indeed a real advance beyond the happy piety of the pair in Sophocles' play, where the voice of Apollo sets at rest every scruple of filial piety or of natural instinct.
From another aspect we may regard the Electra as the most openly democratic of all Euripides' works. Elsewhere the poet has represented trusty slaves of high character and devotion, and insisted upon the fact that slavery is but an accident, and that there is nobility in men of low degree. Yet these instances occur in the retinue of princes, whereas here peasants are put upon the stage, and made the finest characters in the play. Electra's pretended husband is a moral hero, and the aged farmer from the Spartan frontier is the moving spirit in devising the plot of vengeance, whereas Orestes and Electra are the victims of oracles and family curses and crimes, which force them into exile and remorse.
44. The Iphigenia in Aulis.—We now turn to another example of the tragedies of plot—the Iphigenia in Aulis. This noble play was left unfinished by the poet, and there are great critical difficulties about many passages, which were completed or interpolated by inferior hands. The general outline, however, is fixed, and no essential feature of the plot has been lost. But the character drawing is here as prominent as the plot, so that the piece is one of the most remarkable in both respects.
It opens with a striking night-scene, in which Agamemnon appears tortured with agonising indecision as to his daughter, whose sacrifice had been suggested by Calchas and Odysseus, and whom he had summoned to Aulis with her mother under the pretence of a marriage with Achilles. He is writing missives and tearing them up again—missives to stop his child on the way, and save her from her fate. All this appears in the opening dialogue with an old and faithful retainer, who is at last despatched to stop the approach of the princess. But Menelaus meets him, and seizes his despatch, and they return in angry dispute,
