430 THE GREEK SAGAS: GREEK LOCAL LEGENDS
ORESTES: Ah, how am I to kill her, the one who bore me and nourished me?
ELECTRA: In the same way as she butchered your father and mine.
ORESTES: Oh Phoebus, you prophesied sheer folly....
ELECTRA: Where Apollo is a fool, who are wise?
ORESTES:... you, Phoebus, who told me to kill my mother, a crime which I
should not commit.
ELECTRA: What possible harm is there since you are avenging your own father?
ORESTES: I am guiltless now, but if I do the deed I will be condemned as the
killer of my mother.
ELECTRA: But if you do not avenge your father, you will be impious against god.
ORESTES: The murder of my mother—to whom will I pay the penalty?
ELECTRA: To whom will you pay, if you fail to accomplish vengeance for your
father?
ORESTES: Did some demon, disguised as god, order me to do this?
ELECTRA: A demon sitting on the sacred tripod? I really don't think so.
ORESTES: I cannot be convinced that this divine oracle was right.
ELECTRA: Don't become a coward and a weakling.
ORESTES: Am I to devise the same treachery against her?
ELECTRA: Yes, the same that you used when you killed her husband
Aegisthus.
ORESTES: I will go in and undertake a terrible task. I will do a terrible thing—
if the gods think it is right, so be it. This ordeal is both bitter and sweet for me.
CHORUS: Lady and queen of the land of Argos, daughter of Tyndareus and
sister of the noble twins, the sons of Zeus, who live amid the stars in the fiery
firmament and are honored by mortals as their saviors in storms at sea. Greet-
ings, I give you honor equal to the gods because of your great wealth and blessed
happiness. Now is the right time for your fortunes to be provided for. Hail, O
queen!
CLYTEMNESTRA: Out of the chariot, Trojan women, take my hand and help
me to get down. The temples of the gods are adorned with Trojan spoils, and
for my palace I have taken these chosen women from Troy, a small yet lovely
gift, in exchange for the daughter whom I lost.
ELECTRA: Shouldn't I, mother, take hold of your royal and blessed hand, for
I also am a slave, cast out of my ancestral home and living in a miserable one?
CLYTEMNESTRA: I have these slaves here; don't trouble yourself on my ac-
count.
ELECTRA: Well, am I not just like these women, taken prisoner when my
palace was captured, driven out of the house, left bereft of my father?
CLYTEMNESTRA: Such are the results of actions your father devised against
those whom he should have loved. I will explain. I know that when a reputa-
tion for evil clings to a woman, a bitter sharpness inevitably invests the tone of
her argument. So it is with us, and that is not good. But if, upon learning the
truth, you have a worthy reason to hate, it is right to hate but if not, why should
there be hatred?
Tyndareus gave me to your father and the marriage was not intended to
bring death to him or me or the children whom I bore. Yet that man, Agamem-
non, through the pretext of marriage with Achilles, took my daughter from home