Clytemnestra

The killing in the Odyssey

The Odyssey, an early Greek epic poem, tells the story, and it does not have Clytemnestra strike the blow. Odysseus, the poem’s wandering hero, meets the dead, and he introduces the deaths of Agamemnon and the men with him as the work of an evil woman’s will before Agamemnon has said a word. Those men, the poem says, were killed in the house of Aegisthus.

Then Agamemnon’s shade speaks for itself, and it names a man. Aegisthus bade him to that house, made him a feast, and killed him there as a man slaughters an ox at the stall, with the help of the wife the shade calls accursed.

The poem does give Clytemnestra one killing of her own. Cassandra, a captive woman brought home at Agamemnon’s side, was cut down beside him, and the shade says Clytemnestra did it. Of all the cries he heard as he died, he says, hers was the most piteous. He says too that she turned her back on him and would not close his eyes or his mouth.

The wife who refuses at first

Earlier in the same poem the story is told at greater length, and it starts further back. The speaker is Nestor, one of the kings who came home from Troy, and he has Clytemnestra put the unseemly deed from her when Aegisthus first works on her, because she had an understanding heart. He calls her beautiful in the same line.

Agamemnon had not left her unwatched. A singer stayed behind in the house, charged by him to guard his wife while he was at Troy.

What ends the refusal, in Nestor’s telling, is the doom of the gods, which bound her that she should be overcome. Aegisthus then carried the singer off to a desert island and left him there as prey for the birds, and led Clytemnestra to his own house, willing as he was willing. Afterwards he burned thigh-pieces on the altars of the gods and hung up offerings of woven cloth and gold, having accomplished more than his heart had hoped for.

The queen who claims the killing

Aeschylus, a Greek playwright, puts the act in her hands. In his play Agamemnon the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are shown to the audience, and the queen stands beside them and speaks.

Much has been said before to serve her need, she begins, and contradicting it now costs her no shame. She stands where she dealt the blow, and the deed is done: deny it she will not.

Then comes the method. She cast a robe over him as though catching a haul of fish, an impassable net, so that he could neither escape nor ward off doom. Twice she struck him, and with two groans his limbs went slack. Once he had fallen she dealt a third stroke, to grace her prayer to the Zeus of the dead below, and his blood came out over her in dark spurts.

The chorus, the onlookers who comment on the action, is shocked at how bold-mouthed she is over her own husband. She answers that they are testing her as if she were a witless woman, that praise and blame are one to her, and that what lies there is Agamemnon, her husband, a corpse, the work of her right hand.

The reason Aeschylus gives her

The chorus threatens her with exile and the hatred of the city, and she turns the charge round. Agamemnon valued the child she bore with her dearest travail no more than if a beast had died, she says, and sheep were plentiful in his folds. He sacrificed that child to charm the blasts of Thrace. It was he who should have been banished from the land for a polluting deed, and the men judging her now had nothing to urge against him while he lived. In this account she names neither the girl nor the place where it was done.

The longer defence in Euripides

Euripides, another Greek playwright, lets her argue the case at length. She arrives by wagon with captive women from Troy, taken, she says, in return for the daughter she lost. Electra, her daughter, who lives in that house as a slave, asks whether she may take her hand, and is told the slaves are there for it.

Then she makes the case. Tyndareus, her father, gave her to Agamemnon, she says, and not so that she or any child of hers should die. Agamemnon took the girl from the house on the promise of a marriage to Achilles, carried her to Aulis where the fleet lay, stretched Iphigenia over the pyre and cut her white cheek. Had that death cured the capture of the city, or benefited his house, or saved his other children, she would have pardoned him. He did it because Helen was lustful and the man who had Helen as a wife could not punish the one who took her.

Even that wrong, she says, would not have made her kill her husband. What did was the girl he brought home with him, raving and possessed, whom he put in his bed, so that one house held two brides at once.

Her own death, and the hand the poem leaves unnamed

The Odyssey follows the household forward. Nestor is still answering Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, who had asked him how Agamemnon died. Aegisthus reigned over Mycenae for seven years after killing him, Nestor says, and the people were subdued under him. In the eighth year her son Orestes came back from Athens and killed his father’s murderer.

For Clytemnestra the account reports one thing only. Orestes made a funeral feast for the Argives over his hateful mother and the craven Aegisthus. Whose hand had killed her, the poem never says.

The graves at Mycenae

Pausanias, who wrote a description of Greece, lists what the ruins of Mycenae held: a fountain called Persea, underground chambers where Atreus and his children had stored their treasures, and the graves. Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, had his grave there, and so had the men who returned with Agamemnon from Troy and were murdered by Aegisthus after he had given them a banquet. Agamemnon had his tomb, and Eurymedon his charioteer had another, and a third was shared by Teledamus and Pelops, twin sons said to be Cassandra’s, killed as babies by Aegisthus after their parents.

Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were buried at some little distance from the wall. They were thought unworthy of a place within it, where Agamemnon lay with the men murdered beside him.