Electra and Other Plays
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
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 Womenis perhaps the greatest of all anti-war dramas; Andromacheshows the ferocious clash between the wife & concubine of Achilles' son Neoptolemos; while Hecabereveals how hatred can drive a victim to an appalling act of cruelty. Electradevelops & 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.
Liked Electra and Other Plays? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Electra and Other Plays. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
