Clytemnestra, the queen of Mycenae who killed Agamemnon

Clytemnestra is the queen of Mycenae, daughter of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, and of Leda, sister of Helen, wife of Agamemnon and mother of Iphigenia, Electra, Orestes and Chrysothemis. She waits ten years for her husband to come home, then kills him in his bath. Greek tradition puts one question to her and keeps asking it: is she the unfaithful wife of an absent king, or the mother demanding the price of her daughter’s blood? Homer answers one way, Aeschylus the other, and the gap between them produced one of the densest characters in ancient drama.

Daughter of Tyndareus, sister of Helen

Leda gave birth on the same night to the children of two fathers. In Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Library, Zeus came to her as a swan and Tyndareus that same night: Helen and Polydeuces were born of Zeus, Castor and Clytemnestra of Tyndareus (3.10.7). The queen of Mycenae is thus the one wholly mortal member of a half-divine set of siblings — a detail the tragedians never forget when they set her against her sister.

A fragment of Stesichorus explains both sisters’ fate by a father’s lapse: Tyndareus, sacrificing one day to all the gods, forgot Aphrodite, and the angry goddess made his daughters “twice-married, thrice-married, and deserters of husbands” (fr. 223 PMG). Helen follows Paris, Clytemnestra takes Aegisthus: one divine grudge, two disasters, and the Trojan War in between.

A first marriage written out

The harshest tradition about Agamemnon is also the least known. Pseudo-Apollodorus reports in a single sentence that Agamemnon married Clytemnestra “after killing her husband Tantalus, son of Thyestes, along with their newborn child” (Epitome 2.16). Euripides stages the charge in Iphigenia at Aulis: Clytemnestra throws in her husband’s face that he took her by force, tore her infant from her breast and dashed it to the ground, and that her brothers the Dioscuri marched against him until Tyndareus forced a reconciliation and made him his son-in-law again (1148-1156).

That past changes the case. It does not make Clytemnestra an innocent, but it rules out reading her act as the idle adultery of a neglected queen: in this version the marriage itself began with the killing of a child.

Aulis: the motive

At Aulis the Greek fleet is pinned down by the contrary winds of Artemis. The seer Calchas demands the sacrifice of Iphigenia; the girl is summoned on the pretext of marriage to Achilles. Aeschylus’ chorus reports the killing without softening it: the father has his daughter gagged so that she cannot utter a curse, her saffron robe slips to the ground, and she strikes those who sacrifice her with a look, “as in a painting” (Agamemnon 218-247).

Aeschylus allows no substitute deer. That choice, and only that choice, makes his Clytemnestra possible: a mother with a death to avenge and ten years to think about it.

The homecoming: crimson cloth and a net

The Agamemnon (458 BC) opens on a night watch and a fire running from peak to peak to Mycenae. Clytemnestra describes the chain of beacons in a speech of thirty lines (281-316): this is a queen who has organised a signalling network across the Aegean, and the play insists that she governs. The watchman, in the prologue, has already called her “a woman’s heart that plans like a man’s” (line 11).

When the king arrives she has crimson-dyed fabrics unrolled before him and presses him to walk on them. Agamemnon resists: to tread such wealth underfoot is a barbarian’s gesture, a provocation to the gods. She persists, he yields, and he enters his palace trampling the wealth of his own house (905-974). The scene is not only symbolic; it shows which of the two can manoeuvre the other.

The murder happens offstage, then the doors open on the bodies. Clytemnestra describes her method with cold precision: she wrapped her husband in a garment with no way out, “an endless net, as for fish”, struck him twice, then added a third blow as an offering to the Zeus of the dead (1382-1387). She says the dark spray covered her and that she rejoiced in it as sown earth rejoices in rain (1389-1392). Then she makes her claim: this is not murder but the justice owed to Iphigenia (1412-1420), and when the chorus accuses her she declares herself the instrument of the Alastor, the avenging spirit of the house of Atreus (1497-1504).

Homer tells an entirely different story. In the Odyssey the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus that Aegisthus cut him down at a banquet “as a man kills an ox at the manger”, that his wife killed Cassandra beside him, and that she would not even close his eyes (11.409-434). Nestor adds that she resisted at first: she was “of sound mind”, and Agamemnon had left a bard behind to watch over her, whom Aegisthus had to maroon on a deserted island before he could seduce her (3.263-275). The Homer of the Odyssey needs a guilty wife to set off Penelope: in Book 24 he has Agamemnon’s ghost say that Clytemnestra’s song will be hateful and will blacken even virtuous women (24.199-202).

The reign, then Orestes

After the murder Clytemnestra and Aegisthus rule Mycenae for seven years, according to the Odyssey (3.304-305). The tragedians fill that dead time: Electra humiliated in the palace, Orestes sent far away, Chrysothemis submitting.

Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers begins the end with a dream. Clytemnestra dreamed that she gave birth to a snake, put it to her breast, and that it drew a clot of blood along with the milk; she sends offerings to the tomb to avert the omen, and Orestes understands at once that he is the snake (523-550). As he is about to strike she bares her breast and reminds him that he was fed there (896-898). Orestes falters, Pylades recalls Apollo’s command, and he strikes. She has time for one more line: “Beware the angry hounds of a mother” (924). The Furies enter the play a few lines later.

What the sources change

No Greek figure varies as much from author to author, and each variant is an argument.

• Homer makes her an accomplice who gives way to a seducer; the killer is Aegisthus, and the story serves as a warning to Telemachus and to Odysseus alike.
• Pindar openly hesitates over her motive: was it the sacrifice of Iphigenia, or a night-time affair? He raises the question and leaves it open (Pythian 11.22-25).
• Aeschylus gives her the deed, the speech and the argument. She kills alone, she explains, she faces down the chorus; she is what turns the play into a tragedy of justice rather than of adultery.
• Sophocles pulls her back into the household quarrel. In his Electra she defends herself point by point — “it was Justice that took him, not I alone” (528) — and is answered that the argument mostly covers her desire.
• Euripides, in his Electra, makes her nearly pitiable: aged, come to her daughter’s hovel on the news of a fake childbirth, she admits regrets, and the killing is staged as a squalid act that the Dioscuri themselves condemn.

Pausanias adds a note of mythical archaeology: at Mycenae the tombs of Agamemnon and his companions were shown inside the walls, while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus had been buried a little outside, judged unworthy to lie within (2.16.6-7).

Why she matters

Clytemnestra is the first figure in Greek literature to make a public argument from justice against the authority of the head of the household. Aeschylus uses her to test the contradiction that runs through the whole Oresteia: a just revenge produces a killing that in turn calls for revenge, and the chain stops only at the court of the Areopagus in the Eumenides. Without her the trilogy has no engine.

Her afterlife matches that role. She runs through French classical tragedy with Racine, through opera with Gluck, and the twentieth century made her the image of a maternal rage that civic order cannot absorb — from the Elektra of Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss to Sartre’s The Flies.

Further reading

For the man she kills and the house whose curse she inherits, see Agamemnon and, further back, Pelops, where the guilt of the Atreidae begins. For her children, see Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. For the sister whose fate doubles her own, see Helen of Troy, and for the captive she cuts down at the homecoming, Cassandra. The war that keeps her husband away for ten years is told in the Trojan War.