Electra

Euripides’s Electra explores the consequences of seeking justice through revenge, challenging the notion—taken for granted by several of the characters—that justice and revenge are one and the same.

At least initially, Electra and Orestes view their revenge on Aegisthus and Clytemnestra as just, asking the gods to grant them victory, “if our claim to victory is just” (675). Electra especially, driven by her unwavering loyalty to her father Agamemnon and hatred for her mother Clytemnestra, is resolute in demanding blood for blood: The only way justice can be carried out, in her view, is for Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to die. Electra says as much to Clytemnestra:

If murder judges and calls for murder, I will kill

you—and your son Orestes will kill you—for Father.

If the first death was just, the second too is just (1094-96).

Electra and Orestes are not the only ones who seem to view the matter this way. The Old Man, helping Electra and Orestes form their plot against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, asks the gods to “grant them at last avenging justice for their father” (676). The Chorus proclaims on a few occasions that any revenge that falls upon Clytemnestra and Aegisthus will be just, “a judgment of death” sent by “the sons of heaven” (483-84), and musing as Clytemnestra dies that: