O treachery!
Thou, wife? O headens, I die! O treachery!

Clytemnestra comes out with the dagger in her hand:

The dagger drips with blood; my hands, my robe,
My face--they all are wet with blood. What vengeance
Shall yet be taken for this blood? Already
I see this very steel turned on my breast,
And by whose hand!

The son whom she forebodes as the avenger of Agamemnon's death passes
his childhood and early youth at the court of Strophius in Phocis. The
tragedy named for him opens with Electra's soliloquy as she goes to
weep at the tomb of their father:--

Night, gloomy, horrible, atrocious night,
Forever present to my thought! each year
For now two lusters I have seen thee come,
Clothed on with darkness and with dreams of blood,
And blood that should have expiated thine
Is not yet spilt! O memory, O sight!
Upon these stones I saw thee murdered lie,
Murdered, and by whose hand!...
I swear to thee,
If I in Argos, in thy palace live,
Slave of Aegisthus, with my wicked mother,
Nothing makes me endure a life like this
Saving the hope of vengeance. Far away