Euripides’ Electra brings out how closely ‘‘rhetoric’’ can intertwine with other aspects of performance. The play is full of roles to play, functions to perform, burdens to carry, persons to try to be. And nothing sits easily on anyone. One of those mismatches affects rhetoric, the way that speech itself misses its mark.
Other forms of performance come first, particularly those of ritual activity. Early in the play the chorus invites Electra to a festival of Hera - a significant deity, not merely as one who cared for Argos but as a goddess of marriage and the transition from virgin to wife (Zeitlin 1970). That transition has here gone amiss. Electra is wed, but to the farmer who has respected his social superior (no easy part for him to play either, then), and she is still a virgin. That leaves her with no role in that festival, no way to ‘‘perform.’’ As a princess, she should lead the dance; yet her royal position is compromised, by husband and dwelling and the whole humiliation of her self and her house. Women, whether virgin or married, might have a role to play in a festival; married women seem to have had a particularly prominent role in the cult of Hera, as one would expect; but she is neither the one thing nor the other. The chorus try to persuade her, but they have no real understanding of the person or her predicament. Their choice of argument - if you haven’t a thing to wear, borrow some of ours (19093) - is in one way trivializing: there is more than clothing at stake in Electra’s mindset. But in another way it emblematizes the predicament rather precisely. To borrow someone else’s clothes would be to affect a role which was not her own; and just as there are no right clothes for such a person to wear, there are no right words for the chorus to say.
Ritual returns later in the play, in the messenger’s report of Aegisthus’ death. Orestes came upon him when he was sacrificing to the Nymphs. The earlier parts of the play have predisposed us to expect an Aegisthus who is a monster - the murderer, the adulterer, the person who urged Clytemnestra to kill her young children (25-28). Yet his behavior at the sacrifice is exemplary: here the disturbing thing is that he performs his role so well, not so badly. He invites the stranger to participate. As a ‘‘Thessalian,’’ the visitor will of course know how to butcher a victim, so would he like to take the knife (815-18; Kraus 1992)? And so he does - but the victim turns out to be Aegisthus himself, though not without some missed cues (Arnott 1973, 55-56): Orestes does not take to his role very naturally. The theme of the perverted sacrifice (Zeitlin 1965) had been central to the Orestes myth since Aeschylus - a constant presence in this play - but here it takes an unnerving new form. Is the audience to suspect that all their previous impressions of Aegisthus were awry? That would not be out of keeping with a drama that so often plays on conflicting perceptions, and the difficulties of being sure about anything (Goldhill 1986a, 245-59, and 1986b). Once again, there may be no right thing left for a principal, in this case Orestes, to do; one can understand the growing unease at the role in which he is cast, the plot which Apollo is staging.
‘‘Missed cues...his role...he is cast... the plot... staging’’: it is natural for us to use such theatrical phrasing. In most cases we should be cautious about extending such ideas of metatheater to fifth-century tragedy; true, explicit metatheater is frequent enough in comedy - but then comedy is often very different from tragedy, indeed may even define itself against it (Taplin 1986). Usually we should talk only of analogies with theatrical phenomena, without assuming that the audience would naturally or necessarily figure matters in those terms. Electra however may be different, not least when Electra cries ‘‘where are the messengers?’’ at a time when not merely real life but also dramatic convention leaves the audience clear about the expected next step (759: Arnott 1973, 50-51; Marshall 1999-2000; contra, Taplin 1986, 169). The roles cast for Orestes and Electra come from myth, and from previous drama, especially that omnipresent Aeschylus (self-conscious hints of the theater again): there is a sort of mythical and intertextual determinism about their actions. Yet time and again the discomfort of the characters is felt. They cannot even manage their essential, hackneyed recognition without outside help: it is the old man who recognizes Orestes, not his sister (558-76). The horrors of matricide are less easy to process when transposed into this more humdrum setting of empty larders and grimy cottages, and it is no surprise that the principals find them hard to process too: when it comes to the killing of Clytemnestra, they are barely able to carry it through.
Those mismatches concern actions. A further set concern words, and this is where ‘‘rhetoric’’ ties in with those other modes of performance. ‘‘I come from killing Aegisthus not in words but in deeds,’’ says Orestes (893-94), and he has the corpse to prove it: he encourages Electra to maltreat that corpse. She is reluctant, and Orestes presses her for the reason: ‘‘say, sister, if you wish’’ (905). She does ‘‘say’’ - yet not ‘‘say’’ what she wants to do or why she is reluctant, which is the way Orestes’ question would most naturally be taken (Kovacs 1987, 265-67, though he suspects textual corruption). Instead she delivers a long tirade against the dead man - that ‘‘killing Aegisthus in words’’ to correspond to Orestes’ ‘‘deeds’’ (Mossman 2001, 377). ‘‘What shall I put first, what last?’’ she begins, echoing a trope of real-life speeches (907-8: cf. Andocides 1.8, Hyperides 6.6-9, and already Homer, Odyssey 9.14): but in fact her speech ranges less widely than one would expect. There is surprisingly little on the murder of Agamemnon, and almost all centers on the marriage with Clytemnestra: how silly to think she would be faithful to you (yet nothing else suggests that Clytemnestra was anything less, now, than a devoted wife to Aegisthus); how dreadful for a husband to be called a wife’s belonging rather than the other way round (yet that is Aeschylus’ weak Aegisthus rather than the one we see elsewhere in this play); as for his dealings with women - that is not appropriate for a virgin to speak of (yet this virgin seems peculiarly preoccupied with sexual matters).
This is a travesty of a funeral lament, and in several ways. This does not praise, it vilifies. But as invective it should be meant to hurt: yet its target is beyond hurting now. As funeral oratory, it should help some sort of closure - and so it does, with a swift move on to the next phase, Clytemnestra’s killing: but where lament often energizes toward vengeance (Foley 1993), here the shaking of the siblings’ resolve is almost immediate. As narrative of a marriage, it tells more about Electra’s imaginings than about the reality: it celebrates justice, but the charges look anything but just.
A few minutes later, and we have a more elaborate rhetorical exchange. The next victim, Clytemnestra, gorgeously arrives in a chariot entry that matches that of Agamemnon in Aeschylus - indeed, probably outdoes it, for there may well be two chariots rather than one (998-99 with Cropp 1988 ad loc; Hammond 1984, 375 n. 6). Within a few lines mother and daughter are engaged in an agon: it is as if Clytemnestra is on trial - and yet Clytemnestra’s fate is already sealed, her murderer Orestes is already waiting within the cottage. This is rather like Thucydides’ Plataean debate (3.52-68), where the rights and wrongs may be difficult to establish, but anyway cannot affect anything, for the Spartan decision has already been reached.
Both speakers show a certain skill, as is usual with Euripides’ agdn-participants (Lloyd 1992, esp. 55-70). In different ways, both may discomfit any of the audience who begin by thinking the moral issue an easy one. Yet both fail to make the most of the rhetorical possibilities. Clytemnestra of course dwells on the killing of Iphigenia, giving a nasty turn to the notion of Agamemnon as war-lord by using language appropriate to an enemy: Agamemnon ‘‘carried her away’’ to Aulis, he ‘‘slashed her cheeks’’ (1022-23). She also makes much of Agamemnon’s return with Cassandra - a fair point in suggesting that the wrong was not all on one side, but spoilt by suggesting that this was the motive for Clytemnestra’s own adultery, something that had evidently started long before. She then asks, very reasonably, why her daughter should have had to die for Menelaus’ sake: but instead of asking (as her counterpart in Sophocles’ Electra asks, 539-42) ‘‘why not Menelaus’ own daughter,’’ she goes into a fantastic set of unreal conditions - if Menelaus had been abducted, would I have been right to kill Orestes, and how would Agamemnon have reacted to that (1041-45)? Such hypothetical syllogisms again reflect a feature of real-life oratory (Lloyd 1992, 32-33), and she does have a point; but the comical twist - an abducted male hero - and the over-complication means that it strikes cold (Michelini 1987, 220).
Yet this is no monster of a Clytemnestra. She is quick to allow Electra the chance to speak out in return: that is another way in which the agOn seems odd, for this is not the demonized Clytemnestra we have seen in Electra’s presentation earlier in the play (esp. 60-63, 264-65, 657-58). That demonizing continues in Electra’s own speech, full of bitter invective. Clytemnestra had been beautifying herself for lovers as soon as Agamemnon left, and rejoicing at any bad news that came from Troy (1069-79): it may all be true, but by now we have lost confidence in any Electra narrative. She too turns to a fantastic, unreal picture at the end (1091-93) - why is Aegisthus not the one in exile rather than Orestes, why is he not dead instead of... me - as if Electra’s living death was really on a par with the slaying of Iphigenia. If your killing was just, then it would be just for me and Orestes to kill you too (1093-96) - words with close application to the present, yet this ‘‘senseless chain of vengeance’’ argument would more naturally be deployed against the matricide rather than in its favor. Nor is it clear what the audience would make of Clytemnestra’s swiftness to relent once the speech is over. At the point where an agOn would normally become an exchange of one-line insults (Kubo 1967, 27), she instead admits that she is not so very proud of what she has done (1105-6). ‘‘Some children prefer their fathers, some their mothers,’’ she says - an uncomfortable casualizing of what is at stake, given extra point by memories of a culminating moment of the Oresteia (Athena’s proclaiming that she is ‘‘wholly the father’s’’ at Eumenides 738). Aeschylus is trivialized; the normal rhythm of an agoOn is lost; the demonized queen is quite human after all; every direction the plot has taken has faltered - and yet the killing will happen anyway. Everything and everyone is out of kilter. And shortly we will see some divine characters too, the Dioscuri, who seem equally uncomfortable with the divine actions they have to explain.
So in this play - and Orestes is here similar (Zeitlin 1980) - ‘‘performance’’ of all sorts of roles and tasks is anything but morally straightforward. The audience’s awareness of myth and of Aeschylus underlines the mismatch between those expectations and how it all now seems on stage; and the mismatch of the rhetoric to the situation goes closely with all those other mismatches.
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