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Sophocles: Electra, Doom or Triumph?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
The return of Orestes to avenge his father's death was good material for tragedy since it provided at any rate the possibility of a tragic dilemma. Thus in the Oresteia Orestes cannot deny the duty to avenge his father, a duty imposed by public opinion and divine command; but he cannot do this without killing his mother, an act that involves pollution and is also repugnant to the deepest instincts. In mythological terms he will inevitably be pursued either by the Erinyes of his father or by those of his mother. Aeschylus stresses the divine command, repeated at a crucial moment when Pylades breaks silence at Cho. 900, and presents Orestes as essentially guiltless, caught in a tragic dilemma, and eventually after much suffering purified and absolved. In Euripides the divine command is still there, though its validity is questioned both before and after the matricide, and Orestes is still faced with a dilemma, though he and Electra (who now becomes much more prominent) are presented in a less sympathetic light; in the main part of the play Euripides clearly invites us to condemn their action, and it is only in the epilogue that the mitigating circumstance of Apollo's command is emphasized and ultimate acquittal on Aeschylean lines is foreshadowed. In Sophocles the killing of Clytemnestra is approved even if not expressly commanded by Apollo, and it is not surprising that Orestes should be presented as justified. What has surprised many critics is that the dilemma seems to have disappeared: Orestes never has any doubts or qualms, nor indeed has anybody else in the play, and some have felt that this leaves Sophocles open to the charge of ‘moral obtuseness’. In 1927 J. T. Sheppard came to the rescue with an article entitled ‘In Defence of Sophocles’ (CR 41 (1927), 2–9) containing a new interpretation, which has now been revived and persuasively argued by J. H. Kells in his valuable edition of the play (Cambridge, 1973). Briefly it is that Sophocles is actually condemning the act of matricide quite as strongly as Euripides, not as explicitly but rather by means of ‘a series of subtle but forceful dramatic touches’, and that the play is ‘a continuous exercise in dramatic irony’. By this means Sophocles is inviting his audience not of course to condone the crime of Clytemnestra, but to condemn Orestes and Electra as murderers, and to see Electra, before the killing of her mother, as overwrought to the point of mental derangement and delusion, but ‘like many mad people hard-headed and cunning in achieving her ends’.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1978
References
NOTES
1. Quotations are from Kells's Introduction.
2. A date about 413 B.c. is now fairly widely accepted for Sophocles' Electro.
3. Jebb, R. C., Electra, Introduction p. xlii.Google Scholar
4. Odyssey 1. 298–300Google Scholar. In Homer Clytemnestra is less prominent and it is not clear what part she took in killing Agamemnon or whether she was killed by Orestes; see 3. 306–10; 4.515–35; 11.404–34. In the Oresteia of Stesichorus it seems that Orestes was pursued by Furies.
5. Selectivity may be misleading, but any reader of this paper will naturally consult Kells's edition before coming to a conclusion.
6. See Hdt. 1. 157–9 ; 6. 86; Xen. An. 3.1.6.
7. e.g. in Eur. Ion, where Creusa repeats several times a misleading account of the fate of her child, but the audience have heard the truth from Hermes in the prologue.
8. See 115 ff., 162–3, 209 ff., 245–50, 475 ff., 1042, 1382–3, 1395–6.
9. Accepting with most editors Erfurdt's correction of the MS. λέγειν.
10. Kitto, H. D. F., Greek Tragedy (London, 3rd edition 1961), pp. 130–1.Google Scholar
11. Cf. Pind. P. 11. 17Google Scholar, τὸν δὴ [Ὀρέστην] Κλυτ
ήστρας χειρῶν ὕпο κρατερᾱν… τροφὸς ἄνελε.
12. In the Electra of Euripides Clytemnestra does give some practical expression to maternal feeling for Electra (650–5, 1123–33), and since the success of the killing depends on taking advantage of this feeling, Euripides makes it appear more revolting.
13. пάτερ is used in Homer as a respectful form of address to an older person, as in Od. 7.28, and in comedy, as in Ar. Eq. 725Google Scholar. I know no example in tragedy, but in Eur. Ion the old retainer repeatedly addresses Creusa as θύγατερή.
14. Euripides' play should probably be dated about 420–418 B.c.; see Dale, A. M., Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 227–8.Google Scholar
15. CR 41 (1927), 50–52Google Scholar; Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 177–9Google Scholar; the title of this paper is taken from Waldock's chapter heading, but this does not, of course, imply agreement with all his views.
16. Aes. Cho. 899Google Scholar; Eur. El. 969.Google Scholar
17. Introduction to Sophocles (Oxford 1936), p. 83.Google Scholar
18. Sophocle, , Poète tragique (Paris, 1969), p. 209.Google Scholar
19. Dale, who regards Electra as a truly tragic figure, writing with reference to a notable modern performance concedes that ‘admittedly Mme Paxinou might be capable of overlaying the proper significance of the drama by the sheer power of her acting’ (Collected Papers, p. 221).Google Scholar
20. Class, et Med. 25 (1964), 8 ff.Google Scholar
21. The quarrel scene (516–633) is clearly intended to be typical of many such scenes; cf. 520, 524, 556–7, 603.
22. Op. cit., p. 221.
23. Class, et Med. 27 (1966), p. 79 ffGoogle Scholar. This paper is a detailed reply to Johansen, and generally speaking seems to me to be convincing.
24. See Dover, K. J., Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford, 1974), pp. 180–4Google Scholar. On this and other matters much of the evidence is from the fourth century but presumably popular morality was much the same in the fifth.
25. Aristotle, , Poetics 1451a12–15Google Scholar; 1453a 12–15. Indeed Aristotle might have classified the plot of Electra as διпλ
σύστασις, which he condemns as providing the appropriate pleasure of comedy rather than tragedy (1453a 30–6); but the οίκεία ἡδονή of tragedy can be enjoyed in more ways than Aristotle recognized in the Poetics.
26. A paraphrase of Schlegel's description, approved by Waldock, , op. cit., p. 174 n. 1.Google Scholar