Virginia Woolf's stricture came in her essay ‘On not knowing Greek’ where she offered a number of examples of how impossible it is to find direct equivalents for the density and breadth of the Greek playwrights. The problem was pinned down to not knowing what Greek tragedy meant to the Greeks. She wrote of the landscape, the climate and the cruelty in Greek tragedy ‘which is quite unlike our English brutality’, noting that we simply do not know how actors delivered lines or ‘where precisely we ought to laugh’. She also drew attention to the need for instant impact, unalloyed by time for reflection and unusually open to the power of the visual as well as the aural. Her examples, Electra and Clytemnestra from the Sophocles Electra, Antigone, Pentheus and Agamemnon, were chosen to mark the differences between the three tragedians, their subtlety and their sheer dramatic brilliance. All of which led her to a sensitivity for the originals which any translator would be advised to heed. On two choral lines in Agamemnon she commented: