Clytemnestra: Why She Killed Agamemnon — The Greek Myth

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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.

Clytemnestra is one of the great murder cases in Western literature. Not a simple act, but a case: 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 refuses to 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 she had no reasons. It simply decides, in the end, that her reasons were not enough. But the road to that verdict is one of the most serious pieces of drama the ancient world produced (three plays, not one, to reach a judgment most retellings settle in a single sentence). Read it closely and you will notice that Aeschylus builds Clytemnestra's case with something close to 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 the debts compound, and the only way to stop them compounding is to replace blood justice with civic justice: Athena's jury trial, the founding of the Areopagus, a vote on Orestes that ties. This is usually read as Aeschylus celebrating the birth of Athenian democracy, which it may well be. But look at what the resolution actually requires. It requires Clytemnestra's claim to be superseded, not answered. The jury that acquits Orestes for killing his mother never votes to condemn Clytemnestra for killing her husband — it simply moves on, and the new system begins. What Clytemnestra had coming is never assessed, because the system that would have assessed it no longer applies.

Troy's fall from inside the walls, and the people the epics rush past. That’s my novel The Hound of Troy. Read it on Amazon →

Here is the detail most summaries of the trial leave out: the deciding vote is Athena's own, and she tells the court exactly why she casts it for the father. She was never carried by a mother, she says — she came from Zeus's head, fully grown — so she is, in her own words, entirely on the male side in everything except marriage. A goddess of justice, admitting to the jury that she walked in with a thumb already on the scale. Call that the birth of civilization if you like. It is also, depending on your patience that day, 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. It is one of the ancient world's more uncomfortable passages of dramatic irony (the whole point of Odysseus's own story, after all, 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 useful to a novelist who works with these stories. She is a woman with legitimate grievances who acted on them, and the mythology built an entire theological apparatus to explain why that could not be allowed to stand. Not wrong in the sense of unjust — Aeschylus is too good a playwright to make that claim — but impermissible in the sense that it 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 (Agamemnon's own father, Atreus, once murdered his brother's sons and served them to him at a banquet, then showed him their heads after he had eaten). She was the villain it got. But villain is a role, not a verdict — and Aeschylus, who spent three plays on her case and gave her some of the best lines in all of them, never once let her stop making it.