Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Sophocles’ *Electra* the focus is the daughter who keeps mourning alive in the Atreid house while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus rule. Orestes arrives with Pylades and the Old Tutor; they plot to announce Orestes’ death in a chariot race at Delphi and to enter with an urn of supposed ashes. Electra, denied rites and beaten down by her mother, clashes with Chrysothemis—who would yield and live quietly—and refuses Clytemnestra’s defense of Agamemnon’s murder as justice for Iphigenia. The Tutor’s false report breaks Electra; when Orestes brings the urn, she laments over the empty bronze, holding what she believes her brother’s dust. Only then does he reveal himself, proving identity with their father’s sealed ring (not Aeschylus’s lock and footprints). Brother and sister reunite in fierce joy. Orestes and Pylades go inside; Clytemnestra’s death-cries sound from the house; Aegisthus is lured in and driven to the same fate at the play’s end. Sophocles leaves the Erinyes largely offstage—the moral knife-edge is Electra’s unsoftened will and the paired killings—whereas Aeschylus’s trilogy will carry the pollution to Athena’s court (058).