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The ‘Electra’ of Sophocles: prolegomena to an interpretation1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
Extract
The play has given rise to diverse interpretations. The greatest divergence of opinion is about the attitude of Sophocles to the matricidal vengeance. At one extreme we have a robust Homeric Sophocles, untroubled by the squeamishness of Aeschylus; at the other, an Aeschylean sensitiveness to the moral implications of the vengeance and a presumption that the Furies are only waiting for the play to end to begin their pursuit of Orestes. Adherents of the former view can point to certain epic features which Sophocles has introduced, but the constant reminiscences of the Oresteia are far more striking. This paper assumes (what will be in part substantiated) that Sophocles wrote with the Oresteia constantly in mind and expected the better-educated among his audience to be reminded of it. It will be concerned particularly with the Sophoclean treatment of the Furies and will suggest that this is of fundamental importance to the interpretation of the play.
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- Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1955
References
page 20 note 2 Cf. Headlam, in Thomson, G., The Oresteia of Aeschylus, II, 217Google Scholar; Sheppard, J. T. in C.R. XLI, 2–9Google Scholar.
page 20 note 3 Whitman, C. H., Sophocles, 161Google Scholar.
page 20 note 4 The implications of referring to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in this way are worth consideration.
page 20 note 5 In the Oresteia the Erinyes are hounds only in relation to their pursuit of Orestes. At 846 ff., when Electra refers to Alcmaeon, could the audience fail to remember that he—the counterpart of Orestes—was pursued by Furies?
page 21 note 1 Detailed references and argument will be found in J.H.S. LXXIV, 16 ffGoogle Scholar. and Gnomon XXIII, 414 ffGoogle Scholar.
page 21 note 2 J.H.S. LXXIV, 16 ffGoogle Scholar.
page 22 note 1 Embraced between μάντις at the beginning of the strophe and μαντεῖαι at the end of the antistrophe.
page 22 note 2 For the Erinyes as μνήμονες cf. Ajax, 1390 and Aesch., Prom. 517Google Scholar.
page 22 note 3 
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page 23 note 1 Words of intellectual or quasi-intellectual content are also prominent in the debates between Electra and Chrysothemis, particularly between 1013 and 1057, where we find no less than seventeen terms which imply (more or less) rational consideration. But what determines the different attitudes of the two sisters in the same circumstances is certainly not the validity of their intellectual processes so much as a difference of φύσις. But this important theme cannot be pursued here. The ‘intellectual’ words of the dialogue are picked up at the beginning of the stasimon; and we should note that the filial piety of the birds, which wins them the description of φρονιμώτατοι (1058), is a matter of instinct and not of reason.
page 23 note 2 Having made Clytemnestra angry, she becomes calmer herself.
page 24 note 1 A detailed analysis is impossible here. But two points may be noted, (i) The crimes of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are in the forefront of their minds, and they hope that a convergence of divine powers will bring about their punishment through the human agency of Orestes. But, when they sing: 
(199 f.), they are singing, not of the vengeance of Orestes, but of the murder of Agamemnon, (ii) On 157 Jebb justly remarks: ‘Ʒώει has more point when it is remembered that one sister had perished.’ Sophocles may well have resurrected (and then reinterred) the Homeric Iphianassa merely because the name was bound to suggest Iphigeneia.
page 24 note 2 It may be observed that the two debates between Electra and Chrysothemis are concerned the first with words and the second with deeds. Electra's decision to act alone—mad though it may be in the eyes of Chrysothemis and of the world—is the only decision fully consistent with her earlier attitude.
page 24 note 3 Cf. Weinstock, , Sophokles, 72Google Scholar; Thomson, , Aeschylus and Athens, 356Google Scholar.
page 25 note 1 Sophocles here opens a window upon sinister possibilities, just as, in the O.C., he ends with Antigone preparing to play her part in the Antigone. The similarity is only not precise in so far as the approaching fate of Antigone has the greater certainty.