Unabridged Audiobook
Electra by Euripides is a great play, I like it very much. It's interesting that, whereas in the beginning of the play, Electra and Orestes are impassioned by their plan of vengeance, yet after they accomplish the murder, both feel remorse and horror at the matricide. On the one hand, the siblings are propelled to action by the idea that revenge has the power to exact justice and heal their pain. When the action is carried out, however, they realize it resolves nothing and fails to assuage their pain of their father's murder - if fact, it creates new pain. This is a very human point of view that speaks to us. Euripides expresses a universal and timeless truth: revenge and violence solve nothing.
The Libre Vox narrator, Expatriate, has a generally monotone and mono-speed voice with a strong nasal quality, and doesn't change it for different characters. He does read the name of each character before their lines, which makes it possible to know who's speaking. The translation is terrible. It sounds like one of those 19th-century translations, made to sound grandiloquent by 19th-century standards, which means throwing in a mess of techniques for "elevated diction" from throughout the ages: Old English alliteration, pseudo-Elizabethan screwed-up grammar, and occasional neo-classical rhymes. All this is pointless, doing nothing to elevate what is said, and making it all stilted and difficult to understand. The original text is not interesting to us today. The only point of interest is that Apollo has commanded Orestes to kill his mother, even though this is wicked. The message at the time was either that the gods are unjust, or that Athens should stop basing claims about justice on the actions or commands of the gods (which would most-notably include the oracle at Delphi, which was a powerful political force at the time). It holds no interest for us today.
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