Clytemnestra

Clytemnestra was a daughter of Leda, queen of Sparta. Apollodorus's Library says that Zeus, in the form of a swan, lay with Leda on the same night as her husband Tyndareus. She bore Pollux and Helen to Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra to Tyndareus. Homer's Odyssey calls her simply the daughter of Tyndareus. Apollodorus's Epitome adds a harsher start to her marriage. Agamemnon won her only after killing her first husband, Tantalus son of Thyestes, together with his child. Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis gives Clytemnestra the same charge in her own voice: he tore her baby from her breast and dashed it to the ground.

When the fleet was held at Aulis, Agamemnon sent for their daughter Iphigenia. Apollodorus's Epitome says he asked Clytemnestra for the girl on the pretext of marrying her to Achilles, and that Artemis snatched her from the altar and left a deer in her place. In the tragedians the girl dies, and her death is the wound Clytemnestra never forgives.

While Agamemnon fought at Troy, his cousin Aegisthus courted her. Nestor tells the story in Homer's Odyssey. At first she refused, and a bard left to guard her kept her faithful. Then Aegisthus marooned the bard on a desert island and took her willingly to his house.

Aeschylus's Agamemnon gives her the leading role in what followed. She has the king walk into the palace over purple tapestries. Inside, she casts a robe around him like a fishing net, strikes him twice, and deals a third blow after he falls. She kills Cassandra, the captive he brought home, beside him. Then she defends the deed to the elders of Argos as justice for Iphigenia. She also says the ancient evil spirit of Atreus, avenging slain children, worked through her. That curse runs through the house of Atreus.

She and Aegisthus ruled for seven years, Homer's Odyssey says, until her son Orestes came home. In Aeschylus's Libation Bearers she dreams she has given birth to a serpent that draws blood from her breast. Orestes takes the dream as a prophecy of himself, kills Aegisthus, and then kills her. In Eumenides her ghost rouses the sleeping Furies to hunt him down. At his trial in Athens, Apollo argues that a mother is not the true parent of her child, and Athena casts her vote for Orestes. The votes are equal, and he is acquitted.

The ancient sources agree that Agamemnon died on his return and that Clytemnestra shared the guilt. They disagree on nearly everything else. Homer's Odyssey makes Aegisthus the killer. Agamemnon's own ghost says Aegisthus invited him to a feast in his house and killed him with the aid of his wife, like an ox at the stall. Aeschylus makes her the one who strikes. Sophocles's Electra has the pair split his head with an axe, and Euripides's Electra says he died by his wife's guile and the hand of Aegisthus. Apollodorus's Epitome names them both and adds the trick of a shirt with no sleeves and no neck, which trapped him as he put it on.

Her motive is just as unsettled. In Pindar's eleventh Pythian ode the poet asks the question himself: was it Iphigenia, slaughtered at the Euripus, or was she led astray by another man's bed? Pindar also sets the murder at Amyclae, not at Mycenae or Argos. In Sophocles, Clytemnestra claims justice for her daughter, and Electra answers that Aegisthus persuaded her to it. In Euripides's Electra she adds Cassandra. She says she could have forgiven the sacrifice, but not a husband who brought home a second bride.

Her death is told differently too. The Odyssey only hints at it: Orestes gave a funeral feast over his hateful mother and Aegisthus. Aeschylus has Orestes kill Aegisthus first and then his mother. In Sophocles, Clytemnestra dies first, crying out while Electra urges her brother to strike again, and Aegisthus comes home to find her body under a veil. In Euripides, Electra lures her to her own poor house with a false report of a newborn child. Orestes covers his eyes with his cloak and drives the sword into his mother's throat, and Electra puts her hand to it with him.

Clytemnestra remains the central figure of every modern Oresteia. Richard Strauss's opera Elektra, first performed at Dresden in 1909 with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, gives her a principal role as Agamemnon's widow and killer. Martha Graham's full-length dance Clytemnestra, first performed in New York in 1958, retells the trilogy from the queen's own point of view.