ELECTRA, the name of three Greek legendary figures, ('HMKTpa, Doric 'AMKTpa, "bright one") . (I) Daughter of Oceanus, wife of Thaumas, and by him mother of Iris and the Harpies; sister of Styx. (Hesiod, Theog., 265 ff., cp. 349 ff.). (2) One of the Pleiads (q.v.); mother by Zeus of Dardanus, the ancestor of the Trojan royal family. This detail is post Homeric, the genealogy in the Iliad beginning with Dardanus, whose mother is not named, II., xx., 215. She is regularly said to have lived in Samothrace, where once or twice the Cabiri are identified with her sons, although several authorities connect her, or her children, also with Arcadia and Crete, and a late and artificial account makes her an Italian, wife of Corythus. Iasion, the lover of Demeter (q.v.) is also her son by Zeus, and frequently she and Zeus are the parents of Harmonia (q.v.). In some late authors she brings the Palladium to Troy for her son (schol. Eurip., Phoen., 1136), or her star is the dim Pleiad, which lost its splendour when Troy fell (Hygin., Fab., 192 ; Ser vius Danielis on Virg., Georg., I., 138) . For these and other stories see Furtwangler in Roscher's Lexikon, I., col. (3) Daughter of Agamemnon (q.v.) and Clytaemestra (not named in the Homeric list of his daughters, II., ix., 145, 287), and ap parently first in Stesichorus, or Xanthus, (Aelian, Var. Hist., iv. 26), where she is said to have been identified with the Homeric Laodice. In the tragedians who certainly follow the lost Oresteia of Stesichorus, in some particulars at least, she rescues Orestes, then a child, at the time of Agamemnon's murder, and sends him with an old servant to Phocis for safe keeping (so Sopho cles ; in Aeschylus, he had already been sent away before the return of his father) . She herself remains with her mother, en during all manner of insult and ill-treatment and remaining un married (in Euripides, she is nominally married to a commoner, who respects and guards her) . At length, Orestes, now a man, returns secretly and with the help of Electra entraps Aegisthus and Clytaemestra (the stratagem he uses is variously given), and kills them both. Electra then marries Pylades. Many variants, some very complicated (e.g., Hygin., Fab., 12 2) exist.
See Aeschylus, Choephoroe; Sophocles and Euripides, Electra, with Jebb's introduction to his edition of the former for an account of the handling of the theme in literature, ancient and modern ; also the mythological handbooks, and the articles in Roscher's Lexikon and Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopadie.