Byron, in "Childe Harold," Canto IV., alludes to the story of
Orestes:
"O thou who never yet of human wrong
Left the unbalanced scale, great Nemesis!
Thou who didst call the Furies from the abyss,
And round Orestes bade them howl and hiss,
For that unnatural retribution,--just,
Had it but been from hands less near,--in this,
Thy former realm, I call thee from the dust!"
One of the most pathetic scenes in the ancient drama is that in
which Sophocles represents the meeting of Orestes and Electra, on
his return from Phocis. Orestes, mistaking Electra for one of the
domestics, and desirous of keeping his arrival a secret till the
hour of vengeance should arrive, produces the urn in which his
ashes are supposed to rest. Electra, believing him to be really
dead, takes the urn and, embracing it, pours forth her grief in
language full of tenderness and despair.
Milton, in one of his sonnets, says:
"... The repeated air
Of sad Electra's poet had the power
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare."
This alludes to the story that when, on one occasion, the city of
Athens was at the mercy of her Spartan foes, and it was proposed
to destroy it, the thought was rejected upon the accidental
quotation, by some one, of a chorus of Euripides.
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