In Greek mythology. Electra was the daughter of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, and Clytemnestra. Years after her mother killed her father, Electra and her brother avenged their father’s death.
The character Electra is not mentioned as one of Agamemnon’s daughters by the earliest Greek poet, Homer (c. ninth-eighth century BCE). Instead, she makes her first dramatic appearance in the fifth century BCE in a play by Aeschylus (525-456 BCE) called Choephoroe (more popularly known as Libation Bearers), the second part of the Oresteia trilogy. From that time on the story of Electra was retold with several variations, but the essential plot never changed.
Electra was one of four children born to King Agamemnon of Mycenae and his wife, Clytemnestra.
Their other children were a son, Orestes, and two more daughters, Iphigeneia and Chrysothemis. Electra’s legend begins with the Trojan War. When Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta and sister of Clytemnestra, ran away to Troy with Paris, a Trojan prince, the Greeks decided to wage war on Troy and bring back Helen. Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother, was chosen as the military leader of the Greek forces. Before the Greeks set off for Troy across the sea, a soothsayer told Agamemnon he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis in exchange for a fair wind. He did so—although in some versions Artemis spared Iphigeneia’s life—and the Greek army set sail for Troy. Clytemnestra was devastated by the loss of Iphigeneia and never forgave her husband. While Agamemnon was away fighting in Troy, Clytemnestra and her husband’s cousin Aegisthus became lovers, yet Electra always remained loyal to her father and longed for his return.
After 10 years of warring between the Greeks and the Trojans, Troy was finally defeated and Agamemnon came home to Mycenae, but he did not return alone. As a kind of victory trophy he had claimed Cassandra, a daughter of King Priam of Troy, as his mistress. Within hours of his arrival at the royal palace, according to some versions, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murdered both Agamemnon and Cassandra. Clytemnestra then planned to kill Orestes, but Electra secretly arranged for her young brother to be sent to the Greek kingdom of Phocis, north of the Gulf of Corinth, where he was raised in safety.
Left: This 19th-century painting by Frederick Leighton (1830—1896) depicts Electra grieving in the tomb of her murdered father, Agamemnon.
Above: In this painting by French artist Jean Baptiste Joseph Wicar (1762—1834), a distraught Electra hugs an urn that she believes contains the ashes of her dead brother and savior, Orestes. Unknown to her, the man bearing the urn is actually Orestes in disguise.
World History
