Seeing with Free Eyes by Marlene K. Sokolon;

Author:Marlene K. Sokolon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The Electra

The Justice of Good and Bad Judgment

In making distinctions, how does anyone judge

such things in a straight line?1

Euripides’s Electra has the “distinction of being the best abused and not best understood of ancient tragedies.”2 It tells a familiar story: the siblings Electra and Orestes plot revenge against their mother Clytemnestra for murdering their father, Agamemnon. This family saga was so popular in ancient Athens that we have extant versions by all three playwrights, including the only surviving trilogy: Aeschylus’s Oresteia. For both Sophocles and Euripides, only the story of sibling vengeance has survived. This part of the family saga is laden with moral paradox. So horrific is matricide that the ancient goddesses of vengeance, the Erinyes (Furies in Latin), pursue violators to the end of time. Yet, the mother is no saint: she bedded Agamemnon’s greatest rival, murdered their father, and usurped Orestes’s political inheritance. To complicate matters, the Olympian Apollo contradicts these vengeance goddesses by commanding matricide. Euripides throws open the question of justice in this play: no moral standard is certain, no action is straightforward, and no one is innocent.

Another of the alphabet plays, the performance date and companion tragedies are uncertain. Traditional scholarship dates the Electra to 413 BCE, as the mention of rescuing ships in Sicily is considered an allusion to the ill-fated Sicilian Expedition.3 Other scholars see an anticipation of Euripides’s Helen of 412 BCE or a response to Sophocles’s also undated Electra, which was probably produced between 416 and 410 BCE.4 Although the performance date of this tragedy remains elusive, Sewell suggests it “almost certainly was written between the sailing [to Sicily] and news of its miserable end … but, [one] can imagine him writing it even later, when so many young friends and kin were dead, maimed, or hostage slaves.”5

These possible allusions to the real world, no matter how opaque, have long been the source of Euripidean criticism.6 Certainly, Euripides’s “fondness for de-mythologicalization … jars us abruptly out of the mythical world [and] into … the late fifth-century Athenian reality.”7 Other scholarship investigates wider possibilities of Euripidean realism.8 Lush, for example, explores how the disruption of norms establishes Euripides’s dramatic world.9 Adding to this perspective, this analysis focuses on how an understanding of justice requires confronting the uncertainty embedded both in authority and standards of judgment. Most importantly, the very act of thinking about justice forces us to question what influences our own judgment of circumstances, other people, and ourselves. Thus, Euripides turns his audience away from a question of “what is justice?” toward the first steps of an unfolding journey of self-examination.

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