Clytemnestra: The Villain the Myths Needed You to Hate

← Back to the blog

Why Did Clytemnestra Kill Agamemnon?

She gives the reason herself, standing over the body: he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to get a favourable wind to Troy. She waited ten years, and she was still waiting when he came home. Aeschylus builds her case in the Oresteia with something approaching respect — and does not refute it. He simply decides, in the end, that her reasons were not sufficient. What the road to that verdict looks like is one of the most intellectually serious pieces of drama the ancient world produced.

Clytemnestra is one of the great murder cases of Western literature, in the sense that it is a case rather than a simple act: a killing with stated reasons, a perpetrator who does not flee, and a trial — in the Eumenides, the third play of Aeschylus's trilogy — that the mythology itself does not treat as a foregone conclusion. She killed Agamemnon. She killed Cassandra. She ruled Argos with Aegisthus for ten years while Agamemnon was at Troy, and she was waiting when he came home. The Oresteia does not pretend that she had no reasons. It simply decides, in the end, that her reasons were not sufficient — but the road to that verdict is one of the most intellectually serious pieces of drama the ancient world produced, and you cannot read it carefully without noticing that Aeschylus builds Clytemnestra's case with something approaching respect.

The reason she gives for killing Agamemnon is Iphigenia. Before the fleet could sail from Aulis for Troy, the winds would not come. Calchas the seer told Agamemnon that Artemis required a sacrifice — specifically his daughter, his eldest child, his Iphigenia. Agamemnon sacrificed her. The mechanics of how this was arranged differ between sources: in some versions Clytemnestra was told it was a marriage to Achilles, and the girl arrived at Aulis expecting a wedding. In Aeschylus, the act is rendered in the Agamemnon with an image that has never left me — Iphigenia gagged so that her curses could not call down any divine protection, lifted above the altar, her saffron robe falling. Aeschylus gives this in a choral ode. He does not mitigate it. He does not suggest Agamemnon had no choice. He lets the image stand. Aeschylus had opinions about Agamemnon. They come through.

The Case She Makes

Clytemnestra, standing over Agamemnon's body at the beginning of the Agamemnon, makes the explicit argument: he killed their daughter, she killed him, the accounts are settled, and the house of Atreus can be done with its killing. This is presented as her genuine belief. The chorus rejects it — they tell her that she will be exiled, hated, cursed — but they do not refute the logic. They cannot. The logic is sound within the framework of blood justice that the myth operates in. A father who kills a daughter has forfeited something. The question the Oresteia is working through is whether a mother who kills a father to avenge a daughter has forfeited something in return, and if so, whether those debts cancel or compound.

The answer Aeschylus reaches, in the Eumenides, is that they compound, and that the only way to stop compounding is to replace blood justice with civic justice — Athena's jury trial, the establishment of the Areopagus, the vote that acquits Orestes by a tie. This is usually read as Aeschylus celebrating the advent of Athenian democratic institutions, which it may well be. But it is worth noting what the resolution requires: it requires Clytemnestra's claim to be superseded, not answered. The jury that votes to acquit Orestes for killing his mother does not vote to condemn Clytemnestra for killing her husband. It simply moves on. The new system begins. What Clytemnestra had coming does not need to be assessed, because the system it would have been assessed under no longer applies. This is, depending on your view of the matter, either the birth of civilization or a very sophisticated way of changing the subject.

What the Myth Needed Her to Be

Homer, in the Odyssey, uses Clytemnestra as a counter-example to Penelope: Penelope who waited faithfully, Clytemnestra who did not. Agamemnon's ghost in the underworld warns Odysseus not to trust women, citing Clytemnestra as his evidence, in one of the ancient world's more uncomfortable passages of dramatic irony, since the whole point of Odysseus's story is that his wife is the exception to precisely this rule. Homer needs Clytemnestra monstrous so that Penelope can be heroic by contrast. The structural requirement of the story demands that a woman who acts — who takes power, who makes decisions about her own life and household — be coded as a threat.

This is the deeper architecture of the Clytemnestra myth, and it is what makes her so interesting to a novelist who works with these stories: she is a woman who had legitimate grievances and acted on them, and the mythology built an entire theological framework to explain why her actions were impermissible. Not wrong in the sense of unjust — Aeschylus is too good a playwright to make that claim — but impermissible in the sense that they could not be allowed to stand as precedent. A mother who kills a king who killed her daughter cannot be allowed to have simply won. Something must come after. Orestes must avenge Agamemnon. The Furies must pursue Orestes. Athena must hold a trial. The institutional machinery of Greek civilization must be invoked to process what Clytemnestra did, because the alternative is that she did it, it was justified, and that is the end of the story. That ending was not available to the mythology. It needed her to be a villain so that the house of Atreus could eventually run out of blood to spill. The house of Atreus had a great deal of blood to spill. It was industrious in this regard. She was the villain it got. She deserves to be read as something more than that — and Aeschylus, who after all wrote three full plays wrestling with what she did, clearly thought so too.