Oxford University Press Euripides: Electra: Edited with Introduction and Commentary

This volume presents a newly edited text of Euripides' Electra with a scene-by-scene and line-by-line commentary that addresses a wide variety of questions, including the nature of Euripidean tragedy. In his Introduction and across several discussions in the commentary, David Kovacs presents an alternative to the current scholarly consensus on Euripides. Scholars following this consensus tell us that Euripides' play is a cynical take on the old story of Orestes' and Electra's revenge on Aegisthus and Clytaemestra. Both of the principal figures, we are told, are morally diminished, Electra inter alia by her excessive hatred of Clytaemestra and Orestes by his cynical reliance on Aegisthus' hospitable nature to get himself invited to the sacrifice at which he will kill his host. It is also alleged that this play virtually excludes the gods, who are part and parcel of the tragic genre. Kovacs shows that these and similar unfavourable judgements fail to take note of the practice of the other tragedians and also overlook evidence from Euripides' text, such as the frequent mention of the gods, that locate the play squarely within the tragic genre. What emerges is a play that is well constructed and thematically integrated; a play whose novelties--and an Athenian audience would not have wanted a play on an oft-treated myth to lack novelty--are all new ways of producing tragic effects found also in Aeschylus and Sophocles; a play that gives greater scope to the tragic view of the universe than even the corresponding plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, thereby confirming Aristotle's judgement that Euripides is 'the most tragic of the poets'; in short, a play that can be called a tragedy without qualification. The gap between Euripides' original manuscript and the earliest complete copy we possess is nearly two millennia. This volume makes a considerable number of suggestions for improving a Greek text that has been badly corrupted over this period of manual copying.