|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Yet it was possible for you to show virtue in a really fine way.
You had a man for a husband no worse than Aegisthus,
A man Greece had chosen as her own general.
Since Helen, your sister, had perpetrated such deeds,
You could have gained great fame. For evil is
An example for good, and attracts men's gaze. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Electra stresses Clytemnestra's inability to show virtue ( ), an archetypal female quality (as she had wished her mother had better sense). For since Helen had so transgressed, Clytemnestra could have won great glory by maintaining the rules of virtue. 'For evil is an example ( for good'. The mutual dependence of the categories 'good' and 'bad', and indeed the paradigmatic status of the bad, its ability to compel attention in the sight of men ( a hapax), goes to the heart of tragedy in the theatre (the place for looking), where the exempla of transgressions have such contested paradigmatic value for the good citizen. Where Plato requires a city to allow only literature that extols the virtues of the good as exemplary and didactic models, Euripides' Electra stresses the necessary display and paradigmatic value of evil by which the glory ( ) of the noble is won. Helen should have been a paradigm for Clytemnestra not to follow but to mark her difference. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Electra here recalls Clytemnestra's own argumentation in fragments. Clytemnestra states the possible reasons for killing Iphigeneia, but concludes (102729): |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
But as things are, it was because Helen was lustful, and because her man
Did not know how to get and punish his treacherous wife,
That he destroyed my child. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The destruction ( ) that Clytemnestra stresses is the sacrifice of Iphigeneia; the cause is first Helen's lewdness, her lustfulness, and second Menelaus' failure to control her. ('The contempt strong women feel for weak men' Denniston. Generalizing from . . . ?) Clytemnestra separates herself (and Aegisthus) from Helen (and Menelaus) and from Agamemnon (and Cassandra). It is in response to this diacritical account that Electra constructs her rhetorical parallelization of her mother and aunt. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Clytemnestra has been reminded earlier by the chorus of her inability to recall suitable models. They respond to the story of the sun's shocked response to Thyestes' consumption of his own children as follows (73746): |
|
|
|
|
|
