hate and love, alike unsatisfied--hate against her mother and stepfather,
love for her dead father and her brother in exile; a woman who has known
luxury and state, and cares much for them; who is intolerant of poverty,
and who feels her youth passing away. And meantime there is her name, on
which all legend, if I am not mistaken, insists; she is _A-lektra_, "the
Unmated."

There is, perhaps, no woman's character in the range of Greek tragedy so
profoundly studied. Not Aeschylus' Clytemnestra, not Phaedra nor Medea.
One's thoughts can only wander towards two great heroines of "lost" plays,
Althaea in the _Meleager_, and Stheneboea in the _Bellerophon_.

G.M.

[Footnote 1: Most of this introduction is reprinted, by the kind
permission of the Editors, from an article in the _Independent Review_
vol. i. No. 4.]




ELECTRA




CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY


CLYTEMNESTRA, _Queen of Argos and Mycenae; widow of Agamemnon_.