Sófocles

I liked Aeschylus's version of this story better, but it also had the context of the whole trilogy. This one...kind of bored me, if I'm honest. While I thought the themes explored by Aeschylus were still applicable today, I didn't have that feeling with Sophocles's play. Maybe it was the translation. Or just the passage of all the years since it was written. But all of Electra's lamenting got on my nerves. And I didn't see what was gained for Orestes to pretend to be dead. And when Electra realized he was alive, she didn't even wonder why he deceived her, or berate him for lying, or have any other believable reaction. Her grief seemed to be solely that he wasn't around to take revenge for their father's death, and her joy likewise, that he was here to kill their mother. She was so eaten up by a desire for revenge that she was almost insane. So I found her not very relatable. I mean, I get that her mother murdered her father, but Clytemnestra had some reason to complain, considering her husband killed their oldest daughter. In this play, no one even mentions poor Iphegenia, who was betrayed and sacrificed. It just felt too one-sided. Aeschylus story was more complex.… (more)

This classic play is an out and out dramatic classic of murder,
incest, self-mutilation and suicide. It is amazing to think that this play was performed nearly 2,500 years ago, five times longer ago than Shakespeare's plays. Put another way, when Jesus was born and lived, this play was as far in the past to people living then as Shakespeare's plays are to us now in 2024. It won second prize in a competition in 429 BC to a play now lost to us written by a nephew of Euripides, one of the other two most prominent Greek tragic writers of the era. What huge influence this and other plays of the era have had on the literature of the past two and a half millennia.… (more)