P. 43, l. 652, New-mothered of a Man-Child.]--Her true Man-Child, the Avenger whom they had sought to rob her of! This pitiless plan was suggested apparently by the sacrifice to the Nymphs (p. 40). "Weep my babe's low station" is of course ironical. The babe would set a seal on Electra's degradation to the peasant class, and so end the blood-feud, as far as she was concerned. Clytemnestra, longing for peace, must rejoice in Electra's degradation. Yet she has motherly feelings too, and in fact hardly knows what to think or do till she can consult Aegisthus (p. 71). Electra, it would seem, actually calculates upon these feelings, while despising them.
P. 45, l. 669, If but some man will guide me.]--A suggestion of the irresolution or melancholia that beset Orestes afterwards, alternating with furious action. (Cf. Aeschylus' _Libation-Bearers_, Euripides' _Andromache_ and _Orestes_.)
P. 45, l. 671, Zeus of my sires, &c]--In this invocation, short and comparatively unmoving, one can see perhaps an effect of Aeschylus' play. In the _Libation-Bearers_ the invocation of Agamemnon comprises 200 lines of extraordinarily eloquent poetry.
P. 47 ff., ll. 699 ff.]--The Golden Lamb. The theft of the Golden Lamb is treated as a story of the First Sin, after which all the world was changed and became the poor place that it now is. It was at least the First Sin in the blood-feud of this drama.
The story is not explicitly told. Apparently the magic lamb was brought by Pan from the gods, and given to Atreus as a special grace and a sign that he was the true king. His younger brother, Thyestes, helped by Atreus' wife, stole it and claimed to be king himself. So good was turned into evil, and love into hatred, and the stars shaken in their courses.
[It is rather curious that the Lamb should have such a special effect upon the heavens and the weather. It is the same in Plato (_Polit._ 268 ff.), and more definitely so in the treatise _De Astrologia,_ attributed to Lucian, which says that the Golden Lamb is the constellation Aries, "The Ram." Hugo Winckler (_Weltanschauung des alten Orients_, pp. 30, 31) suggests that the story is a piece of Babylonian astronomy misunderstood. It seems that the vernal equinox, which is now moving from the Ram into the Fish, was in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. moving from the Bull into the Ram. Now the Bull, Marduk, was the special god of Babylon, and the time when he yielded his place to the Ram was also, as a matter of fact, the time of the decline of Babylon. The gradual advance of the Ram not only upset the calendar, and made all the seasons wrong; but seemed, since it coincided with the fall of the Great City, to upset the world in general! Of course Euripides would know nothing of this. He was apparently attracted to the Golden Lamb merely by the quaint beauty of the story.]