Electra

Also known as: EL / ELEC. / ELECTRA / Elect / Elect. · Family: House of Atreus · Role: daughter of Agamemnon · First appears: Aeschylus, The Libation-Pourers — Scene 1

After Agamemnon was slain, Electra mourned her father in secret and prayed for vengeance while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ruled Argos. At Clytemnestra’s command, she went with the handmaids to pour libations on Agamemnon’s tomb, where she found a lock of hair and suspected Orestes. When he emerged and revealed himself, she embraced him as “Thou whom thy father's house most loves, most prays for, Our one sole hope, bewept with many a tear,” and together they sought shelter at their father’s tomb, invoking his aid against his foes. In another account, she had earlier rescued Orestes from the sword and sent him to Phocis for safety.

Electra opposed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, rejecting her mother’s offerings and praying that Justice punish her father’s murderers. Threatened with exile and confinement, she still proposed that Chrysothemis help kill Aegisthus; when her sister refused, she declared that she would pursue the vengeance alone. When Orestes was falsely reported dead, her hope of salvation through him seemed destroyed, but he later revealed himself with Agamemnon’s signet. In Euripides’ account, Aegisthus forced her to marry a poor, god-fearing man, while Clytemnestra once saved her from being killed; Electra then used a false childbirth story to lure Clytemnestra to her, and helped Orestes kill both Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. She told Orestes that, if he died, she would kill herself, and crowned him and Pylades after Aegisthus’s death.

After the killings, Argos barred shelter from Electra and Orestes and decreed that they must die. Electra, Orestes, and Pylades acknowledged their parts in Clytemnestra’s murder; they attacked Helen and seized Hermione, while Diomedes argued that the siblings should instead be banished. Orestes had betrothed Electra to Pylades, and Apollo later ordered the marriage; in another account, she is married to Pylades and departs Argos with him. She is also linked by kinship to Chrysothemis, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Atreus, Pelops, and Tantalus, calls Castor and Polydeuces her kinsmen, remembers Castor as a former bridegroom, and treats Helen and Tyndareus as enemies while appealing to Zeus as a parent.