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Updated: May 14, 2025
The Electra is Sophocles' version of the revenge of Orestes which Aeschylus described in the Choephori and is useful as affording a comparison between the methods of the two masters. An aged tutor at early dawn enters the scene with Orestes to whom he shows his father's palace and then departs with him to offer libations at the dead king's tomb.
In the' trilogy of the "Agamemnon," the "Choephori," and the "Orestes," written in advanced years, we may trace the contagious innovation of Sophocles; but still, even in these tragedies, there is no part so effective in representation as those afforded by the great characters of Sophocles.
Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the Choephori 'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood? the Electra closes with an expression of entire satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as grand.
Comparing the Choephori of Aeschylus, the second play in the Oreseian Trilogy, with the Electra of Sophocles, which deals with the same matter, he says: "Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it.
The ingenious Schlegel attributes to these tragedies symbolical interpretations, but to my judgment with signal ill-success. These four tragedies the Prometheus, the Agamemnon, the Choephori, and the Eumenides are in grandeur immeasurably superior to the remaining three. XII. Of these last, the Seven against Thebes is the best.
In the Choephori or Libation-Pourers, the second play of the trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to avenge his father. The scene again is in front of the house of Atreus.
The fourth kind is by process of reasoning. Thus in the Choephori: 'Some one resembling me has come: no one resembles me but Orestes: therefore Orestes has come. Such too is the discovery made by Iphigenia in the play of Polyidus the Sophist.
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