Greek Drama · Part 7 · Sophocles · B1–B2
Sophocles: Electra
Part 7 of Greek Drama: years after her father Agamemnon was murdered, Electra still mourns him every day at the palace gate, waiting for her brother Orestes to come home. Then a stranger arrives with news that Orestes is dead, and another stranger brings an urn of his ashes. It is the most famous recognition scene in Greek drama. The past perfect and the past perfect continuous (had been waiting for years), it turned out that, and the language of grief, hope and recognition, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
You remember the murder of Agamemnon. His son Orestes was sent away as a child, and his daughter Electra stayed in the palace with the murderers, her own mother and her mother’s lover. Every day for years she has mourned her father aloud, and waited for her brother to come back.
Waiting all those years? She must have nearly given up.
Nearly, Demetria. And then she is told he is dead, and a young man puts his ashes in her hands. Sophocles builds one of the most moving scenes in all of drama around that urn. Tonight we use the grammar of long waiting and sudden discovery.
All three great tragedians wrote about Electra; Aeschylus in The Libation Bearers, Euripides in his own Electra, and Sophocles in this play, which makes her the central character. She has been living for years as a servant in her father’s palace, mourning him publicly and insulting his murderers, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Her gentler sister Chrysothemis tells her she should accept the situation and stay safe.
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