Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(43)

So the young man might have compared his stepmother to Deianeira, who inadvertently poisons the great Heracles. He might also have compared her to Medea, whose witchy skills with poison made her one of the more fearsome women in Greek myth. But instead, he compared her to Clytemnestra. Perhaps it’s because the actual poisoning was done by another woman, so the comparison with Deianeira or Medea would have been at one remove. Or perhaps the reason for mentioning Clytemnestra was more visceral, given that juries in Athenian courts were all-male. Clytemnestra is the ultimate bad wife, in the same way that Medea is the ultimate bad mother. Clytemnestra was the woman men feared coming home to. Was she craven with lust, driven by revenge, determined to wield power in the polis – city – as well as in the home? Whichever version of Clytemnestra’s story men read, or saw, or heard, they came across the same troubling phenomenon: a woman who did not know her place.

The version of Clytemnestra’s story with which the men in the jury would have been most familiar would – we might imagine – be the power-hungry version we meet in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, first performed in 458 BCE. The play begins with a watchman who is keeping lookout for a beacon: the flaming signal which will tell him that Troy has finally been taken by his king, Agamemnon, and his fellow Greeks. But the man has been ordered to keep watch by Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and queen of the Argive Greeks. She has been ruling them in his ten-year absence.

This in itself is a highly irregular state of affairs, incidentally. Male anxiety over what women might do in their absence is a theme which runs through Athenian society, no more obviously than in the legal system. Upper-class women were kept cloistered, and would have been unlikely to speak to any men at all, other than close relatives. The fear that a woman might leave the house and catch the eye of a man other than her husband amounted to almost a collective neurosis: the penalty for adultery was more severe than the penalty for rape. The cloistering of women makes it hard to know when they were allowed where, even accompanied by their husbands. But it is a fascinating quirk of fifth-century BCE theatre that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and especially Euripides are full of powerful, frightening women capable of murder, torture and infanticide. Yet, as mentioned earlier, it is more likely than not that women weren’t in the audience of the Dionysia to see these representations of their mythological counterparts. The characters themselves were played by men, wearing masks as all characters in Greek plays did. And, equally oddly, men congregated to watch and enjoy these plays in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that they featured women behaving so badly. Though there are some indications that this particular play was not often performed after its initial appearance,2 so perhaps Aeschylus’ version of Clytemnestra was too much for all but the sturdiest men in the theatre.

The watchman is overjoyed when he sees the light of the beacon signalling that Troy has been overthrown: finally his long wait is at an end. He hurries inside to tell his queen that Agamemnon has been victorious at Troy, and will be on his way home. The chorus now take centre stage: they are old men, too old to have left to fight alongside their king a decade earlier. They don’t yet know the war has been won, and when Clytemnestra enters and begins lighting fires to honour the gods, they ask her what has prompted this flurry of religious enthusiasm. She doesn’t answer, and they turn their attention to the past. Specifically they sing of the death of Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia, whom they describe in emotive terms – a sacrificial victim, an animal cowering in distress.3 They tell the whole ugly story: how the Greek army was stranded at Aulis ten years before, and could not find the weather to sail to Troy; how Artemis had to be appeased before the weather would change; how Calchas – their priest – explained that Artemis demanded a sacrifice of blood, the blood of a young woman, of the daughter of Agamemnon, the son of Atreus. They describe Iphigenia pleading with her father when she realized what was about to happen to her. Or rather, what her father was about to do to her. He told his men to gag her, so she could not curse him. Mute, she gazed at her attackers, wishing she could speak.

At this point, when our capacity for horror is almost overwhelmed, the chorus break off. They won’t describe the actual moment of Iphigenia’s death. It is worth noting that, in this entire passage, they never mention her name. Have they dehumanized her, turned her into a nameless sacrificial victim? Or can they just not bear to add to the pain of remembering this young woman too closely? Either way, they know that her mother keeps her memory alive: mnamōn mēnis teknopoinos4 – ‘Rage, remembering, child-avenging’.

There will be many other versions of Clytemnestra in every artistic medium, but there are few who command our sympathy more than this one, at this moment. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is utterly repugnant. Whatever our views on the revenge Clytemnestra will go on to take during this play, and the retribution which will be exacted against her in turn, she is the mother of a daughter who has been slaughtered like an animal. Is it any wonder she nurses an unquenchable rage against the man who committed such a crime? Would we not think less of her if she had simply forgiven Agamemnon and moved on? This is an important question to ask, not least because Aeschylus is unusual in having made the death of Iphigenia so central to Clytemnestra’s motivation. Iphigenia died ten years before the day on which the action of the play occurs. And yet it is presented to us, in all its cruelty, right at the beginning of the play. The night-watchman saw the fire that told him Troy had fallen. He rushed to tell Clytemnestra the news offstage. The chorus then sang, at length, about the death of the young Argive princess. Nothing can happen in the play until we have addressed this unresolved trauma.