14. Plutarch (_Lys._ 15) says that, when Athens had surrendered to Lysander (404 B.C.) and when the fate of the city was doubtful, a Phocian officer happened to sing at a banquet of the leaders the first song of the chorus in the Electra of Euripides--
[Greek: Agamemnonos ô kora, êlython, Êlektra, poti san agroteran aulan],
and that "when they heard it, all were touched, so that it seemed a cruel deed to destroy for ever the city so famous once, the mother of such men." The character of the _Electra_, in metre and in diction, seems to show that it belongs to the poet's latest years. If Müller were right in referring to the Sicilian expedition the closing passage in which the Dioscuri declare that they haste "to the Sicilian sea, to save ships upon the deep" (v. 1347), then the play could not be later than 413 B.C. But it may with more probability be placed shortly before the _Orestes_, which in some respects it much resembles: perhaps in or about the year 410 B.C. No play of Euripides has been more severely criticized. The reason is evident. The _Choephori_ of Aeschylus and the _Electra_ of Sophocles appear to invite a direct comparison with this drama. But, as R.C. Jebb suggested,[3] such criticism as that of Schlegel should remember that works of art are proper subjects of direct comparison only when the theories of art which they represent have a common basis. It is surely unmeaning to contrast the elaborate homeliness of the Euripidean _Electra_ with the severe grandeur of its rivals. Aeschylus and Sophocles, as different exponents of an artistic conception which is fundamentally the same, may be profitably compared; Euripides interprets another conception, and must be tried by other principles. His _Electra_ is, in truth, a daring experiment--daring, because the theme is one which the elder school had made peculiarly its own.
15. The _Orestes_, acted in 408, bears the mark of the age in the prominence which Euripides gives to the assembly of Argos--which has to decide the fate of Orestes and Electra--and to rhetorical pleading. The plot proceeds with sufficient clearness to the point at which Orestes and Electra have been condemned to death. But the later portion of the play, containing the intrigues for their rescue and the final achievement of their deliverance, is both too involved and too inconsequent for a really tragic effect. Just as in the _Electra_, the heroic persons of the drama are reduced to the level of commonplace. There is not a little which borders on the ludicrous, and it can be seen how easy would have been the passage from such tragedy as this to the restrained parody in which the Middle Comedy delighted. It is, however, inconceivable that, as some have supposed, the _Orestes_ can have been a deliberate compromise between tragedy and farce. It cannot have been meant to be played, as a fourth piece, instead of a regular satyric drama. Rather it indicates the level to which the heroic tragedy itself had descended under the treatment of a school which was at least logical. The celebrity of the play in the ancient world--as Paley observes, there are more ancient quotations from the _Orestes_ than from all the extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles together--is perhaps partly explained by the unusually frequent combination in this piece of striking sentiment with effective situation.