THE ELECTRA. OF EURIPIDES.
The Electra of Euripides. Translated by Gilbert Murray, LL.D. (George Allen. 2s. net.)—We are glad to have another of these admirable translations. Never has a great poet had better justice done to him than the "most tragic" of Greek dramatists has had at the hands of Dr. Murray. A gift of sympathy and a quite unusual mastery of poetical expression—it is needless to specify the power of interpreting the original—combine to make these Euripidean translations an epoch in classical study. Here is the passage where Electra bewails her lot. She is alone in Argos :— "No portion bath my life
'Mid wives of Argos, being no true wife.
No portion where the maidens throng to praise Castor—my Castor, whom in ancient days, Ere he passed from us and men worshipped him,
They named my bridegroom l— And she, she! . . . The grim
Troy spoils gleam round her throne, and by each hand
Queens of the East, my father's prisoners, stand,
A cloud of Orient webs and tangling gold.
And there upon the floor, the blood, the old Black blood, yet crawls and cankers, like a rot In the stone I And on our father's chariot The murderer's foot stands glorying, and the red False hand uplifts that ancient staff, that led The armies of the world ! . . . Aye, tell hint how The grave of Agamemnon, even now, Lacketh the common honour of the dead ; A desert barrow, where no tears are shed, No tresses hung, no gift, no myrtle spray. And when the wine is in hint, so men say, Our mother's mighty master leaps thereon. Spurning the slab, or pelteth stone on stone, Flouting the lone dead and the twain that hve e
'WherelithysonOrestesP Doth he give
Thy tomb good tendance ? Or is all forgot ? '
So is he scorned because he cometh not." The original has twenty-one lines, so that the proportion, reckon- ing the Greek lines as six against the English five, has been carefully preserved.
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