How Euripides' Electra is much different from the other two Electra plays can be seen from the very beginning of the play. The princess Electra ousted from the palace to be a wife of a peasant appears in rags with a water-jar on her head and complains of her poor household where she cannot even serve enough food to visitors (who are in fact Orestes with whom the recognition is soon to occur and his friend Pylades). This figure of Electra symbolizes her position throughout this play as the oppressed (672) rather than avenger of her father.(7) She acts mostly from personal and self-pitying motives.(8) The positive belief in god-sent justice or an undaunted will to perform filial duties outstanding in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles is suppressed.(9) Consequently, the sister and brother, after the recognition, in accomplishing matricide with an intrigue, do not feel victorious and proud of their deed as Aeschylus' and Sophocles' protagonists do.(10) Electra, faced with the dead body of her mother, collapses (1183-4) and reveals herself miserable and utterly dejected (1198-1200, 1226). Orestes is haunted and vexed by a sense of guilt and self-disgust (1190-97, 1207, 1209). He confesses how he managed to finish slaughter with his eyes covered (1221). In one word, they are no longer heroes or heroines as their namesakes in older tragedies but ordinary wretched criminals.
The dei ex machina (the Dioscuri) help these wretched 'people as they are' (a phrase used for Euripides' characters by Sophocles, (Arist. Poet.1460b35) return to their mythical stature. In fact the long speech of the Dioscuri who explain the past and foretell the future (1243-1356) does not change the helplessness of these unhappy people. Electra asks about the justification of a matricide(1303-4). Yet their answer is ineffectual (1305-7). The situation for the siblings is made even worse, when they leave the stage for the renewed separation at the play's end (1308-10, 1314-5, 1338-9). Nevertheless, the Dioscuri's appearance representing the divine ordinance helps to define even Orestes' continuing distress in the cosmic order. Deus ex Machina as the facilitator of mythical rehabilitation works well after the play's picture of sheer human misery. That kind of spiritual salvation becomes unnecessary in the next group tragedies of the similar design. For they all end happily 'with nobody slain by anybody' (Poet. 1453a39). That Aristotle's remark on a characteristic of comedy applies to all of these happily-ending tragedies can be an indication that they are approaching comedy, though to different degrees and in different ways.
