Electra (393-440)

oh, yes, my life is so wondrously fine.

It would be, if only you learned good sense.

Do not teach me to betray my friends.

I do not, but to bend before the strong.

Keep your flattery to yourself; it is not in my character.

Regardless, it brings no honor to fall through senselessness.

I will fall, if need be, while honoring my father.

But our father, I know, pardons me for this.

It is for cowards to commend such sentiments.

So you will not be persuaded to agree with me?

No, indeed; may I not yet be so devoid of intelligence.

Then I will move on to where I was sent.

And where is it that you go? For whom do you take these offerings to be burned?

Mother sends me with funeral libations for our father.

What are you saying? For her deadliest enemy?

Whom she herself killed, no doubt you wanted to say this as well.

What friend persuaded her? Whose idea was it?

The cause, I think, was fear induced by some vision in the night.

My father’s Gods! Stand with me now at last!

Do you find something heartening in this terror?

If you would tell me the vision, then I could answer.

I know no more than a small part of the story.

Tell me that, anyway; a small tale has often before now tripped men up, or set them upright.

It is said that she saw the father of you and of me restored to the sunlight and to her company once more. Then he took the scepter—

once his own, but now carried by Aegisthus—and planted it at the hearth. From it branched upward a flourishing limb, by which the whole land of the Mycenaeans was overshadowed. Such was the tale that I heard told by one who was present

when she revealed her dream to the Sun-god. More than this I do not know, except that she sent me by reason of this fear of hers. Now, I beg you by our ancestral gods, obey me, and do not fall in your senselessness!

If you reject me now, it is in misery that you will next seek me out.

Dear sister, let none of these offerings in your hands touch the tomb. For neither divine law nor piety allows you to dedicate funeral gifts or bring libations to our father from his hateful wife.

No! To the winds with them! Or cover them in a deep, dusty hole, where not one of them will ever come near our father’s resting place. Rather let these treasures be preserved for her below when she dies. Were she not by nature the most audacious

of all women, she would never at all have tried to pour these ill-willed offerings to the man she killed. Consider whether you believe that the dead in his tomb will welcome this tribute with affection towards her, by whose hand he died dishonored and was mutilated