The events in Euripides’ play Electra coincide with the plot of Aeschylus’ play, The Libation Bearers, written roughly forty-odd years earlier. It is the story of the return to Argos of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, where he is reunited with his sister, Electra. They both plan revenge against their mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, who now rules Argos with her. The motivation for the killing lies in events that predate the Trojan War. Their father sacrificed their sister, Iphigenia, to appease the goddess, Artemis, who was preventing the Greek fleet from sailing to Troy by denying it wind to launch its ships. As revenge, Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon upon his return from Troy ten years later. For a more detailed account of Aeschylus’ play, you can read my review of The Oresteia, a trilogy of plays by Aeschylus of which The Libation Bearers is second. There is a separate summary of all three plays at the end of the review.

I mention Aeschylus’ play because, to my mind, it is hard to separate it from Euripides’ if we are to appreciate what Euripides is doing with this story. Aeschylus produced his plays at a very different moment in the Classic age of Athens. Aeschylus personally fought in the Persian Wars which would help define fifth century Athens. Greek city states under the leadership of Sparta and Athens had repelled Persian aggression in two separate invasions. The Greek victory was a source of pride, and it helped to cement Athenian influence in the Aegean Sea through a series of treaties and through trade. The Delian League, a defensive alliance formed directly after the Persian defeat, increasingly came under Athenian control.

The point is that the world in which Aeschylus writes his version of Orestes’ and Electra’s story is a very different world in which Euripides produces his. Aeschylus’ society is the product of a triumphant win and burgeoning influence. Euripides’ play is produced under the pressure of a debilitating war. Context affects drama. In our modern world, it would be like comparing John Wayne’s film The Green Berets, shot in 1968 as a pro-war film supported by Lyndon Johnson’s administration, with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, shot just over ten years later. The feelings towards the war after America’s humiliating withdrawal had changed. I might have used earlier films that expressed the optimism of America’s role as an international leader in World War II, like Sergent York (1941), and compare that to later films that focus upon the horrors of war, or that doubt the efficacy of Vietnam, or the role America played in the second Iraq War, or its involvement in Afghanistan. The point is that the fortunes of a country in war affect its self-perception and, in turn, its artistic expression.

By the time Euripides is writing Electra, Athens is at least fifteen years into a destructive war with Sparta which began in 431 BCE, and which would ultimately lead to Athens’ defeat in 404 BCE. It would have been so much harder to write a play that celebrates Athenian democracy or its system of justice at this time. Electra, rather, feels like the product of a community under pressure and plagued by doubt. The crime of Orestes’ revenge in Aeschylus is expurgated by the processes of law. But in Euripides’ play that denouement is foreshadowed only summarily at the end with the appearance of Castor and his brother, Polydeuces, the now semi-divine brothers of Clytemnestra known as the Dioscori, or sons of Zeus, to wrap up what would have been a well-known story for Athenian audiences.

In fact, Euripides seems to overtly signal to his audience a break with Aeschylus in this play: Aeschylus’ broad acceptance of the myth as it was received in the culture as well as the assurance his characters have in their actions. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were vilified while the actions of Orestes and Electra, though troublesome, were righteous. Euripides signals a change in a satirical parody of the recognition scene from The Libation Bearers. The story is that Orestes had been sent away from home while still a child to protect him from Aegisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover, who intended to kill him. Fast forward and Orestes is now a man who has been instructed by the god, Apollo, to seek revenge for his father’s death. Orestes returns to Argos but neither he nor Electra have seen each other since they were very young. In Aeschylus’ play there is a series of signs by which recognition occurs. Electra recognises that a lock of hair left by Orestes on their father’s tomb is very much like her own. A footprint is also thought, somehow, to be like her own. The clincher is when Electra recognises that Orestes is wearing clothing that she personally made many years before. But Euripides will allow none of this. Electra is, in this matter, a rational person: “you’d find many with similar hair, who are not of the same blood”, she tells the old man who speaks of the signs. Of the evidence of the footprint, she questions how a footprint would be made in rocky ground (a dig at a lack of realism in Aeschylus’, surely), and this supposed evidence is also dismissed on the basis of sex: “brother’s and sister’s feet would not be the same size; the weaker sex has smaller feet.” Finally, the material evidence of clothing is equally dismissed. The old man to whom Electra speaks suggests her brother would wear clothing she had made for the specific purpose of recognition. Electra again falls back on a rational response: “Clothes don’t grow larger on the body; he wouldn’t now be wearing the same cloak he had in infancy.” It is up to the old man to point out a recognisable scar on Orestes that he received as a child, which is beyond Aeschylus, to finally make Electra accept her brother’s return. The scene would have been well known by Euripides’ audience, making Eurpides’ treatment of it an obvious signal that he was not going to respect the old master; that he was going to tell them a very different version of the same tale. And he does.

Euripides strips the tale of any nobility, heroism or a sense that what is achieved is justice. Castor might assure Orestes at the end of the play that he will be acquitted with a hung jury, but that does not mean justice has been served to Clytemnestra. Hence, the play is shorn of any pretence of regal splendour. Instead of the palace, the play is set in the countryside at a house owned by Aegisthus. The old man tells Orestes that it’s no use trying to get past the city walls (though Aeschylus’ Orestes does) so it is in this house that Orestes must seek revenge. Aegisthus is holding a festival at his country house where he will honour Nymphs. Unmarried girls will walk in a procession to Hera’s temple, he will sacrifice a bull and ask the gods for protection. Aegisthus is unguarded except by a few slaves, and he welcomes Orestes and Pylades to share his banquet. Aegisthus expresses a sense of vulnerability, well aware that Orestes, should he return, poses a threat. In fact, Aegisthus acts as a good host and is personable. Clytemnestra also fails to be the unrepentant harpy created by Aeschylus. She has been delayed because she fears the harsh words she will receive from her people, presumably, if she should be recognised with Aegisthus. Before she is even onstage, we sense her vulnerability. When she does arrive, Clytemnestra evokes sympathy from the audience and questions the justice of Electra’s judgment of her:

• … I know my tongue
• Is sometimes bitter; that’s because I’m spoken of
• As a bad woman. I agree, one should not speak
• Bitterly. But when people judge someone, they ought
• To learn the facts, and then hate, if they’ve reason to.
• And if they find no reason, then they should not hate.

Clytemnestra then recalls the terrible circumstances of Iphigenia’s sacrifice. She cuts to the reality of the situation, that her daughter died for the sake of the misdeeds of others, while ignoring any pedantry about the wind:

• Helen was a whore, her husband didn’t know how to handle
• A randy wife; and that was Agamemnon’s reason
• For murdering my daughter.

Added to this, she suffered the insult of “the mad prophetess”, Cassandra, who was foisted on Clytemnestra upon Agamemnon’s return as a “second wife”.

Clytemnestra’s situation is so awful that her recount threatens to surpass any sympathy the audience may have developed for Electra. Electra has been married off to an obscure peasant in the country. She speaks of her lost brother and her murdered father, her lowly position and her banishment, and even her determined resolution to have revenge which squares with the details of the traditional story, as an Athenian audience would have known them. But the problem is in the presentation of their two stories. Clytemnestra acknowledges the level of her culpability, is contrite, but presents a succinct reasoned argument about the circumstances in which her actions are taken. Electra, likewise, apprises the audience of her circumstances early in the play, but her speech is full of self-pity and bitterness. The repeated details of her suffering have a cumulative effect and begin to feel fetishistic. She describes her marriage as a living death. She is still a virgin. And she willingly points out the decline in her physical appearance to Orestes before he is known to her: “My face is withered … I’ve cut my hair off.” Though she is married, she lives in a kind of exile which resembles the self-mortification of later Christian saints or anchorites. Her days are full of toil:

• I must sit at the loom and weave
• Cloth for my own dress, or go naked; never a feast
• On holy days, never a dance; I cannot mix
• With wives, myself a virgin…

The more she says the more it sounds like a lot of complaining. She speaks of “my desolate life”. She points out that she is known by the people of Argos as “poor Electra”. We sense they have heard her story. Electra has turned her suffering life into an identity with which she can villainise her mother:

• Meanwhile my mother sits
• Lapped in the spoils of Troy, and Trojan waiting-maids
• My father captured and brought home, stand by her throne,
• Their Phrygian gowns buckled with golden clasps.

Even the waiting-maids live in greater comfort and elegance than the head-shorn Electra, we surmise from her speech. And well they may. But even if we choose to entirely sympathise with Electra’s lot rather than become a little inured to its whining and self-righteousness, we have to recognise that there are two competing theses being advanced by the play: one represented by Electra, the other by her mother. Electra has embraced a harsh ascetic life, and with it she maintains conservative values with inflexible positions, the most extreme of which is a desire for justice in the form of matricide. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, represents a voice of experience who has lived a tragic life. She recounts the injustices done to her succinctly and acknowledges regret:

• I do not,
• In fact, exult unduly over what I did.
• With what insensate fury I drove myself to take
• My grand revenge! How bitterly I regret it now.

Euripides not only turns Clytemnestra into a more compassionate and identifiable character in the audience’s eyes with these words, but her words signal a doubt about the “grand revenge” now planned by her children. This is in stark contrast to the murderous woman presented by Aeschylus. In fact, we may have anticipated this moment, since Orestes has already killed Aegisthus and hidden his body from his mother’s sight. Now, faced with the gravity of his action, he pauses: “Are we going to kill our mother? … How can I take her life? … It is wrong to kill my mother!” Orestes has seen the grave unnaturalness of the act, as distinct from the notion of justice that it entails: “Avenging him I am pure; but killing her, condemned.” This is an insight Clytemnestra has also had. But Electra, when her brother expresses doubts, plays the role of an ancient Greek Lady Macbeth: “Have you grown soft, as soon as you set eyes on her?” She is unswayed by Orestes’ reservations. But neither has she killed.

Electra’s positions are unflinching. She does not understand the psychological harm that revenge entails, a reality her brother now begins to see, or that her mother has long endured. What she understands are roles, and she is determined to play them to the end, unflinchingly. We have already seen with what zeal she plays a martyred housewife: “to keep things pleasant in the home is my task.” Even when her mother arrives, she insists on her status as a slave rather than as a daughter. To do otherwise would be to negate her resolve as a revenger. So, when Clytemnestra asks for help from one of her slaves, Electra insists on performing the function: “I am a slave too, banished from my father’s house to misery.” Electra will not allow Clytemnestra to reconcile her past with her feelings of regret for the crime she committed.

The importance of stringent social roles cannot be understated when it comes to Electra. She has a narrow view of the role of women, and we sense that Clytemnestra’s crime, in her eyes, lies not only with Agamemnon’s murder, but her mother’s failure to conform to strict sexual codes. Of Helen, she says, “she embraced her own corruption”, and Clytemnestra is implicitly like Helen: “You destroyed the life of the most noble man in Hellas,” Electra says. She refuses to believe the murder was carried out to avenge Iphigenia, for this would ennoble her mother’s actions. Instead, she chooses to degrade her mother with a comparison to Helen. For Electra, Clytemnestra is, “A wife who in her husband’s absence will take pains to enhance her beauty”. She is a wife rued the thought of Agamemnon’s return, who took their father’s estate though she was unworthy, and who took a lover to supplant their father.

But Clytemnestra understands the difficult and limited choices afforded women in this society; a society in which they are rarely given agency and are judged by a different standard to men:

• Well, women are frail, I grant you. But when, knowing this,
• A husband looks elsewhere, and slights his lawful wife,
• She’ll copy him, and find herself another friend.
• And then the glare of public censure lights on us;
• The husbands are to blame – but they are not criticised.

Clytemnestra has been an actor in her own life, refusing the yoke of her own sexuality and railing against the crime of her husband, though it has cost her. Electra, on the other hand, has embraced her servitude as a moral weapon with which to cudgel her mother. Orestes may strike the killing blow, but it is Electra who denies her mother any compassion or understanding, and has no insight into the magnitude of what she plans until the deed is finally done:

• I am guilty.
• I was burning with desperate rage against her;
• Yet she was my mother, I her daughter.

It seems like a moment of enlightenment for Electra: the kind of insight Clytemnestra failed to convey to her through her own story. Instead, Electra’s lamentations soon devolve into the kind of self-pity we have already heard:

• What happy company will welcome me
• To a dance or a wedding?
• What man will accept me as his wife?

This last thought is rather strange, since Electra is already married. But it is a measure of Electra’s self-absorption that the suffering life that provided her sense of identity before her mother’s murder may now be cast aside for another suffering identity – presumably she anticipates a life as a wandering Cain figure – with little that is new to distinguish her ruminations and agonies from those that have formerly defined her.

In Euripides’ play the idea of revenge and justice is more problematic than it already was in The Oresteia. It is far harder for the audience to side with the revengers, and all those who achieve their vengeance suffer in turn, not expressed through the mythological torment of the Furies, but a sense of guilt and personal culpability. Although Euripides also wishes to contextualise this culpability, since each character operates within a milieu greater than their understanding. Though this is a realistic play, it is the gods that ultimately provide this wider milieu. The Chorus twice tells stories in the play about the role of heroes and gods in their lives, first about the heroes of Troy, and then about Zeus’ response to Thyestes infidelity with Atreus’ wife. In the first instance, Achilles is the prime example of the great heroes who were sent to their deaths at Troy. Helen, who never appears in this play but whose actions are the benchmark for all that is bad about treacherous women, is addressed as “adulterous” and called the “evil-hearted daughter of Tyndareos”. The chorus anticipates the gods’ reprisal against Helen: “Therefore you too the heavenly gods will send to death.” But in the second story told by the Chorus there is a change. It is the story of King Atreus finding a golden lamb which he gifts to his wife. But Thyestes seduces her and she gives him the lamb, which he uses to claim the throne of Mycenae. The story is that Zeus sends Hermes to tell Atreus to make Thyestes agree to give up the throne if he can make the sun rise in the west and set in the east. Thyestes agrees and Zeus causes the sun to run backwards. Of this story the Chorus is more doubtful. The Chorus no longer anticipates a resolution from the gods, but sees the story merely as a frightening tale which should act as a deterrence. This time, the Chorus addresses Clytemnestra in her absence:

• Had you but remembered tales like these
• As you raised your hand to kill your husband!

Characters in the play are more ambivalent about the gods. The Dioscori may appear at the end to clean up the action, but this is otherwise a realistic play where actions and consequences remain in the human sphere. Yet the gods still have a large part to play in the play’s denouement. The role played by the Dioscori at the end feels a little like a case of deus ex machina: the kind of sweeping resolution first anticipated by the Chorus. For how else does one end a play that leaves its characters bereft of hope and morally compromised? Euripides cannot end with the jubilant exhortation of the Furies, transformed into the kindly Eumenides, as does Aeschylus as the end of his third play. Though Orestes and Electra will now separate forever, Euripides affords them some relief. By Castor’s decree Electra will marry Pylades. But the intercession of the Dioscori does not result in the kind of resolution that Athena and Apollo affect at the end of The Eumenides. In that play they participate in the action of a trial, playing counsel, witness and judge. It is through Athena’s guiding principles that the Furies are brought to heal and the cycle of vengeance finally ended. Euripides gives his divine characters a different role as the play draws to an end. Caster assures Orestes that he will be eventually acquitted and will find some absolution if he follows Castor’s instructions. However, he furthermore tells Orestes, “I lay your guilt on Apollo’s shoulder.” Apollo has been called a “fiend” already by Orestes for the influence he wielded. Now Castor says he led Orestes with an “unwise utterance.” Orestes is therefore morally exonerated of his crime long before he is legally exonerated. But Euripides is not simply overturning the moral focus of the story. Most strange, for example, is the matter of Helen, herself, for whom all this pain has ultimately been endured: a woman Electra has previously said, “by her guilt has brought grief without measure”. Yet, in what feels like a narrative afterthought, almost springing from the heart of the stage machinery, itself, Castor informs them that Helen is also innocent, since, “Zeus sent off to Troy a phantom Helen to stir up strife and slaughter in the human race.” The real Helen has been in Egypt all along, while some demonic effigy has played her role in Troy. Put aside the fact that this sounds a little like a plot twist in a long-running daytime television drama ( he had amnesia for twenty years!). It recalls to mind Lear’s words on the heath: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” This new information expresses a deeply pessimistic understanding of humanity’s lot in a capricious and uncaring universe: Apollo has pushed Orestes into vengeance; Zeus has orchestrated intergenerational bloodletting on a whim.

This leaves a strange feeling at the end of the play. It feels both despairing and uplifting at once. The ease with which Orestes’ culpability is set aside, and by which Electra’s barren life is filled with hope, seems like the stuff of comedy; when all that has been marred has been set to right once more. But vengeance does not sit well as a moral precept, and the violence has been traumatising. This is a play written for a community far less confident of its own fate or the rightness of its own cause. It is a doubtful play that draws upon a well-known myth and responds to a well-known drama.

I think modern audiences may find Clytemnestra more relatable than her daughter, and it seems that Euripides intends this, too. He is said to have been sympathetic to the cause of women, and Clytemnestra is far fairer on her own sex than is her daughter. But there is the other issue, that in a city at war, it is far harder to cling to the certainties that have led to war. The complexities that have led to a conflict are always left to consider at the end of a conflict, while the primary-coloured standards of war lead armies readily into battle at the beginning. This is the difference, I feel, between Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ plays. Aeschylus portrays the terrible events of the Atreus family, plagued by violence and revenge, but in a period in which Athenian power was ascendant. His plays on this subject move towards a denouement that anticipates a bright Athenian future and celebrates its institutions. Euripides’ play, however, represents characters in the middle of a terrible drama they cannot fully comprehend: who, by looking back cannot yet understand their place in a larger picture. So they continue on their path while the audience understands its terribly tragic pointlessness.