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206 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS
comparisons drawn between Electra and Clytemnestra thus serve not
to put them on the same level but to indicate their fundamental ethical
differences, and the false messenger-speech clinches the contrast-and
so, Macleod suggests, has a central function in the play's ethical
scheme-by making an explicit comparison between Clytemnestra's
satisfaction at her own son's death and Electra's grief and her despairing
(but soon to be answered) appeal to Nemesis for the punishment of
Clytemnestra's hybris (E1. 79z, 794). The revenge action, then, is consistently
presented as just, but it remains irreducibly tainted by being also
an act of kin-murder, and more especially of matricide: hence the play's
low-key ending, which celebrates the restoration of the royal house and
of law and order (as Orestes' final words emphasize), but also advertises
the ugliness of the process through Electra's expressions of hatred
for her dying mother and Aegisthus' insistence on the family's selfdestructive
history. The expectations of personal glory which Electra
and Orestes have previously held (he from the whole vengeance process,
she from her "heroic" scheme to kill Aegisthus) have by this point
evaporated.
There are details here with which one might disagree: I am not sure,
for instance, that Electra's rejection of Chrysothemis' evidence for Orestes'
return needs to be attributed to intellectual blindness and connected
with a lack of self-awareness regarding the implications of revenge
(139-40). But Macleod's interpretation is on the whole
persuasive in showing how Electra's conduct, can be understood as both
wrong in normal terms but right as a res onse to the uniquely and
tragically distorted situation in which she finds herself. This interpretation
can usefully be compared with Helene Foley's recent analysis in
anthropological terms (Female Acts in Greek Tragedy [Princeton zoo 1]
145-171), which sees Electra as compelled to transgress in order to fulfil
the expected role of a woman in a vendetta-that is, to pursue it
through words and even to attempt to pursue it through action when
male action can no longer be expected. Bot interpretations rightly see
the playas commenting on the problems of achieving justice in a society
where communal justice either does not exist or has failed; and as Foley
says (170), the play may well have been in part a response to contemporary
political disruptions at Athens and els where. This only increases
one's regret that we can do so little to relate Sophocles' works precisely
to the context of political events and political thought within which they
were composed.
MARTIN CROPP
DEPARTMENT OF GREEK AND ROMAN STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
CALGARY, AB TzN IN4