Still the last feature (4) directs our attention to the remaining tragedy in the group, Orestes, which is different from the others, not so much because it lacks anagnorisis, but because only in this tragedy the god's command reverses the course of the action and finishes the play with reconciliation between irreconcilable enemies. In the preceding plays the expected happy ending for the protagonists is almost completed before the deus arrives, though, seemingly, narrow disasters threaten to occur. What is left for the deus to do is just to reassure the required ending with a corrective touch.(34) In Orestes, on the contrary, there can never be any possible solution for the enmity that becomes aggravated as the protagonists confront each other with incompatible claims and desires. Nevertheless, or therefore, a deus is needed with a drastic remedy to address a dangerous crisis. Only in Orestes the god's intervention alters the outcome of the plot.
The play is about the various difficulties for Orestes and Electra after the matricide (Orestes' illness and derangement by the Furies' attack (306), their supplication frustrated (382-724) and pleading at the City Assembly rejected (866-956) and so on) and the action proceeds through the conflict between them and Menelaus their uncle. The tragic atmosphere which existed around the frenzied Orestes in the early scenes is blended, before we notice it, puzzled and entertained by the unpredictability of the characters and action, with somewhat comic tones helped by the action of dizzying rapidity (726, 799, 1492, 1503), until in the Phrygian's scene near the end, where the miraculous disappearance of Helen is reported, the barbarian slave in a high-pitched voice narrates in decorative and verbose sentences about the climactic moment and with his wit and intelligence talks Orestes the Prince down (1506-26). The disdained, but witty Phrygian is not unlike a fool in modern drama and the vulgarization of the hero is an obvious feature of comedy.(35) The last scene reveals that for such an anarchic course of events, with political, social, moral and religious frictions between opposing parties multiplied to the extreme, no real settlement seems possible. Orestes is seen threatening to kill Menelaus' daughter and to set the Palace of Argos on fire, and Menelaus, on the other side, prepared with his army to storm the building on which Orestes now stands.
To such a deadlock termination can be given only by a forceful intervention by the god who enables anything to take place, bizarre or great. And that is what Apollo does. Carrying Helen in his arms to be deified soon as a guardian goddess for sailors, Apollo arrives just in time to prevent catastrophe to occur, prohibits Orestes from violence and commands him to marry Menelaus' daughter (1627-59). The god also commands Menelaus to stop, leave Argos for Orestes to rule and return to Sparta to be remarried and rule there (1660-65). Both Orestes and Menelaus obey him willingly. Peace is made between the deadliest enemies. This is an impossible ending in tragedy. Such complete negation or overturn of a prior situation seems as absurd and unacceptable in tragedy as it would look amusing and exhilarating in comedy.(36) To borrow Aristotle's remark made on the general tendency of comedy's end (1453a37-8), the most bitter enemies, uncle and nephew, quit the stage as friends.
And Apollo in Orestes brings about another reconciliation most unlikely in tragedy, that of god and man. In fact, it was Apollo who reduced Orestes to a victim of horrible crime and sickness by commanding him to kill his own mother (line 31). After Orestes went through the unprecedented agony of matricide(1-315),and ensuing hardships, all deriving from the preposterous oracle (274, 416, 595ff), it is only because Apollo is a god that he can write off his relationship with the mortal being. In his reply to Apollo's beneficent offer of a hopeful future Orestes betrays a moment's distrust, "A fear occurred to me that I merely think to hear your voice, when I actually hear some resentful gods" (1669). His words can be understood as the bitterest irony, which can be cast against a god by a human being who has managed to survive the most extraordinary cruelties ever afflicted on mortals. Nevertheless, even though the words sound exceedingly sarcastic, they are promptly defaced by his last words, "I reconcile with your oracle, too, Loxias" (1681), a statement implausible and disillusioning in tragedy but relieving and delightful in comedy. For reconciliation means a happy ending,and, as it seems to me, people like a comedy to end happily. When a comedy approaches its end, the audience expects or strongly wishes the story to end happily. They do not want the fun of comedy they have enjoyed to be ruined. Yet knowing that things are not so simple in human life or that a happy conclusion is possible only in fiction, they no longer take too seriously what the conclusion of the story will be like. They are less interested in the reality of a happy conclusion than in the manner in which the playwright ends the play. Actually happy endings in the theatre do not impress us as true, but as desirable.
Later comedy writers no longer had the gracious and almighty figure to bring about this desirable end. Yet they could exploit the function, which Euripides' Deus ex Machina left behind, that of producing all-embracing reconciliations, single-handed. In place of the machine-suspended gods giving gratuitous reconciliations, and mortals on the ground in awe and amazement accepting and obeying commanding power, we see in later comedies an angry father suddenly repenting of his stubbornness and a heartless master somehow returning to his generosity, all shaping a gratifying manner of ending a comedy.(37)
