Electra
Gilbert Murray (1905)
Euripides' Electra (c. 420 BC) retells the revenge of Orestes and Electra on their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for the murder of their father Agamemnon. Euripides transforms the heroic legend: his Electra is married off to a poor but noble farmer and consumed by grievance, and the matricide, once accomplished, brings not triumph but horror and remorse. The play is a searching, sceptical treatment of a myth also dramatized by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The translation is Gilbert Murray's verse rendering.
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