Electra (Sophocles play)

This article is about the play by Sophocles. For other uses, see Electra (disambiguation).

Electra
Electra and Orestes by Alfred Church
Written by	Sophocles
Chorus	Women of Mycenae
Characters	Orestes Electra Chrysothemis old man Clytemnestra Aegisthus
Mute	Pylades handmaid attendants
Place premiered	City Dionysia
Original language	Ancient Greek
Genre	Tragedy
Setting	Mycenae, before the palace of the Pelopidae

Electra or Elektra (Ancient Greek: Ἠλέκτρα, Ēlektra) is a Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Its date is not known, but various stylistic similarities with the Philoctetes (409 BC) and the Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC) lead scholars to suppose that it was written towards the end of Sophocles' career.

Set in the city of Argos a few years after the Trojan war, it recounts the tale of Electra and the vengeance that she and her brother Orestes take on their mother Clytemnestra and step father Aegisthus for the murder of their father, Agamemnon.

Background

When King Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War with his new concubine, Cassandra, his wife Clytemnestra (who has taken Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus as a lover) kills them. Clytemnestra believes the murder was justified, since Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia before the war, as commanded by the gods. Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, rescued her younger brother Orestes from her mother by sending him to Strophius of Phocis. The play begins years later when Orestes has returned as a grown man with a plot for revenge, as well as to claim the throne.

Storyline

Orestes arrives with his friend Pylades, son of Strophius, and a pedagogue, i.e. tutor (an old attendant of Orestes, who took him from Electra to Strophius). Their plan is to have the tutor announce that Orestes has died in a chariot accident, and that two men (really Orestes and Pylades) are arriving shortly to deliver an urn with his remains. Meanwhile, Electra continues to mourn the death of her father Agamemnon, holding her mother Clytemnestra responsible for his murder. When Electra is told of the death of Orestes her grief is doubled, but is to be short-lived.

After a choral ode Orestes arrives, carrying the urn supposedly containing his ashes. He does not recognize Electra, nor she him. He gives her the urn and she delivers a moving lament over it, unaware that her brother is in fact standing alive next to her. Now realizing the truth, Orestes reveals his identity to his emotional sister. She is overjoyed that he is alive, but in their excitement they nearly reveal his identity, and the tutor comes out from the palace to urge them on. Orestes and Pylades enter the house and slay Clytemnestra. As Aegisthus returns home, they quickly put her corpse under a sheet and present it to him as the body of Orestes. He lifts the veil to discover who it really is, and Orestes then reveals himself. They escort Aegisthus off set to be killed at the hearth, the same location Agamemnon was slain. The play ends here, before the death of Aegisthus is announced.

Similar works

The story of Orestes' revenge was a popular subject in Greek tragedies.

• There are surviving versions by all three of the great Athenian tragedians:
  • The Libation Bearers (458 BC), in the Oresteia Trilogy by Aeschylus
  • Electra (Euripides play), a play by Euripides, probably in the mid 410s BC, likely before 413 BC, that tells a very different version of this same basic story from Sophocles'
  • Electra (Sophocles play)
• The story was also told at the end of the lost epic Nostoi (also known as Returns or Returns of the Greeks)
• The events are also brought up in Homer's Odyssey

Reception

L.A. Post argued that Electra was "unique among Greek tragedies for its emphasis on action."

Commentaries

• Davies, Gilbert Austin, 1908 (abridged from the larger edition of Richard Claverhouse Jebb)

Translations

• Lewis Campbell, 1883 - verse
• Richard C. Jebb, 1904 - prose: full text
• Francis Storr, 1912 - verse
• Francis Fergusson, 1938 - verse
• E.F. Watling 1953 - prose
• David Grene, 1957 - verse
• H. D. F. Kitto, 1962 - verse
• J. H. Kells, 1973 - verse (?)
• Frank McGuinness, 1997 - verse
• Henry Taylor, 1998 - verse
• Anne Carson, 2001 - verse
• Jenny March, 2001 - prose (acting edition)
• Tom McGrath, 2003 - prose; full text
• M. MacDonald and J. M. Walton, 2004 - verse
• G. Theodoridis, 2006 - prose: full title
• Eric Dugdale, 2008 - verse (acting edition)
• Timberlake Wertenbaker, 2009
• Nick Payne, 2011

Adaptations

• Elektra (play), a 1903 adaptation by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• Elektra, Op. 58 (opera), a 1909 one-act opera by Richard Strauss
• Elektra (2010 film), a 2010 Malayalam psychological drama film co-written and directed by Shyamaprasad

External links

• Works related to Electra at Wikisource
•  Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Ἠλέκτρα
• Electra public domain audiobook at LibriVox