Elektra: Revenge in Ancient Greece

Few figures in Greek mythology embody vengeance like Elektra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Betrayal, grief, and justice shaped her tragic fate. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Armand D’Angour to explore Elektra’s story and its powerful new London stage production starring Brie Larson. Along the way, they delve into Sophocles' and Euripides' strikingly different portrayals - one noble and resolute, the other bitter and broken - unpacking what these versions reveal about morality, fate, and female agency in the ancient world. See Brie Larson star as Elektra in London's West End: https://www.thedukeofyorks.com/elektra Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on : https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:42Tristan Hughes?

  It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today, we're focusing on one of the most complex and compelling figures in ancient Greek mythology and tragedy: Elektra. A daughter whose path is first set in motion from the events of the legendary Trojan War. Elektra is the daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and hero of the Trojan War, whose fate was actually sealed before he reached Troy. After being stalled by stilled winds with his army on the way to Troy when they were trying to leave Greece, Agamemnon is told he must sacrifice his daughter, Elektra's sister, Iphigenia, to appease the goddess Artemis and restart the wind.

• 3:27Tristan Hughes?

  This Agamemnon does, and off he sails to Troy with his army, where he would lead the Greek forces in the fabled siege alongside famous names such as Achilles, Ajax, and Odysseus. Once he returns home, however, his grief-stricken wife, Clytemnestra, murders him as revenge for sacrificing their daughter. These events all lead to Elektra being consumed by grief for her father, rage, and an unrelenting desire for justice against her mother. Elektra's story is one of the most powerful explorations of revenge and morality in the ancient world, preserved in the plays of great Greek playwrights such as Isklus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

• 4:09Tristan Hughes?

  Indeed, both Sophocles and Euripides each wrote a tragedy titled Elektra, offering strikingly different portrayals of this famous heroine. In Sophocles' version, Elektra is noble, resolute, and unwavering in her pursuit of vengeance for her father. In contrast, Euripides presents a more psychologically raw and disturbing Elektra, bitter, broken, and consumed by years of suffering. These differences raise fascinating questions about justice, fate, and the portrayal of female agency in Greek tragedy. To help me unravel the story of Elektra, I was delighted to interview Professor Armand Dangour from Oxford University, a renowned classicist, musician, and author.

• 4:54Tristan Hughes?

  Now, Armand and I were delighted to watch a new stage production of Elektra in London a couple of weeks back. The performance stars Bri Larson in the eponymous role, and it was certainly a powerful production that stayed true to the original. Armand and I recorded this interview a couple of days after we watched the performance, and I hope you enjoy.

• 5:23Tristan Hughes?

  Armand, it is great to see you again. Welcome back to the podcast.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Thank you. Nice to see you too.

• 5:29Tristan Hughes?

  And it is not long time no see, because we recently went to watch the play Elektra in London. I'd never seen a performance of Elektra before. I hadn't really even understood the plot quite in all its detail, but this is a rather chilling ancient play, can't we say, with revenge and matricide right at its heart?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yes, and it's part of the story of Agamemnon, the great leader of the Achaeans, the Greeks, who goes to Troy. And destroys it. But in order to do that, he has to get an expedition together. And because he has offended the goddess Artemis, she requires that in order for the fleet to sail, she becalms the winds, but for the fleet to sail, the winds have to be brought back by the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia. So he kills his daughter in a ritual sacrifice. And this is a great affront to his wife Clytemnestra. And when Agamemnon is away for ten years fighting at Troy,

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Clytemnestra gets together with Aegisthus, and when Agamemnon returns, she and Aegisthus kill him.

• 6:45Tristan Hughes?

  And Aegisthus is like her, is her lover kind of thing back in Greece whilst he's away fighting in the Trojan War, the name we know so well.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Indeed. Yeah. So her lover and a rival clan of Agamemnon. So when Agamemnon returns, he's killed by Clytemnestra. And their son Orestes and their daughter Elektra have to avenge this killing. Now, you could say, well, why didn't they feel upset about the death of their sister Iphigenia? But there are various cultural reasons perhaps why they think the killing of their father is more of a crime than the killing of their daughter. I mean, admittedly, the, the killing of their daughter has been required by a goddess, killing of Agamemnon's daughter. But in any case, they set out,

• 7:33Speaker 03

  they, they have strong feelings of vengeance. So it's not just Elektra, it's Orestes as well. He has his own story. And of course, he appears in the play Elektra. So the question, it's really about the aftermath of the killing of Agamemnon. And so, as you say, it's about vengeance.

• 7:48Tristan Hughes?

  And so Elektra, as you've highlighted there, so she is the daughter of the great king Agamemnon, famous from the Trojan War. And the story itself then, should we be imagining the setting? Is this going back almost 3,000 years into Bronze Age Greece or early Iron Age Greece, 3,000 years? Is that supposed to be the, the setting of this tale?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Up to a point, yes. So the fifth century B C Athenian dramatists, essentially three, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, all write as the story of Elektra. And they all go back to myths that seem to go back to the Bronze Age. But they very often make them more contemporary for their audience. So although we might think historically this is a myth that is set in Bronze Age Mycenae, you know, a site that we can still visit today. They might have thought, well, let's take this on its own terms as the story of the vengeance

• 8:57Speaker 03

  of a young woman against her mother for killing her father. And a lot of contemporary issues of gender or of justice might then be raised in the course of such a play. So we can't really find out whether there's any kind of historical truth to the story of Agamemnon's being killed. I mean, you know, we think we can trace quite a lot of historical truth to the Trojan War, the assault of a Greek force against what might have been

• 9:40Speaker 03

  a Hittite kingdom in Asia Minor or something local to the Hittites in Western Asia Minor, where Troy is located.

• 9:49Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, the Hittites are powerful Bronze Age kingdom in Anatolia in Turkey at that time, yes.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. And some Hittite documents show that there was a kingdom in the Troad, that's where Troy is, which had a king or a prince called Alexandus, the first name, therefore, that we can relate to Alexander, another name for Paris, the Trojan prince, and the name Priam seems to come up, and the name Achaeans as the enemy. So these Hittite documents are extraordinary on tablets as evidence for some kind of historical Trojan War. In the thirteenth century B C. So this is the times that it's all taking place.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  And that then leads to centuries of myth-making, which end up with, first of all, the epics of Homer in the eighth century B C, which tell the story of the Trojan War, en passant, when it's talking about the anger of Achilles, for example, or the return home from the Trojan War of the disuse.

• 10:59Tristan Hughes?

  The Iliad and the Odyssey, yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  That's the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that's the first piece of ancient Western literature and hugely influential, those two epics. And they touch upon the story of Orestes, they call him a mother killer. So Homer knew the story, he doesn't elaborate on it. But he talks about the return of heroes and the turn of Agamemnon, and we see a little bit into the future when Agamemnon, having been killed by Thyssen Lestra, causes Orestes to take revenge and to kill his mother, Thyssen Lestra.

• 11:39Tristan Hughes?

  So Amon, that's really interesting. So can we presume then that's by the fifth century B C, when we get to the time of those playwrights that you've mentioned, for the story, the tragedy of Elektra, the likes of Sophocles and Euripides that we're going to explore, that the name Elektra, the whole myth, all of those names would have been known by Athenians, and then also the name of Elektra would have been known too, as the daughter involved in the kind of revenge against her mother alongside Orestes?

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Yes, they were all part of a great mythical background, which would have been known to Greeks of Sophocles' time. Sometimes the names aren't exactly the same as you get in Perma Zillieto, sometimes they change.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  For example, the Oedipus story, his wife in the Iliad is called Epikasta, not Jocasta. So we know Oedipus' wife is Jocasta, but she was known by a different name. Some of the names in tragedy, as far as we can tell, were invented by the tragedians themselves for the first time. So they're quite inventive about that. You know, tragedy doesn't have to rely on existing myths entirely. It can innovate. And it seems to have been one of the tasks of tragedians to create a new story,

• 13:04Speaker 03

  create new characters, create new names for them. So Antigone of Sophocles, that great story about the daughter of Oedipus, who buries her brother Polynices. I think the name Antigone doesn't appear in texts prior to Sophocles' Antigone. So it doesn't mean it wasn't known about, it doesn't mean that the daughter didn't somehow exist in the mythical background. But it means that the tragedians can feel free to invent the stories or to reinvent them for their own age, which I think is, you know, it opens up the possibilities for modern authors. And you find, you know, today you get some Natalie Haines writing about Pandora in her own feminist

• 13:49Speaker 03

  way. And you get authors like Madeleine Miller or Emily Howser writing revised versions of ancient myths. And there's nothing wrong with that because the ancient tragedians did the same thing.

• 14:01Tristan Hughes?

  And so does that also bring us nicely on to Elektra and the story of Elektra? Were there different versions of Elektra's story created by these ancient Greek playwrights in the 5th century B.C.? What versions do we have?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it is interesting that the story of Elektra is unique in that it is treated by all three of the great Attic tragedians. So Aeschylus treats her story in the second play of the trilogy that is called the Orestia trilogy, which is about the return of Agumemnon, his killing, and then the killing of Clytemnestra in the second play of that trilogy, which is called the Coeifery, the picture bearers. And in that you have Elektra Peir.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  As the wounded child of Agamemnon who seeks her death. Though I, I think that the emphasis is more on Orestes in that particular play. And at the end of it, when Pythamnestra is killed, having begged her son not to kill her. Her furies are released, that is the spirits of vengeance. That will haunt Orestes in the third of that trilogy, the Eumenides. And will eventually lead him to a court of justice in Athens. Which will decide on his guilt or innocence.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  And which famously has a split verdict, which then has to be decided by the goddess Athena. And the goddess decides for rather dubious reasons, with a rather dubious explanation as to why. That he shouldn't be executed, he should be sent into exile, so the punishment is mitigated. And the reasons that she gives is that killing a father is worse than killing a mother. Because after all, a man is just, eh eh eh, well. What she says is that the, the woman is just the furrow in which the seed is planted. So it's a somewhat patriarchal view of the relative importance of men and women.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  That ends Aeschylus' trilogy. Anyway, but none of that is evident in the other two treatments of Elektra, which are standalone. And now, we know that ancient plays were created as trilogies. They weren't necessarily always connected trilogies like the Orestia. But we then have standalone plays by both Sophocles and Euripides. Not clear whether they were. Written at exactly the same time, or in response to one another, or which indeed came first of the two, but they both take the figure of Elektra as central.

• 16:53Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, so she becomes the main character. So it's kind of an evolution from Aeschylus, where she's part of the story. But, but in these later versions, I said, the name Elektra is, is the name of the play. She, she comes right to the fore, this daughter of Agamemnon seeking revenge.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes. And so, as you say, the names of these two plays are Elektra. The Euripides' version is typically Euripidean. I mean, he was always ready to do something clever and unusual and innovative. And in Aeschylus' Coeifere, what you get is that Elektra is awaiting the return of Orestes to avenge, because Orestes has been sent away into exile. So he hasn't been in Mycenae, in the palace, whereas Elektra has stayed there. And she's waiting for him to return and avenge her father's death.

• 17:48Tristan Hughes?

  Awaiting a brother's return. Got it.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  That's it. And when he does return, she recognizes him by means of tokens. So there's a lock of hair, which he recognizes his, there's a piece of clothing, and there's his footprint. But Euripides makes fun of these tokens. So Euripides has Elektra presented with a lock of hair, and she says, well, look, anybody can have blonde hair. It doesn't have to be my brother's hair.

• 18:14Tristan Hughes?

  So almost a swipe at a past tragedian there.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  It really, it really is a swipe at the tradition that you could recognize Orestes through these tokens. And then, you know, how about a piece of clothing? She says, well, you know, if I knitted him a piece of clothing when he was a baby, it would have had to grow alongside him in order to still be, you know, clothing that he could wear today. So that's not going to work either. And, and as for the footprint, how could you leave a footprint on stony ground? And anyway, it's a man's foot and not a woman's. So all these tokens are made fun of in Euripides. So he's doing something with the tradition. That aims to be quite self-conscious, I think. He's also, he's also created a story for Elektra.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  She's not just staying in the palace, which, you know, she has stayed in, according to the Sophoclean story. She's married off to a local peasant by Irgistus and Thaddeus. They've decided they want to get rid of her. So they marry her off to a local peasant and she comes on at the beginning carrying a pitcher of water as if she, the great princess, is just a mere peasant wife. So he's changed that story and she's much more embittered by all of that. Whereas the Sophoclean Elektra, well, she's, she's determined to have justice. She talks about vengeance and she eventually recognizes Aristides when he returns

• 19:43Speaker 03

  because he comes back pretending to be a stranger because he knows that if he's found in Mycenae, he will be killed. So he's, as it were, disguised and saying Aristides is dead and bringing his ashes in an urn. And she is so distraught at this because she's been waiting for him to return that her response makes him take pity on her and he says, look, I am indeed Aristides and eventually proves that he is by showing her the ring that he has been given.

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• 22:20Tristan Hughes?

  So it is interesting, Armand, how, I remember when studying Euripides for a bit at school and you compare it to Sophocles and Descartes. It's funny how even in the 5th century B.C., these different tragedians, whether they are, you know, competing at the same festival or their plays are in direct competition with one another, which I guess we should also remember that these plays are created to be performed as part of these competitions in Athens. That you get almost jibes at one another, but also Euripides, is it fair to say he's, is he a bit radical, he's quite new in his approach to the stories compared to those tragedians who have gone before them, and he likes doing that, and Elektra is a good example of that?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, he's definitely the most radical, the most avant garde of all of the tragedians. I mean, the others, in a sense, are the classic tragedies that you might expect. Euripides does write a couple of classic tragedies, so his Bacchae, one of his very late tragedies, his Hippolytus, they're fairly classic in terms of their structure and the sensibility that they evince. But, but some of his other plays are completely wacky. I mean, his Helen, for example, he takes the story of Helen never having gone to Troy, but a phantom went to Troy, and Helen got stranded in Egypt.

• 23:39Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, Egypt, yes.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  And, and Menelaus comes back from the Trojan War and gets washed up on the Egyptian shore, and Helen appears, and he says, what are you doing here? And she says, I've been here for the last 10 years, why have you been fighting for me at Troy? And it wasn't the, it was a phantom. I mean, so, you know, that's a weird take on the Helen story, and he's happy to do that. And the other thing is that Euripides really was up for a laugh. So, one of the things he was accused of was being a tragedian who allowed for humour, comic elements in, in his tragedies. Now, a tragedy doesn't have to be tragic. In, in the ancient world, as you said, it was a competition. So, you had a competition. Originally,

• 24:21Speaker 03

  tragedy seems to have meant the, a goat song, meaning a song or a presentation that the first prize is, is a goat as a prize. But that's really what it was initially. It was a competition for some kind of play or drama or song, where you had a prize, and it continues to be competitive. You have these big tragic festivals in Athens, and the tragedians put on their plays, and they are ranked, and what matters is winning the first prize. Greeks weren't too keen on second and third and place people, you know, what matters is winning. So Euripides, in fact, doesn't win a lot of prizes because his plays are seen to be...

• 25:06Tristan Hughes?

  Many goats.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  There doesn't have many goats, but Sophocles won quite a lot. So Euripides is is bringing in comic elements and you can you can see this up, well certainly in his electorate, you can see that because this gibe about the tokens being worthless way of recognizing a resties. I mean, that would have surely raised a laugh in in the theatre. And similarly, you get, you know, Helen being so weird as I mentioned. And even in in his back eye, the story of the destruction of Penthus by Dionysus, which is a gruesome and ghastly story, but at the beginning, you get the old men who, Tyresius and Cadmus, who are being faithful devotees

• 25:50Speaker 03

  talking about how difficult it is to sort of dance and, you know, walk up a mountain side with their their old sticks. And so almost played for laugh, these old guys. A bit like those two muppets, talking to each other.

• 26:03Tristan Hughes?

  You did mention Dionysus there, the god of wine, which is an interesting feature of a god in the play too, which we might come back to, I think, with Euripides. I'd like to explore Elektra's character a bit more because something which also strikes me with this is if I think of ancient Greek women, I think of, well, women who don't really have many freedoms at all in ancient Greek society. And yet you've got a lecturer at the forefront of this play, leading this vengeance arc and being a key proponent behind it. I mean, does her portrayal, does it challenge those ancient Greek traditional ideas of femininity and an ideal ancient Greek woman?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yes, well, one of the almost paradoxes of ancient Greek tragedy is that it has a lot of women doing things that are extraordinary or unusual, out there, killing or and that's often been, you know, a question, why? Why do we see this side of things when we know that Athenian society in particular tended to want to ensure that women were kept indoors? Women who are of citizen class would be married very young, they would become housewives. Their their main tasks would be to do with weaving and also things like mourning and religious tasks.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  That's how women would be perceived in the society in which these plays were being presented. And yet, these women are not like that at all. As you say, they have agency, they can talk and discuss and have ideas about the divine and about justice and about vengeance. Now, the question is, what are the tragedians doing? And yes, I think they are showing a different side. They're exploring a different side of femininity and one that would not have been encountered very much in their own time. And of course, these plays are not about ordinary women. They're about women in a much earlier mythical age, and they're about

• 28:09Speaker 03

  noble women, they're about princesses, they're about queens. So you could say that it gives license to the tragedians to explore femininity in a different way by saying, okay, yes, these are women, but these are women at a time when they could assert themselves. When, up to a point at any rate, they had more agency and they were of a sufficient status to be able to act essentially like men. And now that, of course, is a bit shocking in itself because a woman who acts like a man and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus, for example, is specifically called someone who thinks like a man, and this is something quite sinister about her.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  This would have been a sensation for a Greek audience, for an Athenian audience, to see women acting in this way and speaking in this way. And maybe that's the point. It's an opportunity to show women who might be considered rather monstrous or rather frightening or alarming to an audience. Or indeed to, uh, uh, one shouldn't forget, of course, that the Greeks had a number of goddesses, such as Athena or Hera, who they worshipped as women with exceptional power. So maybe, you know, there's also that connection. So when you get Euripides, for example, writing the story of Medea.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Who kills her own two children to spite her husband Jason and then gets whisked away at the end of the play because she is the granddaughter of the god of the sun Helios. Uh, so she gets off scot-free at the end of that play. And, and so the audience must be thinking, my goodness, you know, this is another view of a woman, not of the kind that we can experience, but someone who has a sinister divine side to her.

• 29:59Tristan Hughes?

  It's kind of, it, it's almost, I guess, for an ancient Greek man watching that play, I guess, kind of scary in their mindset, fearful of what a woman could do. Is, is that fair to say in their kind of mindset?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  I think that's, there, there must have been something of that kind, you know, you don't want to have a wife like that. You don't want to live with women in your, your society who are like Elektra, or who are like Medea, or who are like Antigone. But then, you know, they don't have to live in, in that kind of society because they have a, a different world. They're not in the mythical world. So on the other hand, you know, women have got the capacity to think and act in the ways that tragedians show them, thinking and acting. And, and therefore perhaps it is the duty of a tragedian to allow that side to, to be exposed in their mythical fictional worlds.

• 30:57Tristan Hughes?

  I'd like to focus one more question on Elektra before we move on to other themes of the play, which is kind of bringing it back to what you said near the start when you were summarizing the plot of Elektra. Now, just as a recap, Elektra's father Agamemnon, after returning from the Trojan War, he's murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. But the motive for that, as you've highlighted, is before he sails to Troy, in order to get the winds so that his ships can sail to Troy with his soldiers to appease the goddess Artemis, that he has to sacrifice another of his daughters, who is Elektra's sister, Iphigenia, and Agamemnon goes through with it. Clytemnestra wants to get revenge, wants

• 31:41Tristan Hughes?

  to kill Agamemnon because- He sacrifices their daughter. But Elektra, regardless of that, she wants to kill Clytemnestra for murdering her father, even though he murdered her sister. So is this an interesting part of the plot? Because I also know in the play, there's that whole part when Clytemnestra and Elektra talk and she tries to justify why she kills her husband by saying, well, he killed my daughter, your sister. Do we, do we know why she ultimately decides that she wants to kill Clytemnestra rather than side with her and accept her point of view? In that whole, I mean, it's a, it's a horrible family, basically.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  It is, you know, you could say heroism and the requirements to avenge is the seduction of Helen by Paris leads Agamemnon to do something that he wouldn't otherwise have wanted to do, which is to sacrifice Iphigenia. I mean, there might be some interesting quasi-historical background to this. So in one of the plays about Iphigenia, she's about to be sacrificed, but Artemis actually replaces her with a deer. So the sacrifice is that of an animal and not of a, of a human being. And that reminds us a little bit of the story of Abraham and Isaac, because remember he was about to sacrifice

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Isaac, his son in the Bible, and God substitutes a ram. And that might perhaps reflect some historical memory of human sacrifice in early Bronze Age, uh, leading to a world of animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice was very common in the, in the Greek world, but human sacrifice was abhorred. So, and you know, there are even some archaeological indications that there was the killing, ritual killing of, of children, certainly in, in the Phoenician world. Uh, but, uh, possibly in the Greek Bronze Age world as well.

• 33:44Tristan Hughes?

  Phoenician world, that, that's Tyre, that's the Lebanon region and the Phoenicians.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. Yes. Um, the biblical world, you might say.

• 33:51Tristan Hughes?

  Sail across the world, yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  But that's aside, I mean, you know, one doesn't know how much of that sort of historical memory was enshrined in these stories, but the fact is that the, the myth held that Agamemnon kills his daughter. Because she's required to by Artemis. Again, the reasons for that are not always very clear. He seems to have insulted Artemis in some way, perhaps by saying he was a better hunter than her, or by killing one of her sacred deer, or something of that kind. So she's got it in for him, becomes the winds, and the expedition is there, gathered at the shores of Aulis. And in order to get it on its way, he does what he's required to do, which is, you know, horrible.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  On the other hand, you might say, and maybe, you know, Elektra feels that that is something that the god has required, the goddess has required, whereas the killing of her father by Clytemnestra seems a much more selfish act. So although, as you rightly say, Clytemnestra does argue that this was the reason she felt justified. She felt it was right to kill the man who killed her daughter. That doesn't seem to be taken terribly seriously by Elektra. And perhaps, again, it's because of this misogynistic view that a mother's blood is really not as important as a father's. And maybe that would have been accepted by the Athenian audience, that actually it was a worse crime

• 35:22Speaker 03

  to kill her husband, for Clytemnestra to kill her husband, than it was for Orestes and Elektra to kill their mother. Especially because, again, Orestes is commanded to do this by the god Apollo. So that's his excuse for it. You know, in all the plays, he's commanded to return from exile and to kill the woman who has killed Agamemnon, his father, the king. So, but again, the fact that Clytemnestra makes that argument, and makes it quite powerfully, in all the plays, actually, she leads for her justified behaviour,

• 36:01Speaker 03

  suggests to me that the tragedians did want us not to simply think this was a straightforward tale of the bad person gets her just desserts. Yes. They want us to recognise that there is a moral dilemma here. We should think, is it really right that she deserved to die? Doesn't she have good reasons for having killed Agamemnon? Yes, there are bad reasons as well. She and her lover Egestus set up in the royal palace. Egesus himself is not a very pleasant individual, said all sorts of good reasons why the two of them perhaps shouldn't be let off the hook, but you can't simply say they were all bad and they had no reason to do what they did.

• 36:47Tristan Hughes?

  I think exactly, also given the fact that the major events of these stories always seem to circle around the killing of another member of your family, which you see again and again. I mean, even with that divine commandment that Orestes has received to kill his mother, when Orestes enters the stage, do you see that moral dilemma in him as well, even though Elektra is on the side saying, you need to go through this, you need to kill our mother? But is that moral dilemma also reflected then before the moment happens that there's almost a wavering in the decision to actually go ahead and commit matricide?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Yes, I mean, so there are a few lines of Orestes, aren't there, where he says something like, it's a terrible thing to kill one's own mother. So he recognizes that it's not an easy demand that he has to follow. She stiffens his resolve, I mean, in a sense, what you get is a much more vengeful woman than you get a sense that she's the one who's deciding that this should be done.

• 37:52Tristan Hughes?

  Elektra's pushing it, okay.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think that leads us to think more psychologically about what's going on. Jung famously thought that the Oedipus complex, in which, you know, Freud had suggested that young infant boys want to murder their father and then suppress that because they, you know, they want to be at one with their mother, so that sense that they love their mother and kill their father that we get in the play of the Oedipus. But Jung suggested that the counterpart for girls was an Elektra complex. And I think one of the reasons for that is that Elektra clearly resents and hates her mother in the play.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  And that hatred and resentment is balanced by excessive love and loyalty towards her father. So she can resent her mother and perhaps even ignore her sister's death.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  Which is the justification of Titan Nestra killing Agamemnon, in order to argue strongly that Titan Nestra deserves to die. So, I mean, you might say, there are questions of mother-daughter relationships and sibling rivalry, all these things perhaps are raised unconsciously or raised in some way by the way this Elektra play is mapped out.

• 39:22Tristan Hughes?

  How do you think the Athenian audience would have reacted ultimately to the seeing through this murder, Orestes being encouraged by Elektra? And it almost feels a bit Hammurabi law code, could we say, in the fact like an eye for an eye, like a murder for a murder kind of logic? I mean, how would the Athenian audience have reacted to that, that delivering of justice that they would have just witnessed in the play?

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I think that's very interesting to think that the Athenian audience is likely to have been aware of Aeschylus's treatment, where you get indeed, as you say, an eye for an eye, the lex talionis, the notion that someone gets killed, you kill them, a vendetta that runs through this family, was seen as itself at a terrible blight. And one that in Aeschylus's trilogy is finally put to rest by the introduction of law. And this was terribly important, I think, for, for an Athenian audience, because they had these legal institutions. I mean, that particular case is the Areopagus Court of Athens,

• 40:35Speaker 03

  which judges the final guilt or innocence of Orestes. But it's, it's like saying, look, you know, if I kill X because X has killed Y, it just goes on and on and on. And this kind of vendetta has to come to an end. And how should we do that? Well, both in Aeschylus's Arysthaia and in, and in Euripides' play Orestes, which is about Orestes himself coming to judgment in Argos.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  That is, the, the solution is that it should be taken to law. And that the law and your, a, a, a court of one's peers should judge whether or not one is guilty and innocent, or whether one should be killed or not. And that then ends this cycle of vengeance. So yes, the audience would have thought, it is terrible that you're just killing someone who's killed someone else, who, you know, and how, and when will this ever stop? But they would also have known that there is a solution. And the solution is in their own institutions, their own legal institutions. So some scholars think that a lot of Greek tragedy aims to show the Athenian audience how lucky they are.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  So in a way, the Athenians watching these mythical stories, ninety-nine percent of which are not set in Athens at all. So they're set in other parts of the Greek world, Thebes, Mycenae, Argos. Uh, the, the, the, the reason for their success and the reception by the Athenian audience is because precisely they show the kind of thing that can no longer happen in their own Athenian world.

• 42:15Tristan Hughes?

  Is, is it this idea that they have a more civilized way of living compared to these people living hundreds of years ago, these mythological people?

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah. They have created a civilization. And that's one explanation for Aristotle's view that the proper pleasure of tragedy is catharsis. It's, it's, you get pleasure because you feel pity and fear, Aristotle said. But those feelings are then released. Now, some people say that's because actually you can feel those things, but the scenario that is put in front of you is a fictional one. And so you exercise these strong emotions on a fiction. And when you emerge from that fiction, you feel relieved. Part of that sense of catharsis, of purgation, of, of liberation from these heavy feelings

• 43:08Speaker 03

  is because you recognize that the world of the play is not the world in which you live.

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• 44:36Tristan Hughes?

  I'd like to move on now to talk about another part of the play, and indeed of Greek tragedies in general, that we haven't talked about yet, but is always central. And we saw it during the more, and we saw it during the performance a couple of nights ago, which is the chorus. Now, Armand, I know you love the chorus, but what exactly was the chorus? And how important a role does it play in the whole story?

• 45:01Speaker 03

  So the chorus is sometimes thought to have been the original element of tragic plays. A group of devotees of God, for example, singing hymns. And then what you have is the emergence sometime in the 6th century B.C. of a player who impersonates a hero or something that comes from the mythical background. And then the two come together. I mean, the origins of tragedy are very murky, but, but, you know, one has a sense that some early tragedies have much larger groups. So early tragedy of Aeschylus, the socked women appears to have perhaps fifty, or at least to represent fifty women.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  So let's assume that the chorus has been one of the original elements of a tragedy. And of course, chorus also represents Athenian religion. So in Athenian religion, there were groups of men, sometimes groups of women as well, singing hymns and marching in honour of some god or other. So you have, for example, a genre called the dithyram, in which in the fifth century B.C., it became a formal performance event with fifty men and fifty boys in a large circle, singing hymns in honour of the god Dionysus.

• 46:22Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, it'd just be men, would it? Interesting. Okay.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so essentially, there were male choruses. There were female choruses as well, but mainly relating to female religious occasions. So there were separate women's festivals, for example. But male festivals, male festivals had male choruses who could appear in public, unlike women choruses. And these male choruses would sing hymns to gods. They would worship gods in that way. And then they are incorporated into tragedy in ways that don't exactly replicate what the chorus would have been doing in religious terms.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  Sometimes it looks as if the choruses in tragedy do exactly that. So you might get a chorus singing a prayer in honour of a god in the course of Antigone or even Elektra. But it's not really a full religious kind of song. So, you know, there's again some debate about what the choruses are doing in tragedy. But what they end up doing for most of us is giving a commentary on the story. So they comment on the story. They rarely actually take part in it. They rarely become agents of any kind.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Sometimes they're assumed to be very present amongst the people who are on stage amongst the, as were the main actors. In the case of Electro, they have the women of Myseni, and they seem to be there observing what's going on and observing the killing. So in the recent production that we saw, it's as if they are the members of the public who, when Clitor Nestor is killed, they're announced in a kind of radio-like way as clustering around and looking at the dead bodies and looking at the gory scene in front of them. But we know in ancient tragedies, the chorus consisted of, or eventually at any rate consisted

• 48:29Speaker 03

  of fifteen men, so it was all male choruses. And they had these interludes in which they sang and danced. So between the action of the play and the speeches given by the actors, the protagonists, you had the chorus come on, comment on the action, sing and dance, prayers to gods who happen to be engaged, maybe sing prayer for mercy or to allow something to happen that they fear is not going to happen, or something of that kind, and occasionally interchange with the actors about what's happening and express emotions. So they act a little bit as if they're

• 49:11Speaker 03

  an intermediate group between the actors and the audience. They kind of represent the actor, actors, they kind of represent us, the audience. So they will reflect in the way we might, oh, what a horrible, terrible thing, you know, Clitor Nestor is dead and bleeding, the way that we, the audience, might be expected to react. So they're this kind of intermediate group. But the key thing is that they are there to provide musical interludes. So, I mean, they were very much the music of the play. These were like operas. In fact, when opera was first invented in the 16th century, they were trying to replicate what they thought Greek theatre was doing. Um. And and so they thought, well, you know, there there is this singing that goes on.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  They tried to work out what the music was, but with they didn't have enough evidence at that stage. We we now have more and and they created Italian, you know, wonderful thorantine offer and oratorio. As a result of not really knowing what ancient music was like, probably a blessed relief. But the chorus then, in the production that we saw, actually had rather lovely singing parts. So four part harmonies and they were singing, uh, you know, making their comments very clear for us to hear and and their interjections.

• 50:30Tristan Hughes?

  And it feels almost like Elektra is consulting them almost, as you say, when she's talking, well, they're they're kind of giving their opinions on what she's thinking about, you know, about murdering Clytemnestra. When she hears that Orestes has died, that fake news that he's died, you know, and she's bereft and everything like that, and all hope is lost. And, you know, the chorus is that almost, as you say, that reflecting reflecting her thoughts into someone else, when someone else is not on stage, one of the main other main protagonists.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. They so they do reflect, they do advise as well. So you know, sometimes the advice of the chorus is is part of the action. So in in saying Sophocles' Antigone, when the chorus say, you really, they say to Creon, who has ordered Antigone to die by being walled up, they say, you really, you should release her, you know, you you've made the wrong decision. And he then waivers and decides that he will do that too late. But, you know, they so they do have a power of intervention and they seem to be, as in this case, people who have an interest in what's going on. So the women of my scene will have some interest.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Now, if you imagine in the ancient theatre, these would have been men dressed in long robes, impersonating women. It does seem rather strange that we have to think of them as a women's chorus, but there are a lot of women's choruses. So most tragedies actually have choruses, which, you know, at least half the ones, the tragedies we have are women's choruses.

• 52:02Tristan Hughes?

  Let's talk about the end of the Elektra in Euripides and Sophocles, because it is not the murder of Clytemnestra that is the ending of the story. So how does the story of Elektra, where the play is Elektra, so Sophocles and Euripides, how do these stories, how do they end? And are there clear differences between the two?

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's again Euripides' interest in psychology. He wants to know how, after they've killed their mother, how Orestes and Elektra are going to react to their own actions. And so what we get is quite a long afterlude in which they express a sense of real remorse and guilt at what has happened. And that, in a way, takes the place of what you get in Aeschylus, where, you know, very physically, the spirits of vengeance appear, ready to hound Orestes. And, you know, they will eventually hound him to the court in Athens

• 53:06Speaker 03

  in, in the, at the end of that trilogy, and, and will be assuaged by what happens. In, in Euripides, there's that sort of emotional response of, of the two of them to having killed their mother, showing that, I think it leaves us very uncomfortable, because, and I'm sure that's Euripides' purpose, because although he does point out that, you know, Orestes is going to be hounded by, by the spirits of vengeance, what is more important is showing that their own psyches have been traumatized by what they've done.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  And that is so different from Sophocles, where it's almost like a revengeous tragedy, where you expect revenge to have taken place, and it happens in its fullness. They kill Clytemnestra, they then lure Igestus into the room where he sees the dead Clytemnestra, and he is himself stabbed to death. And that's it. Ta-da, we have our vengeance.

• 54:12Tristan Hughes?

  Woo!

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 54:13Tristan Hughes?

  We've done it, yeah.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  That's right. You know, the gods have commanded, the vengeance has been taken. And that's, you know, that's his story. In Euripides, what you get is a resolution which comes out of the blue because the other siblings, Castor and Polyduses, who are also divine characters, appear and they say, look, this is what's going to happen. This is called the deosexmarcina, the god from the crane, because they'll be hoisted aloft like divine beings. And so there is no resolution on the human level. When those things look intractable on the human level, then the tragedians who like using this particular deosexmarcina bring in the gods to say, look, okay, guys, this

• 54:59Speaker 03

  is what's going to happen. Elektra, you are going to marry Orestes' friend Piladis, and if happily, alas, Orestes, you are going to be judged for your crime. And so they make the resolution to the play. To us, it's a very unsatisfactory idea that a, you know, a god or two gods can come.

• 55:19Tristan Hughes?

  Divine intervention.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, can just suddenly appear and say, look, this is how it's going to end. Because that is how fate has decreed that it ends. I mean, that's the point. We all know how these things end. But actually, if the, on the human level, it looks as if things are going sadly awry, as for example in Sophocles' play, the Philoctetes, where there seems to be an impasse. You know, this Philoctetes is meant to get to Troy with his bow, but it's not going to happen because he won't be persuaded and he can't be taken there by force, or the bow can't be taken there by force. And then you get the god on the machine, in that case Apollo, the god on the crane, coming in and saying, look, this is what's going to happen. He's going to go to Troy, he's going to bring his bow with him.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Sorry, in that case, it's Heracles who appears and says, my bow will be taken to Troy. So you get these, and Euripides was fond of this device. He used it in his Orestes, that's where Apollo appears. And, you know, and here in his Elektra, Castor and Polidoukis produce a solution to something that looks like a very difficult emotional situation for the kids.

• 56:27Tristan Hughes?

  If anyone wants to look up the story of Philoctetes, just be aware that I believe he has a very, very smelly foot.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  That's him, yes.

• 56:35Tristan Hughes?

  So let's talk about Jung quickly and go to the 20th century, the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung, because you mentioned his name earlier and he is with whom we associate that the Oedipus complex. But does he also try to create an Elektra complex too? What is this whole story with Jung and the Elektra?

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Yes, so Jung and Freud initially were collaborators and Freud came up with his...

• 57:02Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, Freud's Oedipus complex, my apologies.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Freud came up with the Oedipus complex and elaborated it at some length because he felt that the Sophocles play gave us a model for thinking about infant mental development. And in our very earliest infancy, we sense this third party in our lives, the father, and we want to obliterate it from our lives because we have this nice relationship with the mother, we're on the breast, we feel at one, and suddenly there's this this third party that comes into our consciousness, we want to obliterate that. So we have murderous feelings, which we immediately suppress because we know that they're not good.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  And that leads to all kinds of defenses and unconscious repressions. And similarly, our love for our mother, which is, you know, which is wholesale, you know, we don't separate wanting to be with from what then eventually will become sexual feelings. All of that seems to be elaborated for Freud in the Oedipus story as told by Sophocles.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Well, the question then arises, what about girls? Do they feel the same wonders with the mother? Do they feel the desire to obliterate the father? And Freud probably would have said, well, yes, we all are subject to some kind of Oedipus complex. But Jung didn't feel that. And perhaps as a sort of rivalry, he brings up, but only en passant, he doesn't elaborate it in the way that Freud elaborates the Oedipus complex. He brings up the idea of the Elektra complex. We should call it the Elektra complex. And, you know, you have a few paragraphs about that, but but not elaborated. But he would have known, as Freud would have known, the myth of Elektra very well. And of course, what that does allow us to think about, and I think both of these are

• 58:56Speaker 03

  good to think with, even if there is no real evidence for either complex.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  What allows us to think about are things like mother-daughter rivalry and resentment. So you might not want to kill your mother, but you certainly, young girls might feel a certain resentment and indeed feel that they want to be closer to their father and that the mother should be out of the picture. And that would then be modeled on the story of Elektra.

• 59:24Tristan Hughes?

  To think the tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, who entered one of these festivals in Athens more than 2000 years ago in the hope of winning a goat with their Elektra. To think that from those beginnings and creating those tragedies that they now have endured down to the present day over thousands of years and remain so popular. The legacy of Greek tragedies, including Elektra, is astonishing. I mean, why do you think? Do you do you think that they've remained so popular? Why we find the story of Elektra so popular today? If you can nail it down to one particular reason, I'd be incredibly grateful, but I appreciate that it's quite complex.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Why do they retain their power? I think I would just have to agree with with Freud that they they have things which resonate with our psychology and things that we can.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  See in a very concrete way on stage that are indeed quite alien to us, but we recognise that they seemed less alien to ancient audiences. But the idea of, you know, a sibling rivalry or a mother father relationship, or a desire to kill that, you know, can be justified by ideas of vengeance or justice. These are things which are very hard for us to imagine happening in our own everyday lives. And therefore, their kind of, you know, extreme presentation.

• 1:01:01Tristan Hughes?

  Extraordinary, yes.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Hmm. With these kind of larger than life characters and these plots that strike us as horrendous in some ways. I think that's part of the fascination, the fact that they are both alien and yet we understand what's going on.

• 1:01:19Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Armand, that's a lovely thought to finish it on. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 1:01:30Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Armand Don Gore talking you through the story of Elektra, this extraordinary woman of ancient Greek mythology and tragedy. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you want more ancient history videos and clips, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at @AncientsTristan. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.

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