν αἰκίαις”.
Some Roman sarcophagi2, on which the story of Orestes is treated, show three Erinyes sleeping at the tomb of Agamemnon. Among them lies the axe of Clytaemnestra,—a symbol, as with Sophocles, of the crime which calls for vengeance.
The Oresteia of Stesichorus was popular at Athens in the fifth century B.C. There is a striking proof of this. Aristophanes, in the Peace(775 ff.), has adopted some verses from the beginning of that Oresteia3, without naming Stesichorus. He could reckon on his playful allusion to so famous a poem being at once recognised by an Athenian audience. Between the Odyssey and Aeschylus, no other handling of the subject seems to have rivalled the work of Stesichorus in celebrity. In the epic Nostoi, where the deed of Orestes was only one of many episodes, it would be treated, one may suppose, on a relatively small scale.
Now it is known that Stesichorus made Clytaemnestra kill her husband by wounds on the head,—probably, therefore, with the axe, as Sophocles describes in the passages quoted above. This appears from the nature of the dream which terrified the Clytaemnestra of Stesichorus just before the retribution. A serpent approached her with gore upon its head, and then changed into Agamemnon:—
“τᾷ δὲ δράκων ἐδόκησε μολεῖν κάρα βεβροτωμένος ἄκρον: ἐκ δ᾽ ἄρα τοῦ βασιλεὺς Πλεισθενίδας ἐφάνη”4.
Such a dream would necessarily (according to Greek ideas) act upon her mind in the manner described by the Attic dramatists. In the Oresteia of Stesichorus, just as in the Choephori and in the Sophoclean Electra, the guilty and terrified woman must have sent propitiatory offerings to the grave of her murdered husband. But, like the dramatists again, the lyric poet would make her send them by the hands of some one else; even her hardihood could not dispense with an intermediary in this case. Whom did Stesichorus choose as her emissary? It is a notable fact that Electra, who is unknown to Homer,
First mention of Electra. |
Xanthus. |