“What Sacrifices Are Necessary”: The Corruption of Ritual Paradigms in Euripides’s Electra

This diachronic exploration of Euripides’s Electra seeks to demonstrate that the play’s systematic deviation from normative ritual categories and experiences supplies a dramatic world congruent with the transgressive, divinely ordained violence undertaken by Orestes and Electra. Apollo’s punitive intervention, it is argued, comes after and strategically reinforces the miasma initiated by Agamemnon’s murder, and in this way the god models his retribution upon an existing pattern of Atreid transgression.