Electra

Not to be confused with Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon, Sophocles’ tragedy Electra or Michael Cacoyannis’s 1962 film Electra.

Euripides’ Electra is a surviving Athenian tragedy that retells the revenge of Orestes on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra from the point of view of a household that has fallen into poverty. Instead of the royal palace, the play is set at a farmer’s cottage on the border of Argolis (lines 1–53), and the author sets several of its scenes against the corresponding scenes of Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers. The play is introduced by an ordinary farmer, who explains that Aegisthus gave Electra to him in marriage and that he has never touched her (lines 43–46). Orestes, who has come with his friend Pylades to repay his father’s murderers (lines 87–89), is recognized by his father’s old servant, kills Aegisthus at a sacrifice, and with Electra kills their mother Clytemnestra in the cottage. The play ends with the appearance of the Dioscuri, who declare that the killing of Clytemnestra was just in punishment but not justly ordered by Apollo (lines 1244–1246).

Date and Historical Background

No ancient source that survives gives the year, the festival or the result of the first performance of Euripides’ Electra, and no ancient introduction to the play is preserved. Its date is therefore uncertain. The same uncertainty surrounds the relation of this play to Sophocles’ Electra: it is not known from ancient evidence which of the two was produced first.

What can be said from the text is that Euripides’ play assumes that its audience knows the Aeschylean version. The old servant proposes the lock of hair and the footprint (lines 508–537), the very tokens by which Electra recognizes Orestes in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (lines 164–211), and Electra dismisses them one by one.

Characters and Setting

Characters

• Farmer (called “Peasant” in some translations), Electra’s husband
• Electra, sister of Orestes, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra
• Orestes, brother of Electra, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra
• Pylades, a friend of Orestes (non-speaking role)
• An Old Man, the old servant of Agamemnon who rescued the young Orestes
• Messenger, a servant of Orestes
• Clytemnestra, widow and murderer of Agamemnon, wife of Aegisthus
• Dioscuri: Castor and Polydeuces, brothers of Clytemnestra, who appear above the house at the end and speak
• Chorus of Argive country women

Setting

A farm cottage in the Argive countryside, near the border of Argolis (the Old Man lives by the river Tanaus, which divides Argive land from Spartan land, lines 410–412). Aegisthus’ estate, where he is preparing a sacrifice to the Nymphs, lies near the road not far away (lines 623–625, 774–779).

Summary of Electra

Prologue

The play opens (lines 1–53) with a monologue by a poor Farmer before his hut, a figure hardly expected in tragedy. He gives the background: Agamemnon sailed to Troy, took the city and was killed on his return by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus; Orestes was stolen away by his father’s old servant and given to Strophius in Phocis; and Electra stayed in the house. Many of the leading men of Greece asked for her hand, but Aegisthus feared that she would bear a son who would avenge Agamemnon, and kept her unmarried. He then planned to kill her, but Clytemnestra, although hard of heart, saved her daughter from him, since she feared being despised for killing her children. Aegisthus therefore offered gold to anyone who killed Orestes and gave Electra to this man, who is of an old Mycenaean family but poor, so that her children would be of no account. The Farmer swears that he has never dishonoured her in bed (lines 43–44), since he is ashamed to wrong the daughter of a wealthy man, and he hopes for Orestes’ return to see his sister’s unfortunate marriage.

In the second part (lines 54–81) Electra comes out at night in rags, carrying a water jar on her head. She tells the audience that she does this work to show the gods Aegisthus’ insolence, and the husband and wife discuss the daily tasks that they share before leaving. In the third part (lines 82–111) Orestes and Pylades enter. Orestes says that he came to Argive land from the god’s shrine to repay his father’s murderers with murder, and that during the past night he had made an offering at his father’s tomb. He has not entered the city, but is looking for his sister, whom he has heard is living here married, so that she may help him. Seeing Electra approach with the water jar, with her head shorn, he takes her for a servant, and the two step aside. The last part (lines 112–166) is a lyrical song by Electra as she comes back from the spring, calling on her absent brother and lamenting her father, who was killed with an axe at his return from Troy by his wife and Aegisthus.

Parodos (Entrance Song)

The Chorus of local women (lines 167–212) comes to Electra’s “rustic courtyard” with news that the Argives are proclaiming a sacrifice on the third day from now, to which all girls are to go to the temple of Hera. They offer Electra clothes and gold so that she may attend. Electra refuses: “My unhappy heart beats fast, friends, but not at adornment or gold; nor will I set up choruses with the maidens of Argos and beat my foot in the dance” (lines 175–180). She says that she spends her nights in tears and that her mother lives with her new husband in a bed stained with blood (lines 208–210). The Chorus Leader answers that Helen is the cause of many evils to the Greeks and to Electra’s house (lines 213–214).

First Episode

Electra catches sight of Orestes and Pylades (lines 215–220), who had taken their place near the altar, and flees in fear, begging Apollo for her life (line 221). Orestes holds her back and says that he has come to bring word from her brother, who is alive (lines 220–232). In a rapid exchange of single lines (lines 233–289) he asks about her life. She explains that she is married to a poor man, “poor but noble, and respectful to me” (line 253), who has never dared to touch her in bed (line 255). Aegisthus meant her to bear “powerless children” so that none would punish him (lines 266–269). Her mother, she says, loves her husband more than her children (line 265). Orestes then asks what Orestes should do if he comes to Argos, and whether she would dare, with him, to kill her mother. “Yes,” she answers, “with that same axe by which my father died” (lines 278–279), and she adds that she would be ready to die once she had shed her mother’s blood (line 281). She does not recognize him and says that only the old servant who stole her brother away would know him (lines 283–287).

Orestes asks her to tell the whole story so that he can report it to her brother, and she describes how she lives: in rags, drawing water herself, with no share in festivals, avoiding the married women and also having refused Castor, who sought her in marriage before he joined the gods (lines 300–312). She contrasts this with Clytemnestra, who sits enthroned among the Trojan captives, while her father’s blood is still black on the wall and Aegisthus, drunk, leaps on Agamemnon’s tomb and pelts it with stones, asking where Orestes is to defend it (lines 313–331). Electra ends by saying that all her own body, hands, voice, shorn head and “his own father” are begging Orestes to come (lines 332–336).

The Farmer comes home from the fields (lines 339–341), is told by Electra that the strangers are messengers from Orestes (lines 345–346), and at once invites them in with generous hospitality (lines 357–363). Orestes, speaking aside, comments on the Farmer’s worth, which cannot be judged by wealth or birth but by character (lines 367–390), and goes in. Electra rebukes her husband for welcoming guests above their means (lines 404–405) and sends him to the old servant of her father, who tends his flocks by the river Tanaus, to bid him bring something for the guests’ meal and to hear that the child he once saved is alive (lines 408–416). The Farmer goes on this errand and complains briefly of how little a poor household has to offer (lines 420–430).

In the first choral song (lines 432–486) the women sing of the ships that carried Achilles to Troy, accompanied by dolphins and Nereids, and of the scenes forged on his shield by Hephaestus: Perseus with the Gorgon’s head, the sun and the stars, the Sphinxes on his helmet and the lioness on his breastplate. They end the song by turning to Clytemnestra: “your adultery killed the lord of such mighty warriors, evil-minded daughter of Tyndareus,” and the gods will one day send her to her death (lines 479–485).

Second Episode

The Old Man arrives (lines 487–500), bringing a newborn lamb, garlands, cheeses and some old wine. His eyes are wet, and he explains that on his way he visited Agamemnon’s tomb, poured a libation and put myrtle round it, and saw a black-fleeced ram on the altar, blood freshly poured, and severed locks of yellow hair (lines 508–516). He suggests that Orestes may have come secretly, and tells Electra to compare the lock with her own hair and to set her foot in the footprint (lines 517–533). She dismisses both tests (lines 524–531, 534–537): the hair of a man trained in the wrestling schools and that of a woman combed with care would not match, and the foot of a brother is not the size of a sister’s, “for the male conquers”; nor, she adds, would she recognize a cloak she wove for Orestes as a child, since he would have outgrown it (lines 541–544). All of this answers the recognition by hair, footprint and woven cloth in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (lines 164–232 in that play).

Orestes and Pylades come out of the cottage. The Old Man looks closely at Orestes, as at “the clear mark impressed on a silver coin” (line 558), circles around him (line 561), and tells Electra to pray to the gods because he sees her dearest one (lines 563–571). The proof he gives is a scar along Orestes’ brow, from a fall long ago in their father’s house when he and Electra chased a fawn (lines 573–574). Electra embraces her brother (lines 577–584), and the Chorus welcomes the long-awaited day (lines 585–595).

Orestes asks the Old Man how to avenge himself on his father’s killer and on his mother, and learns that he has no friends in Argos and that he cannot enter the walls, where Aegisthus is guarded and sleeps little out of fear of him (lines 596–617). The Old Man says that he saw Aegisthus at his stables near the fields preparing a feast for the Nymphs, with an ox to sacrifice and only his own servants about, none of whom has ever seen Orestes (lines 621–633). He advises Orestes to go where Aegisthus will see him, who will invite him to the feast (lines 634–639). Clytemnestra, he adds, will not take part: she has stayed in Argos for fear of the citizens’ reproach (lines 640–645). Electra takes charge of her mother’s killing (line 647). She has the Old Man go to Clytemnestra to say that Electra has given birth to a son ten days ago, so that her mother will come to her house (lines 651–661). The Old Man leads Orestes and Pylades to Aegisthus, and all join in prayer to Zeus, Hera, the Earth and the dead Agamemnon (lines 671–684). Electra says that if her brother is killed she will strike herself with a sword (lines 685–696).

In the second choral song (lines 699–746) the women tell of a golden lamb which Pan brought from its mother on Argive hills, and of how Thyestes seduced Atreus’ wife, gained the lamb and so claimed the kingship, until Zeus reversed the course of the stars and the sun in the sky (lines 726–736). The Chorus says that it has small belief in this story, but that tales that frighten men are useful for the worship of the gods, whom Clytemnestra did not think of when she killed her husband (lines 737–745).

Third Episode

The Chorus Leader hears a noise from the direction of the fields (lines 747–750), and Electra rushes out. A Messenger, one of Orestes’ servants, arrives to announce that Orestes has conquered and that Aegisthus lies dead (lines 761–770). He describes the killing at length (lines 774–858). Orestes and Pylades met Aegisthus in a garden, where he was plucking myrtle for a wreath. When Orestes said that they were Thessalians on their way to sacrifice at Olympia, Aegisthus invited them to the sacrifice of an ox to the Nymphs (lines 774–789). The servants laid aside their spears, and while Aegisthus prayed that he and Clytemnestra might often sacrifice thus and that his enemies, meaning Orestes and Electra, might suffer, Orestes prayed silently for the opposite (lines 799–810). Aegisthus asked Orestes to take the knife to show that Thessalians can cut up a bull and tame horses (lines 815–818). While Aegisthus looked at the entrails and found the liver without a lobe, a bad omen (lines 827–830), Orestes asked for a Phthian cleaver instead of a Dorian one to split the breastbone, took it, and when Aegisthus bent over the entrails struck him on the spine (lines 835–842). The servants rushed to arms, but when Orestes made himself known and told them not to kill him, they held back; an old servant recognized him, and they crowned him with a wreath (lines 844–854). The Messenger finishes: Orestes is coming to show her a head, not the Gorgon’s but that of Aegisthus, whom she hates (lines 855–857).

The Chorus dances for joy (lines 859–865), and Electra, who has come to see the light free of fear (lines 866–870), crowns her brother with a band for his hair and Pylades with a garland (lines 880–889). Orestes and Pylades have brought the body of Aegisthus, and Orestes tells Electra that the gods lead their fortune and that she may expose the body as prey for animals or birds (lines 890–898). Electra, hesitating to insult the dead for fear of the talk of citizens (lines 900–905), addresses the corpse in a long speech (lines 907–956). She charges him with destroying her and Orestes by orphaning them, with marrying her mother and killing a man who led the armies of Greece though he never went to Troy himself, and with living as the object of talk in Argos as “that woman’s husband, not that man’s wife” (lines 930–931). She also taunts him about his women and his looks (lines 945–949), and ends by warning evildoers that they will not get the better of Justice (lines 953–956).

When Electra tells the servants to hide the body so that her mother will not see it before her slaughter (lines 959–961), Orestes sees Clytemnestra approaching in her chariot (lines 963–966). He hesitates. “How can I kill her when she bore me and brought me up?” (line 969). “As she killed your father and mine,” Electra replies (line 970). Orestes asks whether the oracle that came from Phoebus was folly (line 971) and whether a fiend spoke in the likeness of the god (line 979), but Electra tells him not to become a coward (line 982) and he goes into the house (line 985).

The Chorus greets Clytemnestra, who arrives in her chariot with Trojan captive women (lines 988–1010). Electra, who says she lives as a slave, is told by her mother not to trouble herself (lines 1004–1007). Clytemnestra then makes her defence (lines 1011–1050): Tyndareus gave her to Agamemnon not to have her children die, and he took Iphigenia to Aulis on the pretext of a marriage with Achilles and killed her; she would have forgiven him if he had done it to save the city, but he did it for the sake of Helen. She adds that he brought home Cassandra and kept two brides in the same house, and says that if Menelaus had been taken from his home she would not have killed Orestes for his sake. The Chorus Leader answers that this is justly spoken but shameful (lines 1051–1053). Electra, who has been promised freedom to speak (lines 1055–1059), replies (lines 1060–1099) that her mother adorned her hair at the mirror as soon as her husband had left, was glad when Troy prospered and sad when it did badly, and could have been chaste; she asks why Aegisthus is not exiled in place of her son, and says that if murder is to be paid for with murder, Orestes and Electra must kill their mother.

In the end Clytemnestra is the more subdued. She says that she forgives Electra and that she herself does not rejoice much in what she has done (lines 1102–1105). Seeing her daughter in rags she cries, “Alas for my schemes! I drove on in anger against my husband more than I should have” (lines 1109–1110). Electra replies, “You sigh too late, when you have no remedy” (line 1111). Electra then says that she has given birth and asks her mother to perform the sacrifice on the tenth day, as custom requires, since she has no experience (lines 1123–1127). Clytemnestra agrees, saying that she will go to the sacrifice that her husband is offering to the Nymphs afterwards (lines 1132–1138), and goes into the hut. Electra’s last words to her are that the knife is sharpened, the same that killed the bull by whose side Clytemnestra will lie, struck down, and that in Hades she will be the bride of the man she slept with in life (lines 1139–1145).

In the third choral song (lines 1147–1164), the women recall Agamemnon’s murder in his bath on his return in the tenth year. Clytemnestra’s cry is heard from within: “O children, by the gods, do not kill your mother” (line 1165). The Chorus say that the god deals out justice, but that she did unholy things to her husband (lines 1168–1170).

Exodos (Exit Song)

Orestes and Electra come out of the house, stained with their mother’s fresh blood (lines 1172–1176), and Orestes calls on Earth and Zeus to look on the two bodies lying on the ground (lines 1177–1181). “Too many tears, my brother, and I am the cause,” says Electra. “Unhappy, that I came to fiery rage against this woman, who was my mother!” (lines 1182–1183). Orestes cries, “Ah, Phoebus! you proclaimed in song unclear justice, but you have brought about clear woes, and granted me a bloody destiny far from the land of Hellas. To what other city can I go? What host, what pious man will look at me, who killed my mother?” (lines 1190–1195). He describes how Clytemnestra bared her breast and begged him, “My child, I entreat you,” so that the sword fell from his hand, and how he then threw his cloak over his eyes and plunged the sword into her throat, while Electra put her hand to the sword with him (lines 1206–1225). They cover their mother’s body with a robe (lines 1227–1231).

The Dioscuri appear above the house (lines 1233–1235). Castor and Polydeuces, brothers of Clytemnestra and sons of Zeus, have just calmed the sea and come to Argos when they saw the death of their sister (lines 1238–1243). Their speech (lines 1244–1291) has several parts. They say that Clytemnestra has her just reward, but that Orestes has not acted justly. Apollo, “although he is wise, gave you oracles that were not” (lines 1244–1246). Orestes must give Electra to Pylades as his wife (lines 1248–1249), leave Argos, and flee from the Furies to Athens, where Athena will protect him; there, at the hill of Ares, the gods first sat to vote on bloodshed, and an equal number of votes will save him, with Apollo taking the blame, and the Furies will sink into a cleft of the earth beside the hill as a holy shrine (lines 1250–1272). He will found a city in Arcadia beside the Alpheus, near the precinct of Lycaean Apollo, which will bear his name (lines 1273–1275). Aegisthus will be buried by the Argives. Menelaus, who has just arrived at Nauplia from Troy, will bury Clytemnestra with the help of Helen, who has come from the house of Proteus in Egypt and never went to Troy (lines 1276–1283). Zeus sent a phantom of Helen to Ilium, to stir up strife and bloodshed among mortals. Pylades is to take Electra home and to conduct the Farmer, Orestes’ kinsman by marriage in name only, to Phocis and give him a weight of riches (lines 1284–1287).

The Chorus, Electra and Orestes then speak with the Dioscuri (lines 1292–1331). Asked why they did not keep the death-goddesses from their sister’s house, the Dioscuri answer that “necessity’s fate led to what must be, and unwise speech from the mouth of Phoebus” (line 1301–1302). To Electra’s question about what Apollo ordained, they answer that the deeds were shared, and that one ancestral curse has ground down both (lines 1303–1307). The siblings say farewell to each other and to their city (lines 1308–1336), and Orestes tells Pylades to go and marry Electra (line 1340). The Dioscuri say that marriage will be for them to think of, and warn Orestes to go to Athens to escape the hounds of hell that pursue him (lines 1342–1346). They themselves must go over the Sicilian sea to rescue seagoing ships, and they help those who love piety and justice, so that nobody should wish to act unjustly or set sail with perjurers (lines 1347–1355). The play closes with the Chorus’s farewell (lines 1357–1359).

A Brief Analysis

Euripides’ Electra must come after Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, since it answers that play’s recognition scene directly. In Aeschylus Electra finds a lock of hair and footprints at the tomb and reasons that they must be her brother’s (Libation Bearers 164–211), and Orestes later shows her the cloth she wove (lines 230–232); in Euripides the old servant finds the offerings and proposes the same signs, and Electra rejects them as no proof (lines 508–546). Orestes is recognized by a scar from a childhood accident (lines 573–574), a sign that no one but a member of the household could know.

The setting makes a similar change. The Farmer’s hut is not the palace, and the avengers cannot enter it. The Old Man says that Orestes cannot enter the walls because Aegisthus is guarded and afraid (lines 615–617). The plan therefore is to lure the victims out. Aegisthus is killed at a sacrifice, as a host offering hospitality to two strangers and while he is bending over the entrails of an ox (lines 774–843), and Clytemnestra is lured to the hut by the false news of a birth (lines 651–656, 1123–1127). In Aeschylus both victims are killed within the palace. Euripides also lets his characters show the cost: Orestes shrinks from the killing of his mother (lines 967–985), Clytemnestra answers Electra’s charges at length (lines 1011–1050) and regrets her anger (lines 1109–1110), and after the killing both children speak of their remorse (lines 1182–1183, 1190–1195, 1206–1225).

The play also differs from Aeschylus in how it assigns the decision. In Libation Bearers Orestes is urged by Pylades, who speaks only three lines in that play (Libation Bearers 900–902). In Euripides Pylades does not speak at all, and it is Electra who answers Orestes’ doubts and tells him to use against their mother the same trick by which he killed her husband Aegisthus (lines 967–984). Electra joins in the killing: she says that she urged him on and put her hand to the sword with him (lines 1224–1225).

The gods are treated openly in the final scene. Orestes questions whether Apollo spoke truly, asking whether a fiend spoke in the likeness of the god (lines 971, 979–981), and in the end Castor says plainly that Phoebus, “although he is wise,” gave oracles that were not wise (lines 1245–1246), and that Fate and “unwise speech from the mouth of Phoebus” led to what happened (lines 1301–1302). The Dioscuri also confirm that Clytemnestra’s death was just in itself (line 1244), but that Orestes did not act justly; the Furies are to pursue him, and Athens and an equal vote are to save him (lines 1250–1272).

Electra Sources

Euripides, Electra, lines 1–1359; the Greek text and an English translation are at the Perseus Digital Library. For comparison: Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 164–211 (the lock of hair and the footprints), and the Aeschylean Oresteia as a whole.

See Also: Euripides, Libation Bearers, Sophocles, Electra, Orestes