Orestes and Electra’s Prayer Practices as Instructions to the City

Abstract

The plot of Orestes and Electra, jointly implementing the revenge plan for the death of their father Agamemnon, is taken as the basis of the tragedy Libation Bearers by Aeschylus and the tragedies of the same name Electra by Euripides and Sophocles. А divine will and human desires intertwine at the key points of each of these tragedies, where the protagonists demonstrate different practices of the prayer as precepts to the city, which has to accept and justify the crime they are plotting. Orestes and Electra’s prayer practices in Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles will be analyzed according to the following questions: To whom do Orestes and Electra pray and why? Have their prayers been heard? What events precede the prayers? In which spaces of the city are the key prayers pronounced and what is the role of the chorus in it? What has the city been instructed to do through these prayers? Both Orestes and Electra assert their right to precept and seek support from the gods as the supreme preceptors in different spatial coordinates of the city. Theу view the city not only as a space where prayers are pronounced, but as another main character that can speak, for example, through the chorus lines or give tacit instructions through allusions to the details which appear in urban space descriptions. Not only does the city hear the prayers pronounced by the heroes, but it can give additional power for their materialization. For the protagonists, the city is as an open/closed space of crime and punishment, where they could and should claim new statuses of the ruler-mentors.