Sophocles: ‘Electra’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says that Electra is the play that gives Sophocles critical readers the most trouble. 

The heroine, however much we may pity her, whatever her character may have been capable of, has become a harsh, unlovely woman, a credit to her own mother, as she herself says (v. 609). 

 

Electra is indeed her mother’s daughter. Her mother, Queen Clytemnestra, murdered her husband, Agamemnon. Electra seeks vengeance against her own mother for killing her father.

Kitto says we modern readers tend to trip over two words. First, theos is usually translated “god,” but we think that a god must be benevolent. The Greeks reckoned Ares as a god. We think of war perhaps as a force, and not a benevolent one.

Second, dike usually is translated “justice,” but it also has a primitive sense of “the way” or “the right way.” To the Greeks, “justice” could mean putting things back in balance, and that’s not necessarily a benevolent process. A damaging flood can relieve a drought. Although the flood restores the balance of nature, it might be a tragedy for people.

In Aeschylus, Electra’s brother Orestes is commanded by the god Apollo to kill his mother as a matter of justice.

There’s no such command in Sophocles’ play. In Sophocles, dike is natural. It’s natural that a person of Electra’s character would live for vengeance. It’s just a law of nature. Violence produces violent reactions.

There’s much beautiful poetry in Electra. These lines, spoken by Electra, get to Sophocles’ theme:

   

Terrors compelled me,

to terrors I was driven.

I know it, I know my own spirit.

 

Evil is all around me, evil

is what I am compelled to practice.

 

The hate you feel for me and what you do

compel me against my will to act as I do.

For ugly deeds are taught by ugly deeds.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Electra is on pp. 135-42. The quotation is on p. 135.

Electra, translated by David Grene, is in Sophocles II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 121-87. The quotations are on pp. 134, 137 and 149.