[3] Set in the city of Mycenae a few years after the Trojan War, the play tells of a bitter struggle for justice by Electra and her brother Orestes for the murder of their father Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and their stepfather Aegisthus.

Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, rescued her younger brother Orestes from her mother by sending him to Strophius of Phocis.

The play begins years later when Orestes has returned as a grown man with a plot for revenge, as well as to claim the throne.

Roman writer Cicero considered Electra to be a masterpiece,[4] and the work is also viewed favorably among modern critics and scholars.

In The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama, John Gassner and Edward Quinn argued that its "simple device of delaying the recognition between brother and sister produces a series of brilliant scenes which display Electra's heroic resolution under constant attack.