Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon who drives the revenge

Electra is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, left at Mycenae after her father’s murder and her brother Orestes’s exile. She kills no one, rules nothing, and hardly ever leaves the palace doorway. Yet it is she who keeps alive, for seven years, the memory that makes the revenge possible — and that role, made entirely of waiting and refusal, turned her into one of the great parts of Greek theatre.

A heroine without an epic

Electra does not exist in the Homeric poems. When Agamemnon lists his daughters in Iliad 9, he names Chrysothemis, Laodice and Iphianassa (9.144-145): three names, and not hers. Later tradition closed the gap by identifying Laodice with Electra. Aelian preserves the explanation the historian Xanthus gave for it: she was called Elektra because she stayed a-lektros, “bedless” — that is, unmarried — long past the usual age (Historical Miscellany 4.26).

The etymology is probably a pun after the fact; the name more likely belongs with elektôr, “the radiant”, Homer’s word for the sun. But the pun captures what the character became: a woman kept from marriage so that she cannot bear a son, and whose whole life hangs on a brother’s return.

Aeschylus: the sister at the tomb

In the Libation Bearers, Electra has a short, precise part. Clytemnestra, woken by a nightmare, sends her to pour offerings at Agamemnon’s tomb; Electra asks the chorus what she is supposed to say while pouring gifts sent by the murderer, and chooses to pray not for her mother but for the return of an avenger. On the tomb she then finds a lock of hair like her own, footprints that match hers, and a piece of weaving she made as a child (164-234).

It is the first great recognition scene in Western drama, and Euripides would later mock it by having his own Electra point out that a brother and a sister need not have the same hair or the same shoe size. Then Aeschylus sends her off: she is not present for the murder and does not reappear in the Eumenides. For him the case belongs to Orestes.

Sophocles: the play is hers

Sophocles’ Electra reverses that balance. The heroine is on stage from first line to last, and the tragedy turns on what she says and what she endures. We watch her refuse to be quiet, sing her grief as the nightingale mourns Itys, be called mad by her mother and a disgrace by the household, and set against her sister Chrysothemis — who has chosen obedience and a quiet life — the only position she thinks tenable: better to die saying the truth than to last by keeping silent.

The height of the play is the urn scene. A tutor has announced Orestes’ death in a chariot race at Delphi, a long speech of flawlessly invented lying; Orestes, unrecognisable, then hands his sister the vessel supposed to hold his ashes. Electra takes it in her arms and speaks to her brother’s dust: all that is left of him is “a little weight, and nothing” (1126-1170). It is while listening to her that Orestes gives himself away.

When the killing comes, Sophocles places Electra at the door. Clytemnestra can be heard crying out inside, and Electra answers her appeals by calling to her brother: “strike her twice, if you have the strength” (1415). No Furies follow: the play ends on the end of a tyranny.

Euripides: revenge among the poor

Euripides’ Electra changes the whole setting. The heroine has been married off to a Mycenaean farmer with no property, so that her children will have no rank; out of respect, the man has never touched her. She lives in a hut, carries her own water, and nurses a bitterness with nothing heroic left in it.

She is the one who plans the murder: she sends word to her mother that she has just given birth, to draw her to the cottage without an escort. Clytemnestra comes, and her entrance is that of an anxious, embarrassed older woman. Once the deed is done, the two children come out shattered, each blaming the other for what they have just done; the Dioscuri appear to say that the act was just but badly done, and that Apollo’s oracle was not wise. Electra is given in marriage to Pylades and will leave the Argolid.

In Orestes, three years later, Euripides shows her nursing her sick brother, joining the plot against Helen and the hostage-taking of Hermione. There she is active, hard, and fully responsible.

What the sources change

Electra is a good test case for measuring the distance between three tragedians handling the same plot within a few years of each other.

• The order of the killings: Aeschylus and Euripides kill Aegisthus first and Clytemnestra second, which puts the mother last and loads the ending. Sophocles reverses it, kills Clytemnestra first and closes on Aegisthus, which lightens the matricide.
• Electra’s standing: a secondary figure in Aeschylus, the absolute protagonist in Sophocles, an active and married accomplice in Euripides.
• The consequences: Aeschylus brings on the Furies and opens a trial; Sophocles says nothing of them and ends in victory; Euripides condemns the oracle itself.

Her genealogy is thinly attested but real: Pausanias, describing the tombs at Mycenae, reports that Electra bore Pylades two sons, Medon and Strophius (2.16.7). Hyginus preserves a variant in which Orestes nearly kills her at Delphi, believing she had a hand in his condemnation (Fabulae 122).

Legacy

Electra is one of the few ancient characters whose modern fortune rests first of all on the stage. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903), set to music by Richard Strauss in 1909, turns her into a figure of obsessive fixation and gives twentieth-century opera one of its most violent scores. Giraudoux (Électre, 1937) makes a play out of the truth that destroys a city; O’Neill transposes the trilogy to post-Civil-War New England in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).

That fortune also produced the “Electra complex”, proposed by Jung in 1913 and quickly dismissed by Freud. The phrase has stuck in ordinary speech, but it imposes on the myth an erotic rivalry that none of the three tragedians stages: their Electra is the keeper of a dead man, not her mother’s rival.

Further reading

For the father whose mourning she sustains, see Agamemnon; for the mother she stands up to, Clytemnestra. For the brother she waits for and arms, see Orestes, and for the sister who disappears at Aulis, Iphigenia. For the family curse that goes back to her great-grandfather, see Pelops; for another tragic heroine who sets loyalty to the dead against the order of power, Antigone.