Orestes by Euripides

1/ It would have been quite interesting, I suppose, to read Orestes immediately after the Oresteia and the two Electra plays—I just couldn’t get hold of a copy at the time. Oh well. 

One thing I’ve noticed is that Euripides may create plays about the same people, but the plays are not necessarily related. His Electra and Orestes are fairly consistent, though in Orestes there’s no reference to the fact that Electra has got married (per Aegisthus’s order), but Euripides has a play called Helen in which Helen never goes to Troy—it’s just a phantom. The Helen and Menelaus in Orestes, and the Helen and Menelaus in Helen are completely different characters. 

2/ Euripides’s Orestes is very different from Eumenides, the last part of the Oresteia. At the risk of being reductive, I think we can say the central idea of Aeschylus’s trilogy is that violence begets violence and at some point the cycle of violence has to get cut—the plot of Eumenides is about whether Orestes can be forgiven or forever haunted by the Furies, and the debate boils down to whether a son owes more to the father or to the mother, whether the duty and desire to avenge his father can outweigh the crime of killing his mother. I’m not entirely sure what the central idea of Euripides’s play is—perhaps there isn’t one—what we have is a rather bitter, nihilist, and messy play in which violence piles upon violence, the characters turn increasingly monstrous, and then Apollo appears to provide a resolution that doesn’t resolve anything. I often feel Euripides is best in the middle: his beginnings often have some long and awkward exposition and his endings often have some awkward deus ex machina, but the middles are (usually) brilliant. 

What is wrong with Pylades? And Electra?  

And what kind of sick joke is it that Apollo makes Orestes marry Hermione? 

3/ There are many great passages in the play: 

“CHORUS […] O Zeus, listen! 

What mercy is there? 

Pitiful son, what is this agony, 

This blood-hunt, this persecution? 

There is a fiend of vengeance 

That drowns your life in tears, 

Sinks your house in your mother’s blood, 

Destroys your mind with madness. 

I mourn, I groan, I grieve. 

The greatest happiness is not permanent

In the world of men; 

But the storms of God rise against it, 

Like a light sailing-ship they shatter it, 

Terrors and disasters roll around it, 

Till crashing waves close over death…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott)

4/ I can see why people say Euripides is more realistic and modern than the other ancient Greeks. 

“MENELAUS Ye gods! What am I looking at? Some ghost from hell? 

ORESTES You are right; terror and pain make me a living corpse.

MENELAUS This savage look, this mattered hair—I’m sorry for you. 

ORESTES What you describe is outward; my torments are real.

MENELAUS Your eyes are glazed with horror; your look frightens me. 

ORESTES I no longer exist; only my name is left.” 

Unlike Eumenides, in Orestes, we don’t see the Furies onstage—we only see Orestes’s madness. 

Euripides depicts Orestes committing the worst of sins—matricide—but gets us to understand him. He writes the scene of Orestes and Menelaus and gets us to empathise with Orestes’s anger and sense of betrayal, but at the same time we also understand why, after 10 years of war, Menelaus doesn’t want more conflict and bloodshed. 

Compared to the Oresteia, the plays of Euripides are less mythic: the human beings are more active, the gods are less involved. 

In Electra, it’s almost as though there’s no oracle from Apollo: we see Orestes and Electra talk about killing Clytemnestra; we see Electra urge her brother to carry on with the plan when he hesitates, like Lady Macbeth taunts and urges Macbeth; Electra also takes part in the killing, unlike the Electra of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

In Orestes, the gods don’t appear till the very end; the whole play is driven by humans; Orestes and Electra first turn to others, asking for help or intervention, as they’re facing punishment; then Pylades comes up with the idea of killing Helen and becoming heroes, celebrated for killing the woman everyone hates, rather than just known as the murderers of Clytemnestra; and Electra comes up with the plan to hold Hermione hostage as a way of bargaining with Orestes; there doesn’t seem to be any hint of the existence of the gods till the very last scene. 

And when Apollo does appear, Euripides makes one think why the gods haven’t intervened earlier and prevented all the bloodshed.

The Hypochondriac or The Imaginary Invalid by Molière

Molière is a delight after the gory plays by Seneca! (Funnily enough, last time I read Molière was after the dark and repulsive revenge plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries).

I read the translation by Alan Drury, for the National Theatre in 1981, who devised the Prologue, Interludes, and Epilogues “in parallel to Molière’s rather than being a direct translation.” 

1/ The play is very funny. 

“ARGAN If a husband cannot leave anything to the wife he loves so tenderly, to the wife who has taken such great care of him, then precedent’s an ass. I’ll have to consult my lawyer to see what I can do. 

[…] 

ARGAN I shall have to make my will, my love, way Monsieur tells me to; but to be on the safe side, I’m going to give you twenty thousand francs in gold I have behind a secret panel next to my bed, and two bills payable to the bearer, one from Monsieur Damon and one from Monsieur Gérante. 

BELINE No, no, I’ll have none of it. How much did you say was behind the secret panel? 

ARGAN Twenty thousand francs, my love. 

BELINE Do not talk to me of riches, I pray you. How much are those two bills worth?” 

(Act 1) 

Some of his plays are different, such as Don Juan, but Molière’s plays—I mean the ones I know—tend to have the same format: the protagonist as the main object of satire; a hindered marriage; some charlatan/ trickster/ fraud (in this case, Beline the wife); a clever servant. 

“DIAFOIRUS SENIOR […] What’s irritating about the great is that when they are ill they absolutely insist their doctors cure them. 

TOINETTE How very presumptuous. You aren’t there for that. You’re there to issue prescriptions and to collect your fees. It’s up to them to get better if they can.” 

In this play, Molière lampoons hypochondriacs (like Argan) and quack doctors (like Diafoirus Senior, M. Purgon, M. Fleurant) and mercenaries (like Beline).

Between Act 2 and Act 3, Argan, his brother Beralde, and Argan’s servant Toinette go see a Molière play together—a play within a play I’ve seen many times but this is new—Molière’s characters go see a Molière play! 

“BERALDE […] That Molière play we’ve just seen; I would have thought that would have put you in the right track as well as given you something to laugh at. 

ARGAN Your Molière is an impertinent fellow with his so-called comedies. It’s a fine thing to make fun of honest men, like doctors.” 

(Act 3) 

The disturbing part however is that Molière collapsed onstage during his fourth performance and died soon after. Imagine being in the first audience watching the doctors curse Argan (played by Molière) and then seeing that Molière actually died! 

2/ Alan Drury is funny; another thing I like is that I can spot Shakespeare references in his translation. 

“ARGAN Listen, my girl, there’s no compromise. You have four days to make a choice. Either you marry Monsieur or get thee to a nunnery.” 

(Act 2) 

The same line in Charles Heron Wall’s translation is “Either you will marry this gentleman or you will go into a convent.” Drury’s choice is much funnier. 

“TOINETTE (crying out) Oh, my God, oh woe is me, what an untoward accident. 

BELINE What is it, Toinette? 

TOINETTE Ah, Madame. 

BELINE What is it? 

TOINETTE Your husband is dead. 

BELINE My husband is dead? 

TOINETTE Alas, yes. He’s shuffled off his mortal coil.” 

(Act 3) 

Again, Hamlet. 

I’m a simple girl—I get excited when spotting a Shakespeare reference. One of the pleasures of knowing Shakespeare is that you not only see his influence on playwrights, novelists, and short story writers, but also come across references by translators. E. D. A. Morshead’s translation of Prometheus Bound, for instance, has “More kin than kind” (evoking Hamlet’s “A little more than kin, and less than kind”) and “wild and whirling words” (again, Hamlet). Both are Morshead’s additions—at least that’s what I think when I compare this translation and the one by Theodore Alois Buckley.  

In these cases, it’s obvious, but sometimes it can be confusing—I saw “the dogs of war” and “’Tis I for whom the bell shall toll” in Philip Wayne’s translation of Faust, Part 1, but is it Goethe or the translator who references Shakespeare and Donne? 

3/ I love the light touch, the warmth and humour of Molière. A couple of months ago, I also read but didn’t blog about The School for Wives (translated by Richard Wilbur). 

Apart from Shakespeare, I would probably say my favourite writer of tragedies is Sophocles and favourite writer of comedies is Molière. 

My 20 favourite plays not by Shakespeare [updated]

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. Then I got into Shakespeare and my favourite plays a couple of years ago were all by Shakespeare. 

But now I have got a better grasp of drama, especially classical drama, so here’s a list of favourites that aren’t by Shakespeare (listed chronologically by the dramatist’s birth year, and grouped by country): 

• The Oresteia by Aeschylus, which is actually three plays: Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides 
• Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus 
• Oedipus the King 
• Antigone 
• Electra by Sophocles 
• Hippolytus 
• Hecabe 
• The Bacchae by Euripides 
• Lysistrata 
• The Frogs by Aristophanes 
• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe 
• The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster 
• The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley 
• The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton or Cyril Tourneur 
• Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca 
• Tartuffe 
• Don Juan 
• The Misanthrope by Molière 
• Phèdre by Jean Racine 
• The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen 

______________________________________

What can we see here? My tastes are predominantly Greek (and Shakespearean): 10 out of 20 plays are by the Athenian playwrights (or 12 out of 22 if you don’t count the Oresteia as one). Molière is another favourite. 

Only one play from the 19th century. No Goethe. No Chekhov—is that a surprise?—I struggled with his plays, having read only two, and much prefer him as a short story writer. No Oscar Wilde, simply because I haven’t read him—if “allowed” to include plays I’ve seen onscreen, I would name The Importance of Being Earnest (though it’s hard to say which play I would remove to make place for it). 

No Tennessee Williams, whom I liked at university. No one contemporary, but then the only one I know is Tom Stoppard—one day I’m going to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which I would probably like. 

Now this list is a bit of a cheat—a list of favourite plays, by Shakespeare and other dramatists, would be much, much harder. 

Name your favourite plays. 

Update on 19/3/2026:

I would probably replace The Revenger’s Tragedy or The Changeling with Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen. Now this is a great, psychologically complex, haunting play. 

The Frogs by Aristophanes

1/ Could anyone love ancient Greek drama and not love The Frogs? 

The premise is this: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles are all dead; the Athenian stage is now devoid of talent (“I defy you to find a genuine poet among the whole lot of them: one who can coin a memorable line,” Dionysus says to Heracles); so the god of drama, Dionysus, decides to go to the underworld to bring back one of the dramatists. 

The first half of the play is the journey of Dionysus, in disguise as Heracles, to Hades. The second half is the battle between the traditional Aeschylus and the innovative Euripides. 

When Aristophanes wrote the play, Aeschylus had been dead for some time (456 or 455 BC), Euripides had recently died (ca 406 BC), but Sophocles was still alive; Sophocles died before the play was performed in 405 BC but Aristophanes didn’t have enough time to rewrite the whole play and incorporate him into it, so he only rewrote some lines to allude to Sophocles’s departure to the underworld. 

If you’re familiar with ancient Greek drama, The Frogs is invaluable because it offers insights into contemporary reception of these dramatists—the three tragedians who survive are indeed the three greatest—it’s also fascinating as one of the earliest pieces of literary criticism, long before Aristotle’s Poetics. As its own thing, it’s also a very funny play. Some of the jokes are over my head, naturally—there are local references, some of the plays mentioned don’t survive, and above all, I cannot read ancient Greek and missed all the jokes about metre and language—but I have read enough to see the contrast between Aeschylus and Euripides and it’s still a very funny play. 

Like Shakespeare, Aristophanes mixes the high and the low, the serious and the ridiculous. 

I read the translation by David Barrett, revised by Shomit Dutta. 

2/ Dionysus goes to Hades with his slave Xanthias. 

“CHARON I don’t take slaves. Not unless they fought in the sea-battle.

XANTHIAS I was exempted on medical grounds: eye trouble.” 

The relationship between the two is hilarious. 

“DIONYSUS I feel faint. Give me a sponge.

[XANTHIAS extracts a sponge from one of the bags.]

Press it on my heart, there’s a good chap.

XANTHIAS There you go.

DIONYSUS No, here. That’s it.

XANTHIAS The heart’s slipped a bit, hasn’t it?

DIONYSUS What? Oh, yes – the sudden shock. It’s taken refuge in my… lower intestine.” 

The introduction by Shomit Dutta also makes me think about the question of actors. As the playwrights were allowed first 2 actors, then increased to 3 by Sophocles, and the chorus, the actors had to do quite a lot of doubling. In The Frogs, the main actor would play Dionysus, who I think was onstage the entire time; the second actor would play Xanthias and Euripides or Aeschylus. 

3/ Why is the play called The Frogs? I have no idea. But there’s a chorus of frogs when Dionysus is on the way to see the dead playwrights. 

“FROGS

Brekekekex, koax, koax,

Brekekekex, koax, koax!

Oh we are the musical Frogs!

We live in the marshes and bogs!

Sweet, sweet is the hymn

We sing as we swim,

And our voices are known

For their beautiful tone…”

4/ Even though Aristophanes’s Aeschylus and Euripides are probably not much like the actual Aeschylus and Euripides, the same way Aristophanes’s Socrates is not much like the real Socrates, the duel between the two characters is amusing. 

“EURIPIDES But is a cock suitable material for a tragedy?

AESCHYLUS And you, you blasphemer, what did you put into your plays?”

Euripides is, as always, accused of bringing all sorts of characters into his plays. 

“AESCHYLUS […] No one can say I ever put a lustful woman into a play.

EURIPIDES How could you? You’ve never even met one.

AESCHYLUS And thank heaven for that…” 

5/ The Penguin edition of Alcestis and Other Plays (translated by John Davie) has an excellent introduction by Richard Rutherford, in which he compares the three Greek tragedians. 

“Whereas Aeschylus’ characters (the Prometheus apart) are above all members of a family or of a larger community, Sophocles tends to focus on individuals set apart from their society or at odds with those who care for them: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Philoctetes, the aged Oedipus. With him, more than with the other two tragedians, it makes sense to speak of tragic heroes and heroines. […] The role of the chorus is somewhat reduced, though some of the odes which reflect on human achievement and its smallness in relation to the timeless power of the gods have a poetic splendour to match almost anything in Aeschylus. The characters have more depth and subtlety…” 

That is probably why Sophocles is my favourite, even though I love all three. They’re all different: Aeschylus is monumental, full of grandeur, but he’s more distant; Sophocles and Euripides focus more on individual characters, though Sophocles has a tragic hero or heroine at the centre for the entire play whereas Euripides tends to shift the focus from one character in half of the play to another in the latter half. 

“The plays of Euripides, although they still work within the traditional range of myths, do not generally dramatize heroic initiatives and triumphant achievements. His are tragedies of suffering rather than action (the Medea again is a special case, a partial exception).” 

Rutherford makes an important point though: 

“In some ways Euripides can be seen as a more self-consciously literary dramatist than his fellow tragedians. […] He seems regularly to modify the conventions of his genre and adapt the work of his predecessors, sometimes even drawing attention to the changes he has made. […] Aeschylus and Sophocles are also experienced in reshaping and adapting traditional motifs, but Euripides goes far beyond them in playing with conventions and exploiting the spectator’s awareness of the dramatic situation. While shocked and moved by the events on stage, we are nevertheless frequently reminded that this is ‘only’ a play.” 

I would probably have to think more about the last sentence, but that passage has a good point. If I have to choose between Euripides and Aeschylus, I would probably go for Euripides for the variety and inventiveness and the various interesting things he does in his plays, though the Oresteia is magnificent.

To go back to Aristophanes—after all this blog post is meant to be about him and The Frogs (which, by the way, Richard Rutherford does mention in his introduction)—he is also a great dramatist and very inventive. The five plays I’ve read so far are all different: Lysistrata is a farce about a sex strike; Women at Thesmophoria Festival includes Euripides as a character and parodies multiple of his plays; The Clouds is the most intellectual of the plays, satirising the Sophists; The Birds is a fantasy, about the utopia of Cloudcuckooland; and now The Frogs is something different altogether. 

It is fascinating that these great dramatists were alive and working in the same place around the same time. 

Prometheus Bound, which may or may not have been by Aeschylus

1/ Apart from the Oresteia, Prometheus Bound seems to be the most referenced and influential among the plays attributed to Aeschylus, though it may or may not have been by him. Doubts began to emerge in the 19th century because of the theme, vocabulary, linguistics, metre, and style, but what can I say, I can’t read it in the original. 

I read the verse translation by E. D. A. Morshead (which sounds better than the verse and prose translation by Alan Sommerstein that I’ve got). 

2/ The play is set on the mountaintop. Before the story begins, Prometheus has helped Zeus defeat the Titans to become the new king of the gods, but he is now punished by Zeus for loving and helping mankind. 

“PROMETHEUS

  […] Behold me, who must here sustain

  The marring agonies of pain,

  Wrestling with torture, doomed to bear

  Eternal ages, year on year!

  Such and so shameful is the chain

  Which Heaven’s new tyrant doth ordain

  To bind me helpless here.

  Woe! for the ruthless present doom!

  Woe! for the Future’s teeming womb!

  On what far dawn, in what dim skies,

  Shall star of my deliverance rise?” 

It is interesting that the play is about Zeus as much as it’s about Prometheus, perhaps even more, but Zeus never appears. 

“CHORUS

  What God can wear such ruthless heart

  As to delight in ill?

  Who in thy sorrow bears not part?

  Zeus, Zeus alone! for he, with wrathful will,

  Clenched and inflexible,

  Bears down Heaven’s race—nor end shall be, till hate

  His soul shall satiate,

  Or till, by some device, some other hand

  Shall wrest from him his sternly-clasped command!” 

The various plays I’ve read from ancient Greece have depicted the gods as lustful, capricious, cruel, and petty, but Prometheus Bound goes even further—the playwright goes for Zeus, depicting him as a treacherous tyrant. Prometheus Bound must have influenced Paradise Lost. Kenneth McLeish tells me that in 19th century’s Europe in particular, “the grandeur of its poetry and the suffering colossus at its centre were so much in tune with the intellectual mood that it was ranked with Hamlet and the Book of Job, and its creator with Dante, Michelangelo and other such artist-supermen.” 

The play is very quotable, I think, full of great passages. 

“CHORUS

[…] Strange is thy sorrow! one only I know who has suffered thy pain—

Atlas the Titan, the god, in a ruthless, invincible chain!

He beareth for ever and ever the burden and poise of the sky,

The vault of the rolling heaven, and earth re-echoes his cry.

The depths of the sea are troubled; they mourn from their caverns

profound,

And the darkest and innermost hell moans deep with a sorrowful sound;

And the rivers of waters, that flow from the fountains that spring

without stain,

Are as one in the great lamentation, and moan for thy piteous pain.” 

I especially love the passages when Prometheus talks about what he has taught mankind. 

“PROMETHEUS 

  […] But listen now

  Unto the rede of mortals and their woes,

  And how their childish and unreasoning state

  Was changed by me to consciousness and thought.

  Yet not in blame of mortals will I speak,

  But as in proof of service wrought to them.

  For, in the outset, eyes they had and saw not;

  And ears they had but heard not; age on age,

  Like unsubstantial shapes in vision seen,

  They groped at random in the world of sense…” 

Prometheus has taught humanity carpentry and architecture and astronomy and mathematics and writing and medicine and so on—that’s why he’s now bound to a rock. 

“PROMETHEUS

  Yet more I gave them, even the boon of fire.

CHORUS

  What? radiant fire, to things ephemeral?” 

3/ I have noted before the clear contrast between ancient Greek plays and the plays of Shakespeare’s time: Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are full of people doing things, flirting, kissing, eating, fighting, killing, etc; ancient Greek plays mostly depict people talking about things or reacting to things, as murder and other horrific things are kept off-stage or hidden from view. 

Prometheus Bound is even more extreme in the sense that the protagonist cannot move around—he’s bound to the rock for the entire play (if it’s ever staged)—it’s a drama of the mind. In terms of plot, it’s even more static than Seven Against Thebes—nothing happens, Prometheus first talks to the chorus of nymphs about his sin of helping humanity and Zeus’s punishment, then he talks to Io (now a cow) about their fate, then he sees Hermes and challenges Zeus to dash his bolt on him. But in terms of conflict and tension, I think there is more in Prometheus Bound than in Seven Against Thebes—different characters warn Prometheus of Zeus’s power and fear his punishment, but Prometheus becomes more and more defiant as the play progresses—there is an increasing sense of tension and threat even though Zeus never appears, and that culminates in the final moment of the play. In Seven Against Thebes, even though the characters are in a war and threatened on seven sides, it’s written in such a way that I didn’t feel any tension till Eteocles was told that his brother Polyneices was at the seventh gate. 

4/ Another thing I find strange about Prometheus Bound is that Zeus is not only a tyrant (in his behaviour towards Io as well as Prometheus), but he also has limits. 

Zeus is not omniscient—he didn’t know Prometheus was going to steal fire from the gods and give it to mankind. 

Zeus is not omnipotent—he cannot escape his own fate. 

“CHORUS.

  But what hand rules the helm of destiny?

PROMETHEUS.

  The triform Fates, and Furies unforgiving.

CHORUS.

  Then is the power of Zeus more weak than theirs?

PROMETHEUS.

  He may not shun the fate ordained for him.”

He doesn’t even know what’s going to happen. 

“HERMES.

  […] Attend—the Sire supreme doth bid thee tell

  What is the wedlock which thou vauntest now,

  Whereby he falleth from supremacy?” 

Is this not strange? That the king of the gods is not all-powerful? 

This is a fascinating play. 

Surely Shakespeare must have known the Greeks [updated]

All the writings I have so far come across tell me that Shakespeare probably didn’t read ancient Greek plays: there were no English translations available at the time, writers from ancient Rome were more important, there’s no evidence that Shakespeare knew Greek or read the Greeks. But Latin translations were available, and I can’t help finding it unlikely that Shakespeare wasn’t curious about Greek tragedy: Roman writers, who influenced Shakespeare, were themselves heavily influenced or inspired by the Greeks; Francis Meres, the first to canonise Shakespeare, in 1598 (!) knew the Greeks (“As the Greek tongue is made famous and eloquent by Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Phocylides and Aristophanes; and the Latin tongue by Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Silius Italicus, Lucanus, Lucretius, Ausonius and Claudianus: so the English tongue is mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in true ornaments and resplendent abiliments by Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Chapman”); Ben Jonson knew the Greeks (mentioning Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in his poem about Shakespeare); and so on. 

There is no way that Shakespeare was in such a circle and never read the Greeks. 

In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, Agamemnon begins with a watchman, like Hamlet; the scene of Orestes confronting his mother Klytaimestra (or Clytemnestra) in Libation Bearers reminds me of Hamlet and Gertrude. There are also similarities between Hamlet and Sophocles’s Electra: both are revenge plays that focus more on the mind of the protagonist than on the revenge itself; Electra is consumed with hate, and concentrates all her hate on her mother Clytemnestra even though Aegisthus also took part in the killing; Hamlet seems to hate his mother even more than he hates Claudius; Electra thinks about her mother sleeping with the murderer of her father, so does Hamlet. 

Sometimes the similarities don’t necessarily suggest influence—perhaps it’s simply that Shakespeare and these playwrights were writing about human nature and human nature doesn’t really change: for instance, Oedipus’s anger and bitterness at being abandoned by his children makes me think of King Lear. But I do wonder if the Oresteia and Sophocles’s Electra influenced Hamlet. 

I also like to think that Shakespeare got inspiration from Euripides for The Winter’s Tale: he adapted the play from Robert Greene’s Pandosto but wanted to change the ending—he clearly didn’t care for all the incestuous stuff—so perhaps he got some ideas from Alcestis and Heracles. As my friend Himadri pointed out, Leontes, like Heracles, destroys his own family in a fit of madness; Leontes, like Heracles, has to live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt. I didn’t see strong parallels between Alcestis and The Winter’s Tale when I first read the play, but now that I’ve thought more about it, there are: however you interpret Hermione’s restoration to Leontes, the scene is a vision of resurrection; and as in Alcestis, the happiness in the ending of The Winter’s Tale is subdued, Leontes cannot undo what he has done to Hermione (and their son), the same way Admetus has to face the fact that he has let Alcestis die in his place. 

Surely Shakespeare must have known these plays. 

Thoughts? 

_________________________________

Update on 14/8/2025: Currently not on Twitter, I have more time to read literary essays on JSTOR and found, among others, two interesting essays about the subject of Shakespeare and the Greeks.  

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2870800

In this essay, Louise Schleiner argues that Hamlet was influenced by Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Euripides’s Orestes. 

“Whatever Shakespeare’s competence with Greek and Latin may have been (respect for his learning is fashionable again), I am convinced that at least some passages of Euripides’ Orestes and Aeschylus’ Oresteia (in the latter namely the graveyard and matricide scenes of the Libation Bearers) by some means influenced Hamlet. The concrete theatrical similarities between the Shakespearean and Aeschylean graveyard scenes and between the roles of Horatio and Pylades (in both Aeschylus and Euripides) are in my view too close to be coincidental. Furthermore, the churchyard scene of Hamlet does not occur in any of the play’s known sources or analogues: if it was not a sheer invention—and Shakespeare very seldom sheerly invented anything in the way of plot—it has some source not yet identified.” 

She also argues that Shakespeare could easily borrow books from Ben Jonson’s large library, as they were fellow playwrights (and friends). 

The main arguments for the possible influence are: 

• Hamlet has “Orestean urge to kill his mother” (he may not say it but he’s “at considerable risk of killing her”); 
• There are parallels between the graveyard scene in Libation Bearers and the one in Hamlet, which isn’t in Roman and medieval sources; 
• Horatio seems to mirror Pylades, which may explain the inconsistency in the characterisation of Horatio (“Shakespeare had superimposed upon the domestic Horatio of the Ur-Hamlet the concept of Pylades, dear foreigner-companion of Orestes from his youth abroad, touchstone of justice and male friendship, soul mate and supporter of the Orestean hero with his dreadful commission to cleanse away his own mother’s evil and the usurping step-father whom that evil has enabled to take power”); 
• Orestes is haunted by the Furies after taking revenge, the Furies seem to be let loose on Hamlet before he takes revenge. 

These are interesting points, no? 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40210320

In this essay, Sarah Dewar-Watson argues that The Winter’s Tale may have been influenced by George Buchanan’s Latin translation of Alcestis. 

Alcestis and Hermione are both restored to their husbands; in both plays, they are first veiled in the recognition scene; in both plays, a third party brings about the reunion of husband and wife; in both plays, the wife says nothing to the husband at the end. 

After Alcestis’s departure to Hades, Admetus thinks about creating a sculpture (or something similar) of Alcestis: 

“I will have an image of you, the work of a skilled craftsman’s hand, and lay it in my bed. I will kneel before it, clasping it in my arms, and call your name, and it will seem as though I hold my dear wife, although I do not. An empty pleasure, I know, but it will lighten my heavy heart. Or perhaps you will visit me in my dreams, and console me. We welcome a glimpse of our loved ones in our sleep, however long it lasts.” 

Dewar-Watson argues: 

“Buchanan interpolates the word statura at a crucial moment in the recognition scene: “O femina, / quaecumque tandem es, es profecto Alcestidi / modo et statura corporis simillima” (Lady, whoever you are, you are just like Alcestis, the very image of her form) (ll. 1137-39). This is a rendering of Euripides, lines 1061-63: “σύδ’, ώγύναι, / ήτις ποτ’ εί σύ, ταϋτ’ έχουσ’ Άλκήστιδι / μορφής μέτρ’ ίσθι καί προσήιξαι δέμας” (You, lady, whoever you are, have the exact form of Alcestis and your body is just like hers). Buchanan’s interpolation of the statue motif, therefore, provides a clear model for the device in the equivalent scene in Shakespeare. Buchanan’s variation on the source text is-like his interpolation of umbra-striking, since the rest of his translation is generally a very close rendering.

The link between Buchanan’s Alcestis and The Winter’s Tale is underscored by another verbal echo. In Euripides, Admetus exclaims to Heracles, “uń u’ έλης ήρημένον” (You destroy me, I who am already destroyed) (1. 1065), which Buchanan closely follows (“neve perdas perditum”) (1. 1141). The line is especially memorable because of the reduplicative effect provided by the cognate accusative, and it thus provides a likely source for Perdita’s name. Although the cognate accusative is an effect that English cannot readily accommodate, Shakespeare substitutes a bilingual pun (“Our Perdita is found” [5.3.121]), which playfully inverts the original grammatical structure. Where the cognates in Latin and Greek heavily reinforce a sense of loss and destruction, Shakespeare’s reconstruction of the syntax creates a new play on words in which the very idea of loss is countered and dispelled.” 

Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus

1/ This was tough to read. The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s masterpiece, was first performed in 458 BC. Seven Against Thebes was produced in 467 BC, as the third part and the only one that survives of a four-part sequence, preceded by Laius and Oedipus (forming a tragic trilogy) and followed by a satyr play, The Sphinx. Seven Against Thebes is about the fight between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices, which was not covered by Sophocles’s Theban plays. 

When Sophocles wrote about the same family, Antigone was from around 442–440 BBC, its prequel King Oedipus was around 429–427 BC, and Oedipus at Colonus (ca 407 BC) was written shortly before his death ca 406 BC. 

As my main frame of reference is Shakespeare, when I first got into Greek tragedy, I had to adjust to the plays of Sophocles and Euripides as they’re different, but in the plays before the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s concept of drama is even further away from ours that I don’t quite understand it. The play is static. Part of the play, when the chorus is wailing and lamenting, feels like an opera. Part of the play, when the messenger tells Eteocles about the enemies at the seven gates and paints a picture of each one, feels like an epic poem being performed to the audience. It is very odd. 

2/ I’m just going to poke at the play. 

“CHORUS […] The army has been let loose, it has left its camp! 

This great host of horses is pouring forward at the gallop! 

The dust I see in the air shows me it is so, 

a voiceless messenger but true and certain! 

The soil <of my land>, 

struck by hooves, sends the noise right to my ears! 

It’s flying, it’s roaring like an irresistible 

mountain torrent!”

(translated by Alan Sommerstein) 

If only I could read ancient Greek! 

“CHORUS […] I hear the rattle of chariots round the city! 

O Lady Hera! 

The sockets of their heavy-laden axles are squealing! 

Beloved Artemis! 

The air is going mad with the brandishing of spears!” 

The most interesting images are probably when the messenger describes the enemies. 

“SCOUT […] Tydeus is already growling near the Proetid […]. Teydeus, lusting madly for battle, is screaming like a snake hissing at midday…” 

He describes, he paints a picture of each enemy. What do the audience see? Do they see anything? 

“SCOUT […] I shuddered, I won’t deny it, to see [Hippomedon] brandish his great round threshing-floor of a shield. And it can’t have been a cheap artist who gave him that device on the shield, Typhon emitting dark smoke, the many-coloured sister of flame, from his fire-breathing lips; the round circle of the hollow-bellied shield is floored with coiling snakes. The man himself raised a great war cry; he is possessed by Ares, and he rages for a fight like a maenad, with a fearsome look in his eye…” 

I like the imagery, but all this stuff feels like an epic poem—there’s no drama as we know it, no conflict and tension—till Eteocles hears that his brother Polyneices is at the seventh gate and decides to fight him himself, and the chorus tells him not to do so. 

Aeschylus does raise something interesting, however. When Eteocles hears that Polyneices is at the seventh gate, he says: 

“Ah me, my father’s curse is now truly fulfilled!” 

The curse, presumably about the brothers killing each other for their cruel treatment of their father, would have been in Oedipus, which didn’t survive. But Eteocles’s remark is obviously nonsense—it’s nothing like the preordained fate from which Oedipus couldn’t escape—Eteocles is told that his brother is at the seventh gate—he makes the choice.   

“CHORUS […] And when they die in kindred slaughter, 

killed by one another, and the dust of earth

drinks up their dark red, clotted blood, 

who can provide purification, 

who can release them? O 

new troubles for the house 

mingling with its old woes!” 

4/ The play ends oddly, almost going in a new direction with the herald announcing that Polyneices is not to be buried, and Antigone defying him (which is more or less the plot of Sophocles’s play). However, Kenneth McLeish writes in A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama: 

“Scholars say that Aeschylus wrote only the first four fifths of Seven Against Thebes as we have it. His contribution ends not with the resolution and catharsis, but with a brief report of the princes’ deaths, a reminder that ‘God’s knife is whetted still,’ and a chorus of desolation balancing the chorus of distress at the beginning. Later hands added the Antigone/ Ismene material we now possess – and they unfocused the meaning of the action, introducing a completely new strand (Antigone’s defiance of the council), without integrating it, and –because the quality of the verse is poor—reducing the impact of Aeschylus’ chorus […] How Aeschylus resolved the issues raised by the play and its predecessors in the sequence is now unguessable.” 

Heracles by Euripides

1/ Another blasphemous play from Euripides. 

This is how the play starts: amidst the chaos in Thebes, Lycus attacks the town, kills King Creon, and seizes the crown; as Creon’s daughter Megara is married to Heracles but Heracles has gone to the underworld for the final labour, perhaps to never return, Lycus decides to kill them all—Megara, their 3 sons, and Heracles’s father Amphitryon. 

“CHORUS […] My voice full of grief and mourning,

Like the sad chant of an aged swan;

A ghost of a man, voice with no substance.

Like a figure seen in a dream…” 

(translated by Philip Vellacott) 

About half of the play is Amphitryon, Megara, and the Theban elders (the chorus) lamenting their fate and praying for rescue from Heracles or the gods. Amphitryon begs Lycus to spare them, but Megara doesn’t do so. 

“MEGARA […] I love my children – naturally;

I gave them birth, and care from childhood; and to me

Dying is fearful. Yet I count it foolishness

To struggle with the inevitable. Since we must die,

Let us not die shrivelled in fire, a mockery

To our enemies, which to me is a worse thing than death.

We owe a debt of honour to our royal house.

[…] When the gods spread misfortune like a net, to try

To struggle out is folly more than bravery.

For what will be will be; no one can alter it.” 

She accepts it with poise and dignity. Reminds me of Shakespeare’s Hermione. 

There are lots of good passages in this play: 

“MEGARA […] You weep,

My pretty flowers! Then, like a brown-winged honey-bee,

From all your weeping I’ll distil one precious tear,

And shed it for you…” 

It is moving. 

“AMPHITRYON […] Time as he flies has no care to preserve our hopes;

He’s bent on his own business. Look at me: I once

Was great in action, drew all eyes upon me; now

In one day Fortune has snatched from me everything,

As the wind blows a feather to the sky; all lost.

Wealth, reputation – who holds them with certainty?” 

Euripides gets us to care about Megara and the children, and builds it up so that we all hope for Heracles to return in time and thwart Lycus’s plan to kill the family. And Heracles does return in time! He then kills Lycus. But no, the story takes a different turn as Isis, under the command of Hera, gives him a fit of madness and makes him kill his own wife and children in a frenzy, only because Hera is Zeus’s wife and has always hated Heracles for being Zeus’s son. It is horrific. The play reminds me of Aias (also known as Ajax) by Sophocles (which I think is a more perfect play), but what Hera does to Heracles is so much worse than what Athena does to Aias: Heracles kills his own wife and children! 

“HERACLES […] She has achieved her heart’s desire,

Toppling to earth, pedestal and all, the foremost man

Of Hellas. Who could pray to such a god? For spite

Towards Zeus, for jealousy of a woman’s bed, she hurls

To ruin his country’s saviour, innocent of wrong!” 

What kinds of gods are these? But it’s not only Hera—Euripides doesn’t seem particularly fond of Zeus either. 

“AMPHITRYON Zeus! I once thought you were my powerful friend. You shared

My marriage, shared my fatherhood of Heracles.

All this meant nothing; for you proved less powerful

Than you had seemed; and I, a man, put you, a god,

To shame. I’ve not betrayed the sons of Heracles.

You knew the way to steal into my bed, where none

Invited you, and lie with someone else’s wife;

But those bound to you by every tie you cannot save.

This is strange ignorance in a god; or else, maybe,

Your very nature lacks a sense of right and wrong.” 

Zeus never appears. Never intervenes. He’s even worse than Apollo in Ion. 

Amphitryon and Heracles are not the only ones chastising the gods either: 

“MEGARA […] How dark and devious are the ways of gods to men!”

Euripides goes further:

“HERACLES Divinity’s impervious

To human feeling. I defy divinity.” 

2/ The good thing about living in London is that when I’m fascinated by a period, such as ancient Greece at the moment, I can just go to the British Museum and look at the artworks and artefacts from that period. 

This is me with a vase depicting characters from the Oresteia: 

This is part of the collection about the Labours of Heracles: 

Addendum: My friend Himadri added: 

“You mention Hermione, but I think the parallel with The Winter’s Tale goes further. Heracles destroys his family in a fit of madness: the madness comes from the gods, but no reason is given. Similarly, there is no reason given for the madness of Leontes, who also destroys his family. And both Leontes and Heracles must live not only with the loss, but also with the guilt.
Shakespeare knew Heracles. He must have done.” 

The Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do

When I read Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights in England, or Spanish Golden Age playwrights such as Lope de Vega, I think Shakespeare’s light years ahead of them all. But I don’t think that way when reading the ancient Greeks—I think they’re great in a different way.

Shakespeare’s works may feel richer as he has the advantage of having more actors and mixes the tragic and the comic—not to mention that he can do both tragedy and comedy, and other genres—but the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are not any inferior to Shakespeare’s tragedies in terms of depth and tragic power. This is especially staggering when we consider that there’s a gap of 2000 years between them. 

More interestingly, the Greeks make me realise what Shakespeare doesn’t do. In King Oedipus by Sophocles for instance, the tension in the entire drama arises not because of what’s happening, but because of what has already happened. This is something I later see in Ibsen, but not in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays also don’t question human agency. 

The Electra plays remind me again that Shakespeare doesn’t seem to take any interest in the mother-daughter relationship. He very often explores the father-daughter relationship (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, etc) and depicts some fascinating mother-son relationships (Hamlet and Coriolanus); the only mother-daughter relationship I can think of is Lady Capulet and Juliet, which is not particularly developed, and if we stretch it a bit, the Countess and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, but they’re not actually mother and daughter. 

He also doesn’t take much interest in the subject of incest. In Pericles, it’s only a small part at the beginning of the story, not explored, and that’s a late play that Shakespeare co-wrote with another playwright. 

Now that I’ve read Hippolytus and other versions of the same myth, I’ve also realised that Shakespeare doesn’t write about women who make false rape allegations. We know he’s fascinated by jealousy and slander, and writes multiple times about women being falsely accused of cheating (Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale), but not about the other way around. 

Shakespeare also doesn’t adapt any of the classical plays. For his plays, he uses historical accounts, poems, Ovid, Chaucer, romances (such as Pandosto), and so on, but doesn’t rewrite or revisit any of the classical plays. Even if he didn’t know Greek, I believe there were Latin translations of the ancient Greek plays available. We don’t see him adapting the Roman plays either. 

This is fascinating stuff. 

Electra (or Elektra) by Euripides and the Electra myth

As I read the play in Gilbert Murray’s translation, I will use his spellings (Latinised names such as Clytemnestra, rather than Greek transliterations such as Klytaimestra). 

1/ Among the ancient Greek plays that survive today about the killing of Clytemnestra (Klytaimestra), the first was Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers, part of the Oresteia, first performed in 458 BC. 

Sophocles and Euripides, from the same generation, both wrote a play named Electra, though it’s not certain which one came out first: the one by Euripides was written in the mid-410s BC, the one by Sophocles is dated around 420–414 BC (wouldn’t it have been funny though if they were first performed the same year?). 

These two Electra plays don’t seem to reference each other, but there’s one scene in which Euripides clearly mocks a scene in Libation Bearers: how could Electra recognise Orestes from some strand of hair, or footprints? Don’t be ridiculous, Aeschylus. 

2/ Like Sophocles, Euripides focuses on the character of Electra. 

“ELECTRA […] Brother, brother, on some far shore 

Hast thou a city, is there a door

That knows thy footfall, Wandering One? 

Who left me, left me, when all our pain 

Was bitter about us, a father slain, 

And a girl that wept in her room alone. 

Thou couldst break me this bondage sore, 

Only thou, who art far away, 

Loose our father, and wake once more…

Zeus, Zeus, dost hear me pray?... 

The sleeping blood and the shame and the doom! 

O feet that rest not, over the foam

Of distant seas, come home, come home!” 

Sophocles’s Electra is a larger-than-life character: striking, intense, deformed by hate. Euripides’s Electra appears more vulnerable and fragile. 

One of the changes Euripides makes is that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (also known as Aigisthos) don’t imprison Electra, but marry her off to a poor peasant so that she doesn’t have the power to wage war against them. She’s stripped of the position of princess. The peasant however doesn’t sleep with her, out of respect for her and her father. We then have this interesting passage:  

“ORESTES How dark lies honour hid! And what turmoil 

In all things human: sons of mighty men 

Fallen to naught, and from ill seed again 

Good fruit: yea, famine in the rich man’s scroll 

Writ deep, and in poor flesh a lordly soul!

As, lo, this man, not great in Argos, not 

With pride of house, uplifted, in a lot

Of unmarked life hath shown a prince’s grace…” 

Not hard to see why some people call Euripides modern. 

3/ In this play, Orestes is much weaker and more passive. The old man who rescued him as a child is now the one to come up with the plan to kill Aegisthus. The plan to kill Clytemnestra comes from Electra. 

Orestes hesitates. 

“ORESTES ’Tis my mother comes: my own

Mother, that bare me. 

[…]

ORESTES What would we with our mother? Didst thou say

Kill her? 

ELECTRA (turning on him) What? Is it pity? Dost thou fear 

To see thy mother’s shape? 

ORESTES ’Twas she that bare

My body into life. She gave me suck. 

How can I strike her?”

(The word “bare” is in my copy, shouldn’t it be “bore”?). 

“ORESTES I was a clean man once. Shall I be thrust 

From men’s sight, blotted with her blood? 

ELECTRA Thy blot 

Is black as death if him thou succour not!” 

Euripides humanises Orestes and removes Apollo—there is no command from the gods—it is Electra who pushes Orestes into it. 

Like Sophocles, he lets us see Electra’s point of view and then shows us Clytemnestra’s: not only did Agamemnon kill her daughter Iphigenia…

“CLYTEMNESTRA […] Nay, for long, 

I never would have killed him. But he came, 

At last, bringing that damsel, with the flame

Of God about her, mad and knowing all; 

And set her in my room; and in one wall 

Would hold two queens!...” 

In a way, Aeschylus sees and depicts the tragedy from a distance; Sophocles and Euripides come close to the characters and depict their clashing perspectives; both give us a confrontation between mother and daughter. 

4/ Sophocles’s play focuses on Electra’s state of mind that leads to the killing. Euripides’s play has the revenge, and also depicts the horror of Electra and Orestes when they realise what they have done. 

“ORESTES Saw’st thou her raiment there, 

Sister, there in the blood?

She drew it back as she stood, 

She opened her bosom bare, 

She bent her knees to the earth, 

The knees that bent in my birth…

And I… Oh, her hair, her hair…

(He breaks into inarticulate weeping)”

I would guess that Euripides’s Electra was after Sophocles’s. 

There are mentions of gods throughout the play and a god does appear at the end telling what Orestes and Electra have to do to pay for the murder of their mother, but I would say that the play is humanist, not mythic: unlike the characters in Aeschylus’s and Sophocles’s plays, Euripides’s Electra and Orestes choose to kill their mother themselves, without an oracle. A god only appears after the deed is done. Not only so, the killings are more brutal: Orestes kills Aegisthus after being welcomed as a guest to his feast; Electra lures Clytemnestra to the house and pretends to reconcile with her before having her killed. 

All three plays are wonderful, in different ways. 

The Oresteia by Aeschylus: Eumenides

1/ As the final part of the Oresteia, this is quite a strange play. After the murder of his mother Klytaimestra (better known as Clytemnestra), Orestes is pursued by the Furies.

“PRIESTESS […] But all around this man there slept 

a terrifying crowd of women resting on our seats. 

Not really women—they were more like Gorgons; 

but I cannot truly liken them to Gorgons

nor Harpies—for I saw a picture once 

of Harpies stealing Phineus’ feast, and they 

had wings; but these have none, and they are black 

and horrible in every way. They’re snoring, 

and the stench around them is unbearable. 

Disgusting streams of filth 

Pour from their eyes…” 

(translated by Michael Ewans) 

Horrifying stuff.

I note that the murder of Aigisthos (better known as Aegisthus) is fair game; even Klytaimestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon, for the Furies, is not the worst; but matricide is the greatest evil. 

Haunted, Orestes asks for help from Apollo (the one who told him to kill his mother) and also asks Athena. She then sets up a trial for him in Athens, judged by 12 Athenian citizens. 

2/ The imagery in Aeschylus’s plays is interesting. 

“KLYTAIMESTRA You’re hunting in a dream! You’re barking like a sleeping dog 

that can’t forget its need to kill.” 

That’s the ghost of the dead woman, in case you’re wondering. 

“FURIES While I still slept, reproaches came in dreams

and struck me like a horseman with his whip 

in the belly, down below the liver. 

Here, the chill, the heavy chill, 

the dreadful whip-lash of the executioner!” 

3/ It is, however, a strange play because Apollo, a god, appears at the trial and argues in defence, and because the trial ends up not being about morality or justice but essentially boils down to the question “To which parent does the child owe more?”. 

“APOLLO […] The person called the mother is no real parent

of a child; she simply nurses foetuses once they’ve been sown. 

The parent is the man, who mounts; the woman is a hostess 

who preserves a stranger’s offspring—if they are not harmed by any god. 

Now I will show you living proof of what I say. 

A father can beget a child without a mother; see, right here

as witness stands the child of Zeus himself:

she was not nurtured in the dark depths of a womb, 

yet she is such an offspring as no goddess ever bore…” 

That is Athena. But isn’t this sophistry? The vote is split, Orestes is acquitted, the play ends with a triumphant tone, but this is nevertheless troubling.   

Michael Ewans points out: 

“In Agamemnon, [Apollo] punishes the girl who broke her pledge by a hideous death; in Libation Bearers he is ruthless once again, commanding matricide, warning of terrible penalties should Orestes try to evade it, and ordaining that Orestes must sink to treachery in order to achieve that end. Nor was his oracle, in real life, always above the charge of deviousness and trickery.” 

In a way, the acquittal of Orestes (probably) means the end of the cycle of violence, but at the same time I would guess that Aeschylus does mean the trial and Apollo’s interferences to be troubling. 

The Oresteia by Aeschylus: Libation Bearers

1/ As written in the previous blog post, this is the second part of the trilogy, and about the killing of Klytaimestra (also known as Clytemnestra). 

I read the translation by Michael Ewans, who uses transliterations from Greek. 

2/ Aeschylus’s plays are rich in metaphors and similes. 

“ELEKTRA […] We call upon the gods, who know 

that great waves toss us all around

like men at sea; but when we’re fated to survive, 

a small seed often grows into a great tree-root.” 

Some animal imagery: 

“ORESTES Zeus! Zeus! Look down and witness this! 

You see the orphaned offspring of the eagle who has died – 

a fearful serpent’s trapped him in its coils. They are bereft 

of father-love, and suffer pangs of hunger; they’re not strong enough 

to hunt food like their father, bring to the nest. 

[…] If you were to destroy the eagle’s brood, you could not send 

back any sign of hope to mortal men; 

and if this tree of kingship shrivels up and dies 

we will not be your ministers upon the festive days of sacrifice…” 

Mixed metaphors. 

Klytaimestra’s nightmare also has an interesting image: “she dreamt she gave birth to a snake” and “a clot of blood poured out into the milk.” 

Orestes later compares her to snakes: 

“ORESTES […] If she had been a seasnake, or a viper, she could make men’s flesh dissolve

without a bite, so great her daring 

and the power of her evil mind…” 

3/ This is an interesting passage: 

“LIBATION BEARERS The earth 

breeds terrifying beasts. 

In her embrace the sea 

encompasses a multitude 

of monsters that can kill a man. 

Up in the sky are comets, meteors—

like flying torches which descend 

to harm us. Then think of the hurricane, 

the anger of the stormwind. 

But who can find words to speak 

of the ever-daring mind of man

or woman’s love that dares all, 

wedded to disaster? 

When passion overcomes 

the female, it destroys 

the unions of animals, 

the marriages of men and women.” 

The play is full of such wonderful passages. I can see why my friend Himadri thinks the Oresteia is monumental. 

4/ It’s fascinating to see that Aeschylus and Sophocles tackle the same myth in completely different ways. 

In Liberation Bearers, Aeschylus does repeat the point about the cycle of violence, but presents Orestes’s killing of Klytaimestra and Aigisthos (better known as Aegisthus) as fulfilling the wish of many people, even a god: Orestes has doubts but Apollo tells him of “vile and frosty torments” and the pursuit of the Furies if he doesn’t avenge the murder of his father; the Libation Bearers or the female slaves of the house (the chorus) also egg him on, and take an active role in the revenge plot… 

In Elektra—I will stick to Greek transliterations for consistency—Sophocles does something different: he changes the circumstances of the sacrifice, thus making Artemis appear petty and Klytaimestra’s killing of Agamemnon more justified or at least less of a wanton act of violence; concentrates on Elektra and her state of mind; brings in the counter-voices of Elektra’s sister and the chorus, clashing with Elektra’s thirst for revenge; gets the audience to feel compassion for Elektra but also see something perverse in her love of her father and hatred of her mother, etc. 

However, Aeschylus adds some discordant notes towards the end of his play.

“ORESTES […] I’m like a charioteer who’s forced to drive 

outside the course; I am beaten, and cannot control 

my senses. Terror comes prepared to sing its song of hate 

beside my heart, and join the dance…” 

He is haunted. Did Apollo lie? Or did he warn Orestes of the father’s Furies if the murder’s not avenged, and not of the mother’s Furies if Orestes killed her?

“LIBATION BEARERS […] Where will it end? When will it be sated, 

lulled to sleep, the force of destruction?” 

5/ Another notable difference is that Sophocles reverses the order: Aeschylus has Orestes kill Aigisthos first and then Klytaimestra; Sophocles starts with, and focuses more on, Orestes’s killing of his mother Klytaimestra. 

In Libation Bearers, Elektra also seems to be dropped in the latter part of the play—Aeschylus focuses more on Orestes. 

6/ As my main frame of reference is Shakespeare, it’s hard to read these plays without wondering if Shakespeare knew them—just look at Libation Bearers, look at the confrontation between Orestes and his mother Klytaimestra—do you not think about Hamlet and Gertrude? For 400 years, people have debated the phrase “small Latin and less Greek” that Ben Jonson wrote about Shakespeare—most people seem to take it literally, though there is influence of Latin works on Shakespeare’s plays and scholars generally say Shakespeare may just have “small Latin and less Greek” compared to the learned Ben Jonson—I’ve recently read an essay in The Antigone Journal arguing that the sentence may have been misunderstood as “though” also has an archaic sense of “even if”. Do we know if Shakespeare knew these plays? If not in the original then perhaps in Latin translations? I need to look more into this. 

The Oresteia by Aeschylus: Agamemnon

1/ First, some context: the Oresteia was first performed in 458 BC. Agamemnon is about the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, or Klytaimestra in my copy (Michael Ewans uses Greek transliterations rather than Latinised or Anglicised versions). The Libation Bearers is about the murder of Klytaimestra by her son Orestes. Eumenides is about the trial of Orestes.

The killing of Klytaimestra is the subject of two other plays: we don’t know when Sophocles wrote Electra (or Elektra), scholars date it around 420–414 BC; Euripides’s Electra was written in the mid-410s BC. 

The fascinating thing about reading ancient Greek drama, which I don’t get from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, is that I can watch these great playwrights play with the same myths, and respond to each other. 

2/ Of about 300 known tragedies, only 32 complete plays survive from ancient Greece. I wonder how many of the plays back then were about the Trojan war or the murder of Klytaimestra, or it just so happened that quite a few plays that survived were about these subjects. 

“ELDERS […] and all through Greece a woman waits at home

with patient sorrow in her heart 

for each of those who went to Troy. 

Many things touch their feelings: 

each one knows the person she sent out; 

instead of him

a pot of ashes comes back home. 

The god of War’s a money-changer, dealing in bodies; 

he lifts his scales in the combat of spears

and from the funeral fires of Ilion 

he sends the relatives 

the heavy dust for which they’ll weep

cramming the urns with ashes 

easy stowed 

in place of men. 

Then they lament: this one 

they praise – he was well skilled in fighting; 

this one died nobly, as the battle raged

–but all for someone else’s wife…” 

Euripides’s The Women of Troy is also about the destruction of war, and it focuses on women. 

3/ It’s fascinating to read Aeschylus after Sophocles and Euripides, and see how different he is: he uses the chorus a lot more. In performance it’s probably different, I know much of the chorus is sung; read, Agamemnon often feels more like a poem than a play. 

It’s very quotable though. Lots of good passages. 

“ELDERS […] Among the worst of men 

an ancient Violence always breeds 

a new, young Violence at some time

or other, when the day comes round

appointed for its birth; 

the goddess who cannot be fought, 

unholy daring of black Ruin on the halls, 

the very image of its parents.” 

 Or: 

“ELDERS Tell me, why does this 

persistent fear

hover in front of my prophetic heart? 

My song is full of prophecies, 

unbidden and unpaid, 

and my heart doesn’t have the daring and the trust 

to spit away their meaning like

a dream of doubtful outcome. 

Ruin passed its prime when mooring-ropes 

were cast back on the sand, and our fleet sailed 

for Ilion.” 

This is the moment after Agamemnon has been killed: 

“ELDERS […] Oh, my king, my king, 

how shall I weep for you? 

What can my loving heart tell you? 

You lie here in this woven spider’s web 

breathing your life away murdered outrageously, 

trapped like a slave, 

tamed to a treacherous death, 

struck by her double-sided sword.” 

The cycle of violence is the central theme of the play, but Aeschylus picks Kassandra as the voice of terror and suffering—Paris steals Menalaos’s wife Helen; Menalaos and his brother Agamemnon then attack Troy; feeling pity for Troy, Artemis makes Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia; Klytaimestra kills Agamemnon to avenge the killing of her daughter; she herself will pay for that murder with her own death—it is a cycle of violence, but what does Kassandra, like many others in the Trojan war, have to do with any of this? 

4/ I’ve noted some of the bird imagery. Kassandra, a slave from Troy, wishes her fate to be like a nightingale’s (“a feathered shape and a sweet life free from pain”); Klytaimestra compares Kassandra in her last moments to a swan, singing “her funeral lament”; an Elder (in the chorus) compares Klytaimestra to “a hostile crow”, who “glories in her tuneless, bitter song.” 

5/ Here’s something else interesting: in this play, Artemis demands Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigeneia “in pity for the wretched”, as Agamemnon leads the ships attacking Troy. 

Sophocles changes that detail in Electra: 

“ELECTRA […] My father once, they tell me, hunting in

A forest that was sacred to the goddess,

Started an antlered stag. He aimed, and shot it,

Then made a foolish boast, of such a kind

As angered Artemis. Therefore she held up

The fleet, to make my father sacrifice

His daughter to her in requital for

The stag he’d killed…” 

(translated by H. D. F. Kitto) 

This changes matters: Artemis appears frivolous and petty, and the killing of Agamemnon becomes in a way more justifiable. 

6/ Whilst reading these plays, I’ve also been reading A Guide to Greek Theatre and Drama by Kenneth McLeish, which is probably not of much use to those of you familiar with ancient Greek drama but which is extremely helpful to me. 

This is interesting: 

“[Aeschylus’s] drama is not one of consecutive narrative (of the kind which predominates in Sophocles’ and Euripides’ surviving plays, where action is continuous) but of a systematic alteration of focus, pulling away from intimacy to reveal the wider perspective, and then closing back on another specific instance and another confrontation. In pre-Aeschylean drama, the hero’s main action might have been the subject of an entire play; in Aeschylus it is shown to be part of a much larger ‘action,’ of wider significance than the fate of a single individual.” 

This is true. The plays of Sophocles and Euripides that I’ve read (except for The Women of Troy) are about the main characters; Agamemnon is different, even Kassandra is part of the bigger picture.