Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(49)

So Homer’s Clytemnestra is not quite as terrifying for men as Aeschylus’ version: she doesn’t kill her husband, although she does stand by as he is killed and has been involved in planning his murder. Obviously for women, and specifically for Cassandra, she is precisely the same degree of murderous. And for the Homeric Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s affair with Aegisthus is the root of her evil. There is no suggestion that this Clytemnestra might be avenging the death of her daughter, or indeed that she might have political ambitions to rule in her husband’s stead, both of which were part of her character in Aeschylus. At least as far as Agamemnon tells things here, she was solely motivated by desire for Aegisthus. Clytemnestra is nothing more than an adulteress.

It is this motivation which will come to define Clytemnestra when Roman authors get hold of her. For Ovid, in his Ars Amatoria or The Art of Love, she is driven by sexual jealousy, which only really manifests itself when she sees Agamemnon’s infidelity up close.19 She stays chaste while she can imagine Agamemnon is faithful to her. She heard the rumours about Chryseis and Briseis (both women whom Agamemnon had claimed as war brides in the Iliad). But it is only when he returns home with Cassandra, and Clytemnestra sees the relationship for herself, that she begins her own revenge-affair with Aegisthus. So Ovid is continuing a tradition which deprives Clytemnestra of her status as queen and Fury, but he also removes the responsibility for Agamemnon’s murder from her. The implication is that Agamemnon is responsible for his own downfall: if he had had the good sense to keep his mistress away from his wife, he might have lived to a ripe old age.

Of course, Ovid is writing a very different kind of poem from Homer’s epic Odyssey or Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon. The Ars Amatoria is a bright, racy, jokey guide to having illicit sex in Rome (produced at a time when the new emperor, Augustus, was cracking down on adultery. At least, other people’s). So Ovid has every reason to turn Clytemnestra and Agamemnon into a suburban couple whose swinging habits get out of control, rather than treating them with the epic grandeur of our earlier Greek authors. Here we find no reference to Iphigenia, no reference to Clytemnestra’s designs on the Argive throne. Ovid knows so much about Greek myth that we know he is being deliberately cheeky here: reducing Clytemnestra – and Medea, a little earlier in the same passage – two famously wronged women who respond with remarkable violence to their abuse – to little more than vexed housewives kicking up a fuss.

The Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca must have read Ovid’s treatment of Clytemnestra, because his version of her (in his strange, flawed play, Agamemnon) is a similarly sexual being, tormented by her love and intense desire for Aegisthus.20 She does mention Iphigenia, but not with any particular anguish or need for retribution. As with Ovid’s interpretation, the Senecan Clytemnestra is jealous of her husband’s sexual conquests while he has been away at Troy: Briseis, Chryseis and Cassandra. But unlike our earlier Clytemnestras, this one is afraid that her husband will punish her for her own indiscretions. She even considers suicide. We have come a long way from the fearless, furious woman created by Aeschylus.

But let us return to Clytemnestra in her raging Aeschylean incarnation. More specifically, let’s follow her story through to its end. The second play of the Oresteia is The Libation Bearers. This is a reference to the offerings made at the tomb of the late Agamemnon by Electra and the chorus some years after the events of the previous play. Clytemnestra has been having bad dreams and she believes the ghost of her late husband needs placating. She has sent her daughter Electra to do the honours. Electra prays for her long-absent brother Orestes to come home and avenge their father. We learn that Clytemnestra still rules with Aegisthus.

But Electra is about to have her wish fulfilled: she identifies a lock of hair left as an offering beside her father’s tomb, and she sees a footprint which seems remarkably familiar to her. She concludes that both hair and footprint belong to Orestes, and that her brother must have returned at last. If this seems like a bit of a leap, you are not alone: Euripides mocks this whole recognition scene in his later version of the same story, Electra.

But once the siblings are reunited – along with Orestes’ companion Pylades – they determine to take action against their father’s killer. Orestes has been ordered by no less an authority than the god Apollo to do so. Clytemnestra comes out of the palace to greet these two men whom she believes to be strangers. She welcomes them inside, offers them hospitality. Orestes doesn’t identify himself, instead pretending to have met a man who had news for her: that Orestes is dead. Her response is that of a mother who has lost her son, rather than a woman who fears retribution from him. You’ve stripped away the thing I love, she says: I am utterly destroyed.21

Once they get inside the palace, Orestes kills Aegisthus, but wavers before killing his mother. Clytemnestra realizes she is to be killed by someone who has used trickery, just as she herself had used it to kill.22 For a moment, it seems as though Clytemnestra will talk herself out of trouble: I gave birth to you, she says. I want to grow old with you.23 He is aghast at her words: after killing my father? You want to grow old with me? She blames Moira – Fate – for Agamemnon’s death.

And then she and Orestes share a moment which must resonate with parents and children in less extreme circumstances. You cast me out, he says. She sees things differently: I put you at an ally’s house out of harm’s way. I was sold into slavery, he replies. Oh really, she says: how much did I get for you? We can surely hear the echoes of parents and teenagers arguing through the ages: they agree on the events which have occurred, but their interpretations of those events are poles apart and neither can see the other’s point of view. Mother and son are, in this moment, uncannily alike. But Pylades has reminded Orestes that Apollo demands this retributive killing, and Orestes does as he has been told. Clytemnestra dies reminding him that hounds of vengeance will chase him down.24