Electra

Electra belongs to the mature works of Euripides, though there is no evidence of the exact date the play was composed. Like other works by the mature Euripides, Electra is innovative in its use of myth and in its literary style. Electra was never among Euripides’s more popular plays, however, and has survived only because of its inclusion among Euripides’s “alphabetic plays.” The “alphabetic plays” are nine plays by Euripides whose titles begin with the Greek letters epsilon, eta, iota, and kappa that survive in a fragment of an ancient manuscript that contained all of Euripides’s works in alphabetical order (most manuscripts contained only a selection of the playwright’s works). The survival of Electra is thus a result of pure chance—had the manuscript containing the alphabetic plays been lost, the play would have been lost virtually without a trace.

Despite its apparent lack of popularity in antiquity, Euripides’s Electra is of great interest to scholars today, providing an excellent illustration of the playwright’s powers of innovation. The play opens with a Prologue that is more extended and complex than what was found in a typical Greek tragedy. Most tragic prologues contained a monologue in which one of the characters (or a god) introduced the background of the play and the key points of the plot. Electra does begin with a monologue delivered by the Farmer, but this monologue is soon elevated in a lyric lament sung by Electra before giving way to a more down-to-earth dialogue between the Farmer and Electra, then ending at last with a short speech between Orestes and the silent Pylades (who has no speaking lines in the play). The Prologue of Electra is thus made up of four parts and serves to acquaint us with all the drama’s “heroes” (or, more accurately, anti-heroes).

The characters of Euripides’s Electra are not necessarily what an audience would expect. The Farmer is a newcomer to the myths of the house of Agamemnon, no doubt invented by Euripides. He is painted as a thoroughly honorable figure and calls attention to The Relationship Between Social Status and Honor. The Farmer realizes that his humble social status puts him well below the royal Electra and understands that he was only married to Electra to neutralize her as a threat to Aegisthus; consequently he does not treat the marriage as anything but a sham. Knowing his place and wishing to respect Electra, he does not sleep with her and hardly even touches her: “I would feel ugly taking the daughter of a wealthy man / and violating her. I was not bred to such an honor” (45-46). Throughout the play, the honor of the Farmer (who is unnamed) is contrasted with his lowly social status. The Farmer, though “not dignified by family in the eyes of the world” (381), comports himself honorably and justly—more than can be said for most of the high-born characters of the play.

Indeed, even Electra and Orestes (both of whom praise the Farmer highly) behave with far less honor than he does. Electra, for example, is very harsh toward her mother and does not hesitate to baldly wish for her death. Orestes, on the other hand, comes across as a silvery-tongued hustler, no doubt modeled in part on the contemporary sophists—erudite teachers of rhetoric who charged high fees for their lessons. Orestes certainly counts himself among those “who are educated” (295), and his speech on the difficulty of recognizing people who are truly good bears many of the hallmarks of a sophistic display speech, with the use of rhetorical questions, superficial examination of traditional values, and so on.

There are other elements of these early scenes that may strike audiences and readers as surprising. A fifth-century BCE audience would hardly have expected to see a mythical figure of Electra’s caliber dressed in rags and fetching water, or speaking of how, “I weave my clothes myself and slavelike at the loom / must work or else walk naked through the world in nothing” (307-08). Electra and her humble rustic husband bicker in a familiar and mundane way, discussing their chores, the respective duties of men and women, and the proper way to entertain guests. Though Electra’s marriage is a sham, she nevertheless plays the part of a wife within the home, acknowledging the significance of Familial Relationships and Obligations. At times the characters are almost comical, as when the devious Orestes struggles to understand why the Farmer would behave honorably toward Electra, at last concluding superciliously that what his sister has done is “paint one of nature’s gentlemen” (262).

Also surprising is the Chorus, whose songs sometimes contrast with the events of the play unfolding around them. The first stasimon, which some scholars know as the “Achilles Ode” (432-86), feels barely connected to the plot, which has nothing to do with Achilles, and the imagery of dancing dolphins and divine armor marks a sharp shift from the preceding scene in which Electra rudely sent her husband to fetch the Old Man. Nevertheless, this ode is not completely without connection to the play: The reference to the scene of Perseus’s slaying of the Gorgon shown on Achilles armor, for example, evokes the scene at the end of the play in which Orestes, like Perseus, averts his eyes before he slays his mother.