The Electra of Sophocles might be thought to prove the impossibility of objective literary criticism: so diverse are the interpretations to which it has given rise. The greatest divergence of opinion concerns the poet's attitude towards the matricidal vengeance. At one extreme we have a robust ‘Homeric’ Sophocles, untroubled by the moral squeamishness of an Aeschylus, and at the other an Aeschylean sensitiveness to the moral implications of the vengeance and a presumption that the Furies are only waiting for the play to end to initiate their traditional pursuit of Orestes. Critics are also divided between those who regard the moral and religious issue as central to the play and those for whom it is either absent or peripheral – incidental, one might say, to an essentially psychological drama. But even here, there is no agreement: for one critic Electra goes mad, for another she reaches the height of human arete.

I start from a fact which will hardly be contested: that Electra is full of reminiscences of the Choephori, which must mean that Sophocles wrote his play with the Oresteia constantly in mind. Now it is of course a substantial point of difference between Sophocles, on the one hand, and on the other Aeschylus (and Euripides and the tradition as a whole), that there is nothing in Sophocles about a pursuit of Orestes by the Erinyes of his mother. He is accordingly said to have ‘omitted the Furies’. This is not literally true. The word Erinys occurs four times in the play.