Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(44)

When the chorus finish and their leader turns to speak to Clytemnestra directly, he uses an extraordinary phrase: ‘I come honouring your power, Clytemnestra.’5 The Greek word for power is kratos – it is the root of words like democracy, autocracy, kleptocracy. It is not a nebulous, vague word, which might imply anything from empty charisma to being a figurehead in her husband’s absence. Kratos is specific: political might, ruling power. These men don’t simply kowtow to Clytemnestra because her husband is their king, they are open in telling her that they respect her power. Clytemnestra responds with a proverb: Let dawn be born from mother night. Motherhood is right at the front of her mind. We can surely conclude that it is never anywhere else, that this powerful woman is motivated, first and foremost, by her relationship to her murdered daughter.

Clytemnestra explains to the chorus that Troy has fallen. She appears already to know more than her watchman could have told her, because she makes a pointed reference to the behaviour of the Greeks inside the city of Troy. So long as they respect the temples and shrines of the Trojan gods, they’ll be all right, she says.

Does she know that the Greeks have done the absolute opposite of this, or does she just suspect it because her opinion of Agamemnon and any men he commands is already so low? Presumably the latter, because how could she know that Priam, the ancient king of Troy, had been slaughtered in a temple? How could she know that Cassandra, a priestess of Apollo, had been raped? The Greeks have shown no respect for the gods, and it is hard to avoid imagining a tone of glee in Clytemnestra’s words here. This is a woman who has spent ten long years waiting to avenge her daughter. She knows there are limits even to her power. If the Greeks and Agamemnon behaved well towards the gods, perhaps her time would never come, and Iphigenia’s murder would go unanswered. But her wishes have come true: the untrammelled cruelty of the Greeks cost Iphigenia her life, and that cruelty has not diminished over a decade of brutalizing combat. How could it?

The chorus respond with another song about the horrors of war and the fall of Troy. And then Agamemnon’s herald rushes onstage to announce the king’s imminent arrival. Clytemnestra explains that she had known this was coming as soon as the beacons announced the war was won. She cedes no political ground at all: she is ahead of all these men who surround her. The herald and the chorus exchange mutually hostile opinions on Helen (to whom they attribute blame for the war), who is of course Clytemnestra’s sister.

Finally, at almost the halfway point of the play, Agamemnon makes his entrance, riding in a chariot. This play may be named after him, but he is not the lead character: Clytemnestra has more stage time and more dialogue. Her husband comes onstage with the booty he has seized from Troy, accompanied by Cassandra, the daughter of Priam and Hecabe, a priestess of Apollo. Agamemnon offers thanks to the gods for their assistance in razing Troy and in bringing him back home. The word he uses for the destruction of Troy is diēmathunen – to grind to dust, to destroy completely. His enthusiastic prayer seems out of place when we recall Clytemnestra’s earlier description of the desecration of Troy’s temples by his men. Not least because he is accompanied by a priestess, whose body should be sacrosanct. But Agamemnon has made Cassandra his war bride: he has raped her, like the temple in which she served and the city which was her home.

Agamemnon speaks first to the gods, and then to the chorus of old Argive men. He does not address his wife, although she is onstage for at least the second half of his speech (stage directions are an irritatingly modern invention, so we can’t always be completely sure when characters appear and disappear). His priority is not a family reunion, but presenting himself to the men of his city. When he has finished speaking, Clytemnestra responds in kind. She too speaks to the chorus, telling them how lonely it is for a woman when her husband goes away to fight a war. We might be suspicious of her motives, but there is a ring of truth in the pain she describes as messengers arrived, one after another, each bearing news of injuries, disasters. If her husband had received all the wounds he was reported to have incurred, she explains, he would have more holes in him than a net.

What are we to make of this speech? We surely don’t believe Clytemnestra’s portrait of herself as a lonely, wretched woman, lost in a limbo between wife and widow (although this portrayal must have been true for many more Greek wives than not. We’ll see the complications which arise from it with Penelope, as she waits twice as long – twenty years – for her husband Odysseus to return home from the Trojan War). We know Clytemnestra has been waiting avidly for his return, has sent out watchmen so that she may be the first to know when Troy falls. Is she describing her behaviour accurately and only lying about her reasons? Did she wait for every messenger as she claims, desperate to hear if Agamemnon was injured? Not because she wanted to hear he was safe but because she wanted to hear that he was not? Did she curse each messenger because they seemed to taunt her: Agamemnon must surely be dead by now, and yet somehow he lives? Or was she sincerely desperate for news that Agamemnon was unhurt, even though her motivation was much darker than anyone has realized? Did she want Agamemnon home safe for one reason and one reason only: so that she could kill him herself?

Then Clytemnestra shows us how devastatingly clever and cunning she is. Finally, she turns to speak to Agamemnon. All these rumours about him were so traumatic for her, she tells him, that more than once she fastened a noose around her neck. Others had to cut her down or she would not be alive today. And that is why Orestes, their son, is not present: he has been sent away for his own wellbeing. He’s being cared for by a close friend so he would not witness his mother’s suffering.