Curated works of rarity,
beauty, and cultural importance

Clytemestra’s blood and the Furies: a C5th fragment of Euripides’ Orestes from the opening leaf of an ancient codex

EURIPIDES, Orestes, vv. 1–2 and 36–38. Fragment of the opening folium of an early Byzantine codex, in Ancient Greek, manuscript on vellum. Eastern Mediterranean, probably Byzantium, c.420 AD. 119 × 26 mm.

An exceptionally rare survival from a fifth-century manuscript of Euripides’ Orestes, preserving vestiges of the play’s opening verses together with portions of lines 36–38. These are words spoken by Electra as she watches beside her tormented brother: Orestes lies prostrate after murdering their mother Clytemnestra, pursued by the Eumenides—the Furies who embody the horror of his guilt. Among the surviving words are haima, “blood”, referring to Clytemnestra’s blood, and Eumenidas, the dread goddesses whom Electra shrinks even to name.

The fragment formed part of the codex’s first leaf. Its recto originally contained approximately the first thirty-five lines of the play, beginning with Electra’s bleak declaration: “There is nothing so terrible to describe, no suffering, no god-sent calamity…”. From its reconstructed layout, the complete text of Orestes would have occupied approximately twenty-five leaves.

Written by a professional scribe in a formal round Greek literary hand, the text was subsequently furnished with accents, breathings and punctuation by another early Byzantine reader or readers. These additions reveal that this was not merely a repository of the text but a working scholarly copy, read and studied during late antiquity.

Previously unknown to scholarship and possibly recovered from a later binding, the fragment offers a remarkable physical connection to the transmission of Greek tragedy scarcely eight centuries after Euripides first wrote the play.