The Return (Prologue and Entry of the Chorus)

At dawn, before the palace of the descendants of Pelops at Mycenae, three men arrived from the road: an old servant — the Tutor who long ago, as a child, had carried Orestes out of the house on the day his father was killed, and taken him away to safety; Orestes himself, now a young man; and his silent friend Pylades.

The old man pointed out the places: "This is ancient Argos, which you longed for . . . and here, the house of the Pelopidae, rich in death, from which I carried you, once, from the murder of your father, received from the hands of your own sister; and I saved you, and brought you up to this manhood, to be the avenger of your father's death."

Orestes had asked Apollo's oracle at Delphi how to avenge his father; and the god had answered: by himself, without armies or shields, by stealth and cunning, he must carry out the just slaughter. So this was the plan: the old man would go into the palace, disguised as a messenger from a friend of the family in Phocis, and report, with an oath, that Orestes was dead — killed in a chariot race at the Pythian Games at Delphi. Meanwhile Orestes and Pylades would pour libations at Agamemnon's tomb, and leave locks of hair; and then come to the palace, carrying a bronze urn, which they had hidden in the bushes, saying it held Orestes' ashes. "What harm is it to me to die in word, if in deed I save myself and win glory? No word is evil, I think, if it brings gain."

From inside the house came a woman's cry of grief. The old man urged them away: first, the libations at the tomb.

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Electra came out alone, and lamented to the dawn: "O holy light, and air that covers the earth equally, how many songs of my mourning you have heard, how many blows struck on my bleeding breast, when the dark night has gone! . . . For my wretched father, whom in a foreign land bloody Ares did not entertain; but my mother and her bedfellow Aegisthus, like woodcutters splitting an oak, split his head with a murderous axe . . . But I will not cease from dirges and bitter wailing, as long as I look on the shining stars, and on this day; but like the nightingale who killed her young, I will cry out before my father's doors for all to hear."

The Chorus of women of Mycenae came to comfort her. Why did she waste herself in endless lament? It would not bring her father back. She would not be comforted: "Foolish is he who forgets his parents when they have died miserably." They reminded her that she was not the only one who suffered: her sisters Chrysothemis and Iphianassa lived quietly in the house; and her brother Orestes would come home one day. "I wait for him, unwearied, childless, unwed, always, wet with tears; and he forgets." She described her life: she lived like a slave in her father's house, in shabby clothes, standing at empty tables. "In terrible things I was compelled to terrible things." The women told her not to make her troubles worse by her anger. She could not stop: "In evils there is great necessity for evil."