Electra

Kept unmarried and humiliated in the usurpers’ house, Electra tends her father’s memory like a wound. Aeschylus gives her the recognition at the tomb; Sophocles builds an entire tragedy — in this library — from her endurance, her deception by the false urn, and the terrible joy of the reunion with Orestes. She hears the death-cries from within and answers them line by line: the most unflinching scene in Greek tragedy.