Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(48)

The chorus are on the verge of all-out combat with Aegisthus and his men, but Clytemnestra will allow no further bloodshed. Again, we are left in no doubt who has taken control of the palace, of the city, in the aftermath of the king’s death. Aegisthus may claim to be the mastermind of the day, but when it comes to actual power, it rests in the hands of the queen. She stops Aegisthus – ‘dearest of men’ – from doing any more damage. The use of this endearment surely helps to persuade the chorus that they have nothing to gain by venting further anger and distress. She tells them to leave. They issue one last barb – you wait till Orestes gets home.

Have the chorus remembered Cassandra’s prophecy, that her own death would be followed by the death of a woman and a man? Have they understood that, however much Clytemnestra and Aegisthus believe they were serving the goddesses of Justice and Vengeance, they now may be destroyed by those same goddesses in turn? This is the dark shadow at the centre of the house of Atreus. Every crime committed requires an act of retribution to satisfy the dead: Iphigenia, Thyestes’ older children. But every act of retribution then requires another: Clytemnestra’s daughter is avenged but her surviving children – Orestes and Electra – are now in an impossible bind, as the Choephoroi, or The Libation Bearers, the next play in the trilogy, will make clear. If they fail to avenge their father, his spirit will torment them because he has been murdered and his killer goes unpunished. But if they kill his murderer, they themselves will be committing the unforgivable crime of matricide. Retributive justice is all very well, but when such horrors take place within the family, there is no solution which does not worsen the already intolerable position.

Clytemnestra may prevent fighting from breaking out between her lover and the chorus of Argive men, but she ends the play with no hint of humility or apology. Ignore their worthless barking, she tells Aegisthus, effortlessly dehumanizing the old men: they are no more important to her than dogs, their words contain no more merit than animal howls. And she literally has the last words in the play: I, and you, rule this house now. The word order may pain English grammarians, but Clytemnestra means it. I rule the palace, the city, its people, and so do you. Aegisthus is not quite an afterthought, but she certainly isn’t giving him top billing. The play concludes with yet another motive for killing Agamemnon: the acquisition of power.

The play is disquieting now, and it must have been even more so when it was first performed. It is hard to measure the impact of something by the absence of work it inspires, but there are surprisingly few vase paintings which show this part of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s story, even fewer which show the specifically Aeschylean version. Have we just been unlucky in what has survived? Or might there be a reason for the scarcity? These ornate wine cups and bowls were often used by men at parties attended by other men, as well as women who were not their wives. Plato’s Symposium gives us a very high-minded, idealized version of this kind of night: philosophical discussion, drinking, the arrival of a late guest accompanied by flute-girls. It’s not beyond the stretch of our imagination to conclude that perhaps men at these kinds of parties might not be desperate to be reminded of the murderous anger of a wife left waiting at home for her husband. If you wanted a wine bowl decorated with axe-wielding women, you might well choose the Amazons in a battle rather than a raging wife cutting down a single unarmed man.

The Dokimasia pot in Boston shows a different emphasis, as mentioned above: Aegisthus is the killer, Clytemnestra not much more than an axe-wielding cheerleader. But a fourth-century BCE krater in the Hermitage Museum18 in St Petersburg shows a more murderous Clytemnestra. In fact, it shows a naked Agamemnon cowering behind his shield as Clytemnestra bears down upon him with her axe raised above her head, her cloak billowing behind her. This piece was made in Magna Graecia (southern Italy today, but populated with Greek settlements at the time), which raises an interesting question about whether these wine-drinkers enjoyed the sight of a murderous wife more than their Athenian counterparts. And if so, why?

*

Clytemnestra is usually presented as an archetypally bad wife. The only question tends to be her motivation, which makes her more or less sympathetic, more or less threatening to the society which depicts her. Our earliest descriptions of her are in the Odyssey, where she acts (in narrative terms) as a dark reflection of the archetypally good wife, Penelope. The poem follows Odysseus on his extended journey home to his long-suffering wife, while she copes with the invasion of her home by a gang of young men, the disrespect of her son and plenty more. She is held up throughout Greek myth as a model wife to her absent husband. But the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming punctuates the poem, not least when Odysseus visits the Underworld in Book Eleven and meets his now-dead comrade. He asks Agamemnon how he died, whether Poseidon had wrecked his ship or whether he’d been killed by men whose livestock he was trying to pilfer. Magnificently, Odysseus manages to conjure up scenarios he himself has experienced and will experience: his heroic self-absorption is an ever-present risk to his own (and his men’s) survival in this poem. Agamemnon says no, it wasn’t Poseidon and nor was he killed by men defending their land. It was Aegisthus, he says, with help from my wife. He uses the vocabulary of ritual slaughter, just as Clytemnestra will go on to do, in Aeschylus’ play. The Homeric version is more of a bloodbath, however: this Agamemnon saw his men slaughtered too, like pigs. He then compares it to a battle, which makes the domestic details all the more shocking: palace tables stacked with food and wine, the floor beneath them covered in blood. He says he heard Cassandra being killed by Clytemnestra while his own life ebbed away. Clytemnestra didn’t even look at him as he died, did not even close his eyes and mouth after death. He advises Odysseus to return home cautiously, although he does also suggest that Penelope isn’t the murdering kind, ‘not like my wife’.