Electra

Euripides’s Electra is an important case study in the similarities and differences between the three great tragedians of classical Athens and how they approached their mythical subjects. This is because Electra is Euripides’s only surviving play that dramatizes the same myth as surviving plays by both Aeschylus and Sophocles—namely, the myth of Electra’s and Orestes’s revenge on their father’s murderers. Like Euripides’s Electra, Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers and Sophocles’s Electra show Orestes’s return to Argos, his recognition by his sister Electra, and his murder of his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.

The bloody myths of Agamemnon and his family are very old. As early as Homer’s Odyssey, one of the earliest literary works produced by the ancient Greeks, there are references to how the hero Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus after returning home from sacking Troy, and how his son Orestes later avenged him by killing his own mother and Aegisthus. However, Homer never mentioned Orestes’s sister Electra, and in most other early sources for the myth (including the poet Pindar) it was only Orestes’s role in the murder that was emphasized.

With the Athenian tragedians, Electra began to acquire a prominent role in the old story. Aeschylus, the first to dramatize the myth, showed an Electra who had come to hate her mother and her lover for what they had done to her father. In Libation Bearers, Electra is the first to recognize Orestes when he returns in secret to Argos after many years of exile, and she wastes no time in encouraging her brother to avenge their father by killing their mother and her lover. In his Electra, Sophocles gave Electra a more central role: She is at the heart of the action, condemning her mother’s actions in a debate scene and helping her brother lay out his plot to kill her. In Euripides’s play, Electra actually takes an active part in the murder, even holding Orestes’s sword when he suffers a short-lived change of heart.

Though Aeschylus’s dramatic treatment is certainly the oldest (his Libation Bearers, the second play of his Oresteia trilogy, was produced in 458 BCE), scholars still debate whether Sophocles produced his Electra before Euripides or after. Neither play can be securely dated, and both are thought to have been composed between the late 420s and the late 410s BCE. This uncertainty means that we do not know how the plays are related to each other: Did Sophocles influence Euripides, or did Euripides influence Sophocles? Both playwrights were clearly influenced by Aeschylus’s version, to which they allude extensively, especially in the famous recognition scene in which Electra meets Orestes for the first time in years.

Euripides and Sophocles both introduce surprising innovations to their versions: Euripides, for example, has Electra married off to a lowly farmer, while Sophocles says nothing about the Furies’ pursuit of Orestes, which usually follows his murder of his mother in other versions of the myth. The myth remained a popular subject for tragedians, and Euripides himself would treat other episodes from it in his Iphigenia among the Taurians, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis.