Mythology

  The King dismounted, praying aloud, “O Victory now mine, be mine forever.” His wife advanced to meet him. Her face was radiant, her head high. She knew that every man there except Agamemnon was aware of her infidelity, but she faced them all and told them with smiling lips that even in their presence she must at such a moment speak out the great love she bore her husband and the agonizing grief she had suffered in his absence. Then in words of exultant joy she bade him welcome. “You are our safety,” she told him, “our sure defense. The sight of you is dear as land after storm to the sailor, as a gushing stream to a thirsty wayfarer.”

  He answered her, but with reserve, and he turned to go into the palace. First he pointed to the girl in the chariot. She was Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, he told his wife—the Army’s gift to him, the flower of all the captive women. Let Clytemnestra see to her and treat her well. With that he entered the house and the doors closed behind the husband and the wife. They would never open again for both of them.

  The crowd had gone. Only the old men still waited uneasily before the silent building and the blank doors. The captive princess caught their attention and they looked curiously at her. They had heard of her strange fame as a prophetess whom no one ever believed and yet whose prophecies were always proved true by the event. She turned a terrified face to them. Where had she been brought, she asked them wildly—What house was this? They answered soothingly that it was where the son of Atreus lived. She cried out, “No! It is a house God hates, where men are killed and the floor is red with blood.” The old men stole frightened glances at each other. Blood, men killed, that was what they too were thinking of, the dark past with its promise of more darkness. How could she, a stranger and a foreigner, know that past? “I hear children crying,” said wailed,

  … Crying for wounds that bleed.

  A father feasted—and the flesh his children.

  Thyestes and his sons… Where had she heard of that? More wild words poured from her lips. It seemed as if she had seen what had happened in that house through the years, as if she had stood by while death followed death, each a crime and all working together to produce more crime. Then from the past she turned to the future. She cried out that on that very day two more deaths would be added to the list, one her own. “I will endure to die,” she said, as she turned away and moved toward the palace. They tried to hold her back from that ominous house, but she would not have it; she entered and the doors closed forever on her, too. The silence that followed when she had gone was suddenly and terribly broken. A cry rang out, the voice of a man in agony: “God! I am struck! My death blow—” and silence again. The old men, terrified, bewildered, huddled together. That was the King’s voice. What should they do? “Break into the palace? Quick, be quick,” they urged each other. “We must know.” But there was no need now of any violence. The doors opened and on the threshold stood the Queen.

  Dark red stains were on her dress, her hands, her face, yet she herself looked unshaken, strongly sure of herself. She proclaimed for all to hear what had been done. “Here lies my husband dead, struck down justly by my hand,” she said. It was his blood that stained her dress and face and she was glad.

  He fell and as he gasped, his blood

  Spouted and splashed me with dark spray, a dew

  Of death, sweet to me as heaven’s sweet raindrops

  When the corn-land buds.

  She saw no reason to explain her act or excuse it. She was not a murderer in her own eyes, she was an executioner. She had punished a murderer, the murderer of his own child.

  Who cared no more than if a beast should die

  When flocks are plenty in the fleecy fold,

  But slew his daughter—slew her for a charm

  Against the Thracian winds.

  Her lover followed her and stood beside her—Aegisthus, the youngest child of Thyestes, born after that horrible feast. He had no quarrel with Agamemnon himself, but Atreus, who had had the children slaughtered and placed on the banquet table for their father, was dead and vengeance could not reach him. Therefore his son must pay the penalty.

  The two, the Queen and her lover, had reason to know that wickedness cannot be ended by wickedness. The dead body of the man they had just killed was a proof. But in their triumph they did not stop to think that this death, too, like all the others, would surely bring evil in its train. “No more blood for you and me,” Clytemnestra said to Aegisthus. “We are lords here now. We two will order all things well.” It was a baseless hope.

  Iphigenia had been one of three children. The other two were a girl and a boy, Electra and Orestes. Aegisthus would certainly have killed the boy if Orestes had been there, but he had been sent away to a trusted friend. The girl Aegisthus disdained to kill; he only made her utterly wretched in every way possible until her whole life was concentrated in one hope, that Orestes would come back and avenge their father. That vengeance—what would it be? Over and over she asked herself this. Aegisthus, of course, must die, but to kill him alone would never satisfy justice. His crime was less black than another’s. What then? Could it be justice that a son should take a mother’s life to avenge a father’s death? So she brooded through the bitter days of the long years that followed, while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ruled the land.

  As the boy grew to manhood he saw even more clearly than she the terrible situation. It was a son’s duty to kill his father’s murderers, a duty that came before all others. But a son who killed his mother was abhorrent to gods and to men. A most sacred obligation was bound up with a most atrocious crime. He who wanted only to do right was so placed that he must choose between two hideous wrongs. He must be a traitor to his father or he must be the murderer of his mother.

  In his agony of doubt he journeyed to Delphi to ask the oracle to help him, and Apollo spoke to him in clear words bidding him,

  Slay the two who slew.

  Atone for death by death.

  Shed blood for old blood shed.

  And Orestes knew that he must work out the curse of his house, exact vengeance and pay with his own ruin. He went to the home he had not seen since he was a little boy, and with him went his cousin and friend Pylades. The two had grown up together and were devoted in a way far beyond usual friendship. Electra, with no idea that they were actually arriving, was yet on the watch. Her life was spent in watching for the brother who would bring her the only thing life held for her.

  One day at her father’s tomb she made an offering to the dead and prayed, “O Father, guide Orestes to his home.” Suddenly he was beside her, claiming her as his sister, showing her as proof the cloak he wore, the work of her hands, which she had wrapped him in when he went away. But she did not need a proof. She cried, “Your face is my father’s face.” And she poured out to him all the love no one had wanted from her through the wretched years:—

  All, all is yours,

  The love I owed my father who is dead,

  The love I might have given to my mother,

  And my poor sister cruelly doomed to die.

  All yours now, only yours.

  He was too sunk in his own thought, too intent upon the thing he faced, to answer her or even to listen. He broke in upon her words to tell her what filled his mind so that nothing else could reach it: the terrible words of the oracle of Apollo. Orestes spoke with horror:—

  He told me to appease the angry dead.

  That who hears not when his dead cry to him,

  For such there is no home, no refuge anywhere.

  No altarfire burns for him, no friend greets him.

  He dies alone and vile. O God, shall I believe

  Such oracles? But yet—but yet

  The deed is to be done and I must do it.

  The three made their plans. Orestes and Pylades were to go to the palace claiming to be the bearers of a message that Orestes had died. It would be joyful news to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus who had always feared what he might do, and they would certainly want to see the messengers. Once i
n the palace the brother and his friend could trust to their own swords and the complete surprise of their attack.

  They were admitted and Electra waited. That had been her bitter part all through her life. Then the doors opened slowly and a woman came out and stood tranquilly on the steps. It was Clytemnestra. She had been there only a moment or so when a slave rushed out screaming, “Treason! Our master! Treason!” He saw Clytemnestra and gasped, “Orestes—alive—here.” She knew then. Everything was clear to her, what had happened and what was still to come. Sternly she bade the slave bring her a battle-ax. She was resolved to fight for her life, but the weapon was no sooner in her hand than she changed her mind. A man came through the doors, his sword red with blood, whose blood she knew and she knew too who held the sword. Instantly she saw a surer way to defend herself than with an ax. She was the mother of the man before her. “Stop, my son,” she said. “Look—my breast. Your heavy head dropped on it and you slept, oh, many a time. Your baby mouth, where never a tooth was, sucked the milk, and so you grew—” Orestes cried, “O Pylades, she is my mother. May I spare—” His friend told him solemnly: No. Apollo had commanded. The god must be obeyed. “I will obey,” Orestes said. “You—follow me.” Clytemnestra knew that she had lost. She said calmly, “It seems, my son, that you will kill your mother.” He motioned her into the house. She went and he followed her.

  When he came out again those waiting in the courtyard did not need to be told what he had done. Asking no questions they watched him, their master now, with compassion. He seemed not to see them; he was looking at a horror beyond them. Stammering words came from his lips: “The man is dead. I am not guilty there. An adulterer. He had to die. But she—Did she do it or did she not? O you, my friends. I say I killed my mother—yet not without reason—she was vile and she killed my father and God hated her.”

  His eyes were fixed always on that unseen horror. He screamed, “Look! Look! Women there. Black, all black, and long hair like snakes.” They told him eagerly there were no women. “It is only your fancy. Oh, do not fear.” “You do not see them?” he cried. “No fancy. I—I see them. My mother has sent them. They crowd around me and their eyes drip blood. Oh, let me go.” He rushed away, alone except for those invisible companions.

  Clytemnestra and Orestes

  When next he came to his country, years had passed. He had been a wanderer in many lands, always pursued by the same terrible shapes. He was worn with suffering, but in his loss of everything men prize there was a gain too. “I have been taught by misery,” he said. He had learned that no crime was beyond atonement, that even he, defiled by a mother’s murder, could be made clean again. He traveled to Athens, sent there by Apollo to plead his case before Athena. He had come to beg for help; nevertheless, in his heart there was confidence. Those who desire to be purified cannot be refused and the black stain of his guilt had grown fainter and fainter through his years of lonely wandering and pain. He believed that by now it had faded away. “I can speak to Athena with pure lips,” he said.

  The goddess listened to his plea. Apollo was beside him. “It is I who am answerable for what he did,” he said. “He killed at my command.” The dread forms of his pursuers, the Erinyes, the Furies, were arrayed against him, but Orestes listened calmly to their demand for vengeance. “I, not Apollo, was guilty of my mother’s murder,” he said, “but I have been cleansed of my guilt.” These were words never spoken before by any of the House of Atreus. The killers of that race had never suffered from their guilt and sought to be made clean. Athena accepted the plea. She persuaded the avenging goddesses also to accept it, and with this new law of mercy established they themselves were changed. From the Furies of frightful aspect they became the Benignant Ones, the Eumenides, protectors of the suppliant. They acquitted Orestes, and with the words of acquittal the spirit of evil which had haunted his house for so long was banished. Orestes went forth from Athena’s tribunal a free man. Neither he nor any descendant of his would ever again be driven into evil by the irresistible power of the past. The curse of the House of Atreus was ended.

  IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAURIANS

  I have taken this story entirely from two plays of Euripides, the fifth-century tragic poet. No other writer tells the story in full. The happy end brought about by a divinity, the deus ex machina, is a common device with Euripides alone of the three tragic poets. According to our ideas it is a weakness; and certainly it is unnecessary in this case, where the same end could have been secured by merely omitting the head wind. Athena’s appearance, in point of fact, harms a good plot. A possible reason for this lapse on the part of one of the greatest poets the world has known is that the Athenians, who were suffering greatly at the time from the war with Sparta, were eager for miracles and that Euripides chose to humor them.

  The Greeks, as has been said, did not like stories in which human beings were offered up, whether to appease angry gods or to make Mother Earth bear a good harvest or to bring about anything whatsoever. They thought about such sacrifices as we do. They were abominable. Any deity who demanded them was thereby proved to be evil, and, as the poet Euripides said, “If gods do evil then they are not gods.” It was inevitable therefore that another story should grow up about the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. According to the old account, she was killed because one of the wild animals Artemis loved had been slain by the Greeks and the guilty hunters could win back the goddess’s favor only by the death of a young girl. But to the later Greeks this was to slander Artemis. Never would such a demand have been made by the lovely lady of the woodland and the forest, who was especially the protector of little helpless creatures.

  So gentle is she, Artemis the holy,

  To dewy youth, to tender nurslings,

  The young of all that roam the meadow,

  Of all who live within the forest.

  So another ending was given to the story. When the Greek soldiers at Aulis came to get Iphigenia where she was waiting for the summons to death, her mother beside her, she forbade Clytemnestra to go with her to the altar. “It is better so for me as well as for you,” she said. The mother was left alone. At last she saw a man approaching. He was running and she wondered why anyone should hasten to bring her the tidings he must bear. But he cried out to her, “Wonderful news!” Her daughter had not been sacrificed, he said. That was certain, but exactly what had happened to her no one knew. As the priest was about to strike her, anguish troubled every man there and all bowed their heads. But a cry came from the priest and they looked up to see a marvel hardly to be believed. The girl had vanished, but on the ground beside the altar lay a deer, its throat cut. “This is Artemis’ doing,” the priest proclaimed. “She will not have her altar stained with human blood. She has herself furnished the victim and she receives the sacrifice.” “I tell you, O Queen,” the messenger said, “I was there and the thing happened thus. Clearly your child has been borne away to the gods.”

  But Iphigenia had not been carried to heaven. Artemis had taken her to the land of the Taurians (today the Crimea) on the shore of the Unfriendly Sea—a fierce people whose savage custom it was to sacrifice to the goddess any Greek found in the country. Artemis took care that Iphigenia should be safe; she made her priestess of her temple. But as such it was her terrible task to conduct the sacrifices, not actually herself kill her countrymen, but consecrate them by long-established rites and deliver them over to those who would kill them.

  She had been serving the goddess thus for many years when a Greek galley put in at the inhospitable shore, not under stern necessity, storm-driven, but voluntarily. And yet it was known everywhere what the Taurians did to the Greeks they captured. An overwhelmingly strong motive made the ship anchor there. From it in the early dawn two young men came and stealthily found their way to the temple. Both were clearly of exalted birth; they looked like the sons of kings, but the face of one was deeply marked with lines of pain. It was he who whispered to his friend, “Don’t you think this is the temple, Pylades?”
“Yes, Orestes,” the other answered. “It must be that bloodstained spot.”

  Orestes here and his faithful friend? What were they doing in a country so perilous to Greeks? Did this happen before or after Orestes had been absolved of the guilt of his mother’s murder? It was some time after. Although Athena had pronounced him clear of guilt, in this story all the Erinyes had not accepted the verdict. Some of them continued to pursue him, or else Orestes thought that they did. Even the acquittal pronounced by Athena had not restored to him his peace of mind. His pursuers were fewer, but they were still with him.

  In his despair he went to Delphi. If he could not find help there, in the holiest place of Greece, he could find it nowhere. Apollo’s oracle gave him hope, but only at the risk of his life. He must go to the Taurian country, the Delphic priestess said, and bring away the sacred image of Artemis from her temple. When he had set it up in Athens he would at last be healed and at peace. He would never again see terrible forms haunting him. It was a most perilous enterprise, but everything for him depended on it. At whatever cost he was bound to make the attempt and Pylades would not let him make it alone.

  When the two reached the temple they saw at once that they must wait for the night before doing anything. There was no chance by day of getting into the place unseen. They retreated to keep under cover in some dark lonely spot.

  Iphigenia, sorrowful as always, was going through her round of duties to the goddess when she was interrupted by a messenger who told her that the two young men, Greeks, had been taken prisoners and were to be sacrificed at once. He had been sent on to bid her make all ready for the sacred rites. The horror which she had felt so often seized her again. She shuddered at the thought, terribly familiar though it was, of the hideous bloodshed, of the agony of the victims. But this time a new thought came as well. She asked herself, “Would a goddess command such things? Would she take pleasure in sacrificial murder? I do not believe it,” she told herself. “It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the gods.”