Book
Electra
First published 1963
After Agamemnon returns from Troy, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill him and take control of Mycenae. Electra survives inside the victorious household, preserving the memory of her father while waiting for her exiled brother Orestes. Her loyalty becomes inseparable from a demand for revenge that may reproduce the violence she condemns.
Treece uses the family tragedy to portray the exhaustion of Mycenaean power after the Trojan War. Palace wealth, inherited curses and political murder exist beside social instability and the threat of wider collapse. Electra and Orestes can punish the killers, but their success offers no simple restoration of justice or of the world Agamemnon ruled.
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