Classical Wisdom Litterae - Nov 2019

XLVI Orestes and Electra However, it is not these that make her so low, so base, so… Euripidean. It is her intelligence and with it her challenge to the status quo. A challenge which would make every Athenian with a strong wife sit slightly less comfortably in his seat. With this Electra, Euripides directly mocks Aeschylus as a technical student of theatre who never bothered to study human psychology. In Aeschylus’ The Choephori , Electra identifies her long lost brother through his (and her) similar hair, footprint and his baby clothes. Recognition scenes were not merely well-established, but more or less demanded by the Athenian public. Euripides is ruthless in his dismissal of such trite conventions: “You’ll find many with similar hair who are not of the same blood” ... “brother’s and sister’s feet would not be of the same size” ... “He wouldn’t now be wearing the same cloak he had in infancy”.