About the work
Tragedy by Euripides, probably first performed around 420 BC, though the exact date is disputed and some scholars place it as late as 413 BC. Unlike the versions by Aeschylus and Sophocles, the action unfolds not at a royal court but in front of the hut of a poor farmer to whom Electra has been married off.
Plot
Electra lives in degrading poverty in the countryside, married to a poor but honourable farmer, while her mother Clytemnestra rules Mycenae with Aegisthus. When her brother Orestes secretly returns, the siblings recognize each other and kill first Aegisthus, then their own mother. At the end the divine twins appear and call the matricide a mistake.
Cultural significance
With its deliberately unheroic, everyday staging of the revenge story, Euripides sets a conscious counterpoint to the versions by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The critical distance from its own outcome is considered typical of his late tragedies.