Electra (1059-1130)

No, no, I will give some pleasure to your heart.

I will speak, and this is the beginning of my preface: oh, mother, I wish that you had a better heart. For though your beauty, and Helen’s, is worthy to bring you praise, yet you two were born true sisters, both frivolous, not worthy of Castor.

She was carried off, willingly ruined; and you have destroyed the bravest man in Greece, putting forward the excuse that you killed a husband for the sake of a child; for they don’t know you so well as I do. You who, before your daughter’s death was decided,

as soon as your husband had started from home, were adorning the golden locks of your hair at the mirror. A wife who decks herself out for beauty, when her husband is gone from home—strike her off the list as worthless.

There is no need for her to show her pretty face out of doors, unless she is seeking some mischief. Of all the women in Hellas you were the only one I know to be joyful when Troy was fortunate, and with a clouded face when it was weaker, since you did not want Agamemnon to return from Troy.

And yet it was in your power to be chaste, and rightly; you had a husband, no worse than Aegisthus, whom Hellas chose to be its commander; and when your sister Helen had done her work, it was possible for you to achieve great fame,

for the bad gives a standard of comparison to the good and provides a spectacle. But if, as you say, my father killed your daughter, what is the wrong I and and my brother have done you? How was it that after you had killed your husband, you did not assign to us our father’s home,

but you brought the goods belonging to another to bed, buying your marriage with wages? And how is it that your husband is not exiled in the place of your son, nor has he died in my place, although he has killed me, alive, twice as much as my sister? If murder, giving judgment, requites murder, your

son Orestes and I must kill you to avenge our father. For if that was just, then so is this. Whoever marries a wicked woman, looking to wealth or noble birth, is a fool; for humble wives, if chaste, are better in the home than great ones.

Chance is in the marriages of women; among mankind, I see some fall out well, others not.

Child, it was always your nature to love your father. This is what happens: some children are for their fathers, others in turn love their mothers more than a father.

I will forgive you; for I do not rejoice so very much at what I have done, child.

You, a woman who has just given birth—why is your body so unwashed and meanly clad? Alas for my schemes!

I drove on in anger against my husband more than I should have.

You sigh too late, when you have no remedy. My father is dead; but why do you not recall that exile, your own wandering son?

l am afraid; I am looking to my interests, not his.

For he is angry, they say, over the murder of his father.

And why do you cause your husband to be cruel to me?

Such are his ways. You have a stubborn nature also.

Yes, for I am in distress. Yet I will cease from my anger.

And then he will no longer be harsh to you.

He is proud; for he lives in my home.

You see? Again you are rekindling new quarrels.

I am silent; I fear him—as I fear him.

Stop this talk! But why did you summon me, child?

You have heard, I suppose, that I have given birth;

in thanks for this, please sacrifice—for I do not know how—on the tenth day, as is the custom for the child. For I have no experience, being childless before.

This is work for another, the one who delivered you.

I was all alone in my labor and at the baby’s birth.

Is this household situated with no friends as neighbors?