Electra is one of the most popular mythological characters in tragedies, as the archetypal vengeful soul. Electra's parents were King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra. Her sisters were Iphigenia and Chrysothemis, and her brother was Orestes. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led the expedition to Troy to recover Helen, the wife of his brother Menelaus, who had eloped with the Trojan prince Paris. So that his fleet could sail, Agamemnon was compelled to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis. After returning from the Trojan War ten years later with his concubine Cassandra (one of the spoils of war), Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, who then became rulers of Mycenae (Aeschylus based his play Agamemnon on this incident, while his Libation Bearers addresses the same story as Electra, but in a different way). Electra and Orestes (who were absent at the time of the murder) therefore harbor a deep grudge against their mother and her lover.
[Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon, Frederic Leighton c. 1869]
Electra remains unmarried and lives with her mother, although she is treated as a slave by the usurpers Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. She passes her days in
public mourning for her murdered father and prays that her brother Orestes will return home to avenge Agamemnon's murder. Electra is contrasted with her sister Chrysothemis, who offers no resistance and enjoys a comfortable life. Electra demands revenge on Clytemnestra and Aegisthos and
accuses them of having killed Agamemnon only to keep their love going.
On the other hand, Clytemnestra, who feels no remorse about the murder,
claims that her husband deserved to die because he sacrificed her other
daughter Iphigenia at the altar of Artemis in the Trojan War, so he could send out his ships to fight in that war.
Meanwhile, Electra's brother Orestes is living far from home to escape a fate
similar to that of Agamemnon. Electra has sent him away from Mycenae when he still was a boy to save his life and sees in him an ally in her plans
for revenge and sincerely hopes for his return.
At the beginning
of the play Orestes has grown into manhood and returns to Mycenae on the orders of the Oracle of Delphi, to take revenge on his father's murderers. He is accompanied by his friend Pylades, as well as his elderly tutor - the man who has in fact brought him up in exile. He now sends that tutor ahead to say in Mycenae (where his mother lives) that Orestes was killed in a chariot race in Delphi. Clytemnestra thinks her
prayers have been heard, Electra sinks deeper into her misery and
lamentation. The messenger says that two men will follow with the urn, but in reality these are Orestes himself in disguise with Pylades.
The ruse drives Electra to despair. She has not been made aware of Orestes' plan and the main action of the play is concerned with her individual plight and the impact of Orestes' trick on her emotions and personality. When Orestes presents her
the alleged urn, she begins to lament unaware that
her brother is in fact standing alive next to her, until he makes
himself known. She is
overjoyed that he is alive, but in their excitement they nearly reveal
his identity, and the tutor comes out from the palace to urge them on. It so happens that Aegisthus is away, so this is their chance. Orestes and Pylades lose no more time, go to the palace and kill Clytemnestra. They hide the corpse under a sheet and when Aegisthus returns, they tell him that it is Orestes. When he lifts the sheet to check it, Orestes reveals himself. He escorts Aegisthus to the hearth (the very place where Agamemnon was murdered) to kill him, with the players leaving the stage before the murder is committed (murder was never shown in Greek drama, so the play closes before the deed is done).
The final part of the myth is not part of the Sophocles play, but has been taken up by Aeschylus in Eumenides: after killing his mother and Aegisthus, Orestes was pursued by the Furies to Delphi, where he was purified by the god Apollo, and then to Athens, where he was tried and acquitted by a court of citizens.
[Clytemnestra by John Collier, 1882]
This is an unrelentingly grim play about suffering and the resulting cycle of vengeance. According to the principle of vigilante justice, suffering is settled with suffering, death is avenged by death. Unfortunately, revenge is still seen as an option among less developed minds even today. Of course such behavior is never justified, for it leads to an unending cycle of violence. I do not think that Electra was right when she demanded revenge on Clytemnestra for the murder of her father - the result for her is endless suffering (she is still alive at the end of the play, but I can't imagine that she will ever lead a happy life).
The same events were also addressed in two earlier plays (besides Homer's Odyssey), The Libation Bearers (458 BCE), in the Oresteia Trilogy by Aeschylus, and in Electra by Euripides, probably written in the mid 410s BCE. Many later playwrights were also inspired by this subject matter, such as Voltaire, Hofmannsthal, and Eugene O'Neill. The scene in which Electra doesn't recognize her brother makes of course good theater. The most famous adaptation of Sophocles' play was Electra (premiered Berlin 1903) by the Austrian author Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and this play in its turn was set to music by Richard Strauss, whose still very popular and famous opera Electra was premiered in Dresden in 1909.
I have read the translation by David Raeburn in Penguin Classics.
Free online translation by Ian Johnston
Images from Wikipedia.
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