Electra and Other Plays

alternate cover for 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.