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 form of legend; and no
less than three extant tragedies, Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_ (456
B.C.), Euripides' _Electra_ (413 B.C.), and Sophocles' _Electra_ (date
unknown: but perhaps the latest of the three) are based on the particular
piece of legend or history now before us. It narrates how the son and
daughter of the murdered king, Agamemnon, slew, in due course of revenge,
and by Apollo's express command, their guilty mother and her paramour.

Homer had long since told the story, as he tells so many, simply and
grandly, without moral questioning and without intensity. The atmosphere
is heroic. It is all a blood-feud between chieftains, in which Orestes,
after seven years, succeeds in slaying his foe Aegisthus, who had killed
his father. He probably killed his mother also; but we are not directly
told so. His sister may have helped him, and he may possibly have gone mad
afterwards; but these painful issues are kept determinedly in the shade.

Somewhat surprisingly, Sophocles, although by his time Electra and
Clytemnestra had become leading figures in the story and the mother-murder
its essential climax, preserves a very similar atmosphere. His tragedy is
enthusiastically praised by Schlegel for "the celestial purity, the fresh
breath of life and youth, that is diffused over so dreadful a subject."