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Sophocles' Electra deals with the same episode as Euripides’ Electra & Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers - the return of Orestes & the vengeance the siblings take against their mother for the murder of their father. Aeschylus seemed to uphold the matricide as just, while Euripides seemed to condemn it; Sophocles’ stance is much more ambiguous. The play ends with the deaths of Clytemnestra & Aegisthus. We do not see what happens afterwards, nor are we told what the consequences will be - will Orestes be restored as the rightful king? Live happily with his sister? Will he be driven into exile? Pursued by the furies? Condemned by the people? There is no resolutory trial scene as there is in Aeschylus, and no deus ex machina to fill in the details for us, as there is in Euripides. We can either take the play at face value, assuming a happy ending for Orestes & Electra now that the bad guys have been defeated. Or we can take an ironic and bleaker reading of the play (and Sophocles is noted for his tragic irony), one in which Orestes’ & Electra’s own eye-for-an-eye ideal of justice will lead them directly to being the next victims in the cycle of vengeance; by sealing Clytemnestra’s & Aegisthus’ fate they have sealed their own. In his introduction to this volume, Raeburn comments: ‘of the three dramatic treatments of the Orestes myth, this one is arguably not the cheerfullest but the most unrelentingly grim ... while the play’s action appears to show Orestes & Electra finally triumphing over their foes, the tragedy is that, by a hideous irony, they themselves are destroyed morally as the drama progresses ... the view, then, that regards Sophocles as shelving the moral aspect of revenge in the Orestes story misses the depth & subtle irony of this disturbingly powerful tragedy’. What do you think?
We read Sophocles' Electra as part of the Greek tragedy read-along in July 2020.
