Electra

Electra and Orestes are the surviving children of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, murdered in his bath on his return from Troy by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Orestes was smuggled out of the city as a boy to save him from his father's fate; Electra remained, and to prevent her bearing an heir who might avenge Agamemnon, she was married off to a poor farmer and stripped of her royal standing.

When Orestes returns to Argos as a young man with his companion Pylades, an old family servant recognizes him by a scar, and brother and sister plot the deaths of both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Euripides stages the killings — and Orestes's hesitation before the second one — with a psychological bluntness that departs sharply from earlier tellings of the same myth, questioning the heroism and justice of the revenge even as it unfolds. The play closes with the divine twins Castor and Pollux passing judgment on what brother and sister have done.