Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(45)

Thus Clytemnestra offers a pre-emptive excuse for the absence of their son from the palace. Agamemnon must surely have expected Orestes to be here, welcoming his father home (Clytemnestra doesn’t need to make the same excuses about their surviving daughter, Electra. Perhaps fathers didn’t worry so much about being greeted by their daughters. Or perhaps Agamemnon specifically doesn’t think too much about his daughter, having killed her older sister, as we were reminded at the start of the play). Not only does Clytemnestra offer a perfectly good reason for Orestes being absent, she has weaponized her own unhappiness to give her story greater plausibility. She hasn’t sent Orestes away because she’s a bad mother and doesn’t care about him, or because she’s a bad wife and doesn’t mind if he’s not there to welcome his father. She has sent him away because reports of Agamemnon being injured were so frequent and so distressing that her repeated suicide attempts were upsetting for Orestes, so he is elsewhere for his own good. I hesitate to prejudice your reading of the play, but I would say it is at this moment that we might describe Clytemnestra as ‘a piece of work’. She just cares too much. Well, we’ll see. Oh, and were you wondering why she isn’t tear-stained from all these nights spent weeping over Agamemnon’s potential injuries? Of course, she has an explanation for that too: she has wept all her tears already, in the long nights when she suffered instead of sleeping.

We might think Agamemnon is rather gullible to fall for all this deceit. And perhaps he is. Nothing about his character as it’s presented in Homer’s Iliad would suggest that we are dealing with a cunning or even moderately clever man: the brains in the Greek camp belonged to Odysseus, Nestor and others. But even if Agamemnon were more immediately sceptical of the words of a woman whose child he once murdered, it would do him little good. He is simply outclassed. We will see a similar dynamic at play between Jason (who is much cleverer than Agamemnon) and his wife, Medea, in Euripides’ play.

But then Clytemnestra almost takes things too far. She gestures to her slave-women who have carried their finest tapestries out from the halls of the palace. She tells them to place these gorgeous cloths on the ground so that Agamemnon can walk on them. She doesn’t want him to set foot on the dusty earth beneath his chariot wheels, but to walk only on this luxurious purple fabric. This may seem odd to us, but not especially shocking: these tapestries could be like carpets or fancy rugs. But Agamemnon’s response shows us that Clytemnestra is in fact asking him to do something deeply transgressive.

He almost accepts the praise which Clytemnestra has offered him as his due. But, he says, it would be more suitable if it came from someone else, and not from his wife. The lavish treatment she is proposing makes him uncomfortable. Walking on these tapestries would be hubristic: it is what a god or a barbarian might do. We see an interesting division in his notion of masculinity here. Luxury is too good for a mortal man and belongs in the realm of the gods. But it is also too exotic, too foreign, too other, and any man indulged in this way resembles a foreigner, a barbarian, not a Greek.

What might the tapestries have been like, to provoke such an extreme reaction from Agamemnon? They are clearly far more precious than carpets or rugs. During the Bronze Age, when this play is set – perhaps the twelfth century BCE, many hundreds of years before it was written – the wealth of a royal house was not held in money, which didn’t yet exist. It was held in gold and other precious metals. And it was also held in fine tapestries like the ones Clytemnestra is proposing her slaves throw down on the ground. With no industrial processes, weaving was a formidably time-consuming task. Thin fabrics would have taken longer to create than any other kind: a finely spun yarn needs many more lines of weaving to make the same-sized cloth as could be produced far more quickly using a thick yarn. And patterns would also be much more intricate, because the fineness of the fabric allowed for more detail to be woven into it.

The colour was also a source of their value. Purple-red fabrics were coloured with murex: a sea snail whose secretions are the basis of this dark, regal purple dye. This was imported from the east, probably the Phoenician city of Tyre. The same dye would be used to create imperial purple in Rome, many centuries later. A vast quantity of murex would have been needed to colour the yarn for a large tapestry, and it was an extremely expensive, labour-intensive process to produce it. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon both refer to the enormous cost of the dye – the purple is equal in value to silver,6 Clytemnestra says. To be clear, the dye alone is this valuable: that’s before it has been used on the threads which will be woven into the delicate tapestries.

One more thing to note about murex is that it produced a colour which we might call red, or crimson, or purple. But it would have been a dark, visceral shade. So when Clytemnestra plays on Agamemnon’s vanity, tells him his victory is so great that he deserves the cloths beneath his feet, persuades him to walk over them in his bare feet, she achieves two things. The first is for the characters within the play: they see Agamemnon bending to his wife’s will, and walking over these priceless tapestries as she has ordered. He is being flattered into behaving like a potentate, while she has won their first exchange in ten years. He does as she commands.

The second is for the audience watching the play. We have seen Agamemnon return home, riding his chariot, carrying his spoils, accompanied by his war bride. And now we see this man step down from his chariot, barefoot, and walk into his palace over a river of glistening red. Even those who don’t know his story cannot fail to see that he walks through blood to get home.