Electra and Other Plays

alternate cover for ISBN: 0140446680
Euripides, wrote Aristotle, ‘is the most intensely tragic of all the poets’. In his questioning attitude to traditional pieties, disconcerting shifts of sympathy, disturbingly eloquent evil characters & acute insight into destructive passion, he’s also the most strikingly modern of ancient authors. Written in the period of 426-415, during the fierce struggle for supremacy between Athens & Sparta, these five plays are haunted by the horrors of war & its particular impact on women. Only the Suppliants, with its extended debate on democracy & monarchy, can be seen as a patriotic piece. The Trojan Women is perhaps the greatest of all anti-war dramas; Andromache shows the ferocious clash between the wife & concubine of Achilles’ son Neoptolemos; while Hecabe reveals how hatred can drive a victim to an appalling act of cruelty. Electra develops & parodies Aeschylus’ treatment of the same story, in which the heroine & her brother Orestes commit matricide to avenge their father Agamemnon. As always, Euripides presents the heroic figures of mythology as recognizable, often very fallible, humans.