How Does Sophocles Use Dialogue In Electra

After reading Electra by Sophocles, I came to the conclusion that it was just another retelling of The Libations Bearers by Aeschylus. In Aeschylus The Libation Bearers right after Orestes’ kills Aegisthus there is dialogue between his mother and himself. Before the dialogue happens Orestes’ brings his mother over to where he killed Aegisthus, so that she could be killed by him too. The dialogue that happens between the Orestes and his mother is that she is trying to get him to not kill her because she is his mother and that she raised him and that she did not give him away. His mother continues to give him a speech that she thinks will stop Orestes from killing her, this does not work, he ends up killing her. In Sophocles’ Electra it is the same beginning as The

When he is getting ready to kill Aegisthus, Orestes has a talk with Aegisthus. At this point Aegisthus does not know who he is really talking to until a line is said “That although you’re alive, you’ve been matching words with the dead?”(1475-76). When Aegisthus figures out that the man standing in front of him is Orestes. When he finds out that Orestes is not dead and that he is back to avenge his father’s death, Aegisthus knows that he is doomed for death, and wants to know why Orestes is not going to kill him where they were standing. Orestes tells Aegisthus that he is going to kill him where he killed his father, so they can die in the same place. Seeing that in the two similar stories there are slightly different endings shows that when Aeschylus first wrote the myth, thus this story being the traditional story, he wanted revenge on the mother and that meant that he was going to have the mother’s lover killed first by her son. When Sophocles wrote the story he added his new ending to the piece, this made the myth a innovation of the older myth, he wanted the mother to die first because he thought that Aegisthus killed Orestes and Electra’s father; therefore, he is killing