Electra

The Old Man arrives and greets Electra tearfully. He explains that as he was coming to the Farmer’s house, he passed by Agamemnon’s tomb, where he saw that somebody had recently sacrificed a black sheep to the dead king’s ghost. He asks Electra if her brother Orestes might have come back in secret, suggesting that a lock of hair or the footprints he found at the tomb might match Electra’s and thus prove that the recent visitor was her brother. Electra dismisses the Old Man’s hopes, saying it is not only siblings who have a similar hair color, and that she, as a girl, would not have a similar footprint to her brother, a man.

The Old Man speaks with the strangers, the still-unidentified Orestes and Pylades. Right away the Old Man recognizes Orestes by a scar he received from a childhood accident. There is a brief reunion scene in which Orestes and Electra embrace and the Chorus greets Orestes as “a beacon- / lit hope for the state” (586-87). Then, with the Old Man’s help, Orestes and Electra form a plot to kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Aegisthus, the Old Man tells them, cannot be killed in his palace, where he is too well-guarded, but as luck would have it, he is now on his estate offering