The Character of Orestes in Sophocles’ Electra

“Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless and the spirit of brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life. Woodrow Wilson on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War I” (Burns 441).

There is plentiful evidence that Athens in the late fifth century was witness to an emergence of a new generation of young men with a ruthless passion for the war.⁸ In Euripides’ Suppliants, produced anytime between 427-417, Theseus makes an obvious reference to current Athenian politics when he charges the with having a reckless lust for war (231-7):

You destroyed the state when you were led by young men [] who delight in being honored and who multiply wars without justice. They are destroyers of the city. One wants to be the general, another wants to abuse the power which he acquired, and still another who for the sake of gain doesn’t care at all whether he harms the people.

In the Peloponnesian War, Nicias tries to discredit Alcibiades during the debate by referring to his youth, appealing to the older men in the Assembly not to be intimidated by the young men around them (6.12-13). For what it is worth, Plutarch (Nicias 11.3) writes that the Sicilian debate was a contest between the young war enthusiasts and the older members of the peace party: “To sum it up, it was a debate between the young war-makers against the older peace-makers, one group supporting Nicias, the other supporting Alcibiades.”

Just as revealing of this new “war youth” are the events before and during the Oligarchic Coup in 411.⁹ After the destruction of the Sicilian expedition in 413, the Athenians created the board of the to direct the affairs of the city. The only two members certainly known to have served on the board were the playwright Sophocles and Hagnon, a son of Pericles.¹⁰ Both men were well-off, respected, and, perhaps their most important qualification, advanced in years. Hagnon was more than sixty at the time, and Sophocles was certainly more than eighty. Thucydides also reports that the majority of the members of the board, if not all of them, were chosen from among the of the city (8.1.3). Kagan says this indicates a conscious effort to prevent the young from having any more political influence: “It is revealing of the state of Athenian politics that the Athenians believed they must seek such qualities in an earlier generation, that men in their prime could not be found or trusted to provide it” (7). Later, during the Oligarchic Coup, a commission of thirty was set up to investigate the ancestral constitution and to draft a program for revising and purging Athens of its perceived democratic excesses. The original ten were among the thirty, and once again all thirty of the were older men (A.P. 29.1,3). The oligarchs relied on the young men whenever there was any “rough work” () to be done (Thu. 8.69.4), and when the the Four Hundred appeared in the Assembly to take the places of the duly-empowered Assemblymen, they were accompanied by a gang of one-hundred twenty young men, the so-called “Hellenic Youth,” armed with daggers (Thu. 8.66).

These young men engaged in nothing less than a terrorist campaign against the moderates in the city, ¹¹ encouraging their flight from active involvement in the city and into (“detachment”; “serenity”). These “quiet Athenians,” as Carter called them, extolled the virtues of in direct contradiction to Pericles’ democratic ideal of the man of public affairs. But it was among the young men, especially among the young aristocrats who were being exposed to some of the more extreme teachings of the sophists, that this emerging “war youth” first appeared. This is not to say, obviously, that sophistic education created the disposition to violence, but it was an undeniable co-factor in the way these young men perceived the world.¹²