Aegisthus

Also Known As: Greek Aigisthos; son of Thyestes, in the later mythographers by Thyestes’ own daughter Pelopia; lover of Clytemnestra, killer of Atreus and Agamemnon, king of Mycenae until Orestes returned
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He is the patient schemer of the house of Pelops, a son begotten to avenge one brother on another, who took a king’s wife and throne by ambush and was warned by the gods in advance.
Role in Mythos: Aegisthus carries the feud between Atreus and Thyestes into the next generation, killing Atreus in one telling and Agamemnon in all of them, and so becomes the man Orestes must kill.
Relation to Humans: He seduced Clytemnestra while the Greek kings were at Troy, murdered Agamemnon and his men at a feast, and ruled Mycenae for seven years. Homer holds him up as the example of a man who brought ruin on himself beyond his fated share, and Pausanias records that he was buried outside the walls of Mycenae as unworthy of a place within.

The last thing Aegisthus looked at was the inside of a calf. He had invited two travellers in off the road, stood them at his altar and handed one of them the knife, and now he was bent over the warm entrails in his own hands, reading them. The liver had no lobe. The vein running to the gall-bladder foretold an attack on the man examining it. Behind him the stranger with the cleaver rose onto his toes.

That is how Euripides ends him in his Electra, and it is only one ending among several. Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, is the man who took Agamemnon’s wife and Agamemnon’s throne while the king was at Troy, and who paid for both when Agamemnon’s son came home. Homer uses him as a moral lesson. The Athenian tragedians make him a schemer, a bully and something close to a coward. The later mythographers give him a birth so strange that the rest of his life reads like an instruction being carried out.

The oldest account of where he came from is the plainest. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon he tells it himself, standing over the king’s body: Atreus drove Thyestes out of Mycenae, let him return as a suppliant, and then served him his own children at a feast of welcome. Aegisthus was the third child, a baby in swaddling clothes, and was driven into exile with his father. In this version he is the brother who was not eaten.

The Latin mythographer Hyginus tells something darker. An oracle promised Thyestes that a son he fathered on his own daughter, Pelopia, would avenge him on his brother. At Sicyon, where Pelopia lived, Thyestes came upon a night sacrifice to the goddess Hyginus calls Minerva. Pelopia slipped while leading the dance and stained her dress with the victim’s blood, and when she went down to the river to wash it, Thyestes leapt from the grove with his head covered and raped her. She pulled his sword from its sheath as he held her and hid it under the base of the goddess’s statue. Atreus, hunting for his brother, saw Pelopia, took her for the daughter of King Thesprotus, and married her, not knowing she was already pregnant. She bore the child and exposed him. Shepherds found the boy and set him under a she-goat to nurse, and Hyginus says that is how he got his name, from the Greek word for goat. He turns up again in Hyginus’s list of those nursed by wild animals, alongside Telephus and his deer and Romulus and Remus with their wolf. Atreus then had the foundling tracked down and raised as his own son. The shorter Apollodorus gives the same outline without the scenery: the oracle, the daughter, and a grown son who learned whose he was and killed Atreus for it.

A red-figure wine bowl painted at Taras in southern Italy around 330 BC, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, shows the exposure itself, with Artemis sending Pan off to find a goat for the baby. It is usually connected with a lost play of Sophocles, Thyestes at Sikyon, although the painting departs from Hyginus in places, down to a king named Adrastus presiding over the scene.

In Hyginus the sword comes back. Atreus’s sons found Thyestes at Delphi and dragged him home, and Atreus locked him up and sent young Aegisthus to kill him. Thyestes saw the blade in the boy’s hand and knew it. Where did you get this, he asked, and Aegisthus said his mother Pelopia had given it to him. She was sent for. She told them about the night at Sicyon, took the sword as though she recognised it, and drove it into her own breast. Aegisthus pulled it out and carried it, still bloody, to Atreus, who was delighted to think his brother dead. Aegisthus killed him on the shore while he was sacrificing, and went home with his father to the old kingdom.

Early in the first book of the Odyssey, Zeus sits among the gods thinking about Aegisthus. Men blame the gods for their troubles, he complains, when they bring suffering on themselves beyond their share. The gods had sent Hermes to warn Aegisthus not to kill Agamemnon and not to court his wife, because Orestes would avenge his father once he was grown. He did it anyway.

Nestor fills in the rest for Telemachus. While the Greeks fought at Troy, Aegisthus stayed at his ease in the heart of Argos and wore Clytemnestra down with flattery. At first she would have none of it. Agamemnon had left a bard to watch over her, so Aegisthus carried the bard off to a desert island and left him there for the birds, and after that she went to his house willingly. He burned offerings to the gods and hung their temples with woven cloth and gold, because he had done better than he ever expected.

Then he waited. A watchman sat at his lookout for a whole year, promised two talents of gold, with orders not to let Agamemnon slip past. When the king came ashore and kissed the ground, the watchman ran to the palace. Aegisthus chose twenty of his best men and hid them on one side of the hall, had a feast laid on the other, and drove out with chariot and horses to bring Agamemnon in. When the meal was over he killed him, in the Odyssey’s phrase, as one slays an ox at the stall. In the underworld Agamemnon’s ghost describes his men cut down around the mixing bowl and the loaded tables until the floor swam with blood, while Clytemnestra killed Cassandra at his side. None of Agamemnon’s men survived, and none of Aegisthus’s did either.

The details move from teller to teller. Apollodorus says Clytemnestra gave her husband a shirt with no sleeves and no neck and he was cut down while struggling into it; Hyginus says the pair killed him with an axe while he was sacrificing. Apollodorus also passes on the claim that Nauplius, avenging his son Palamedes, sailed along the coasts of Greece arranging for the wives of the absent kings to take lovers, Clytemnestra with Aegisthus among them.

Aeschylus gives him an entrance after the killing, with armed men behind him, to claim the plan as his own. The old men of Argos are not impressed. They call him a woman for staying home from the war and leaving the deed to one, and promise him stoning. His answer is candid: trapping Agamemnon was the woman’s part, since he himself was known to be an old enemy, and now he will rule with the dead man’s gold and starve anyone who resists. Hands go to sword hilts on both sides until Clytemnestra, calling him her dearest, stops it. The chorus gets the last insult, telling him to strut like a cock beside his hen.

Nestor says he ruled Mycenae for seven years and the people obeyed him. Euripides has him keep Electra unmarried for fear she would bear an avenger, then marry her off to a poor farmer, and put a price on Orestes’ head. Pausanias heard at Mycenae that he killed Cassandra’s baby twins, Teledamus and Pelops. With Clytemnestra he had a daughter, Erigone, whom Apollodorus names among those said to have prosecuted Orestes, and whom the poet Cinaethon, as Pausanias reports, made the mother of a son by Orestes.

The end comes in the eighth year in the Odyssey, when Orestes returns from Athens, kills him, and holds a funeral feast for his mother and Aegisthus on the very day Menelaus sails home. Aeschylus stages it as a trap in The Libation Bearers: the old nurse is sent to fetch him with his spearmen, the chorus talks her into telling him to come alone, and he walks in muttering that the news of Orestes’ death is probably a panic spread by women. A scream follows, and a servant runs out crying that the dead are killing the living. Hyginus has Orestes arrive as a stranger with news of his own death and Pylades carrying an urn of bones, both welcomed gladly by Aegisthus, and the killing done at night. Euripides gives him the garden, the myrtle wreath, the calf, and a cleaver through the spine.

He has no powers in any of this. What he has is patience, gold and a gift for letting others hold the blade: a watchman paid to wait a year, a queen to spread the net, a feast instead of a battle. His weakness is written into the story from the Odyssey’s first council of the gods. He was told plainly what would happen and did it anyway, and in the tragedies and in Hyginus the man who kills him arrives at his door as a harmless stranger. Nestor says that had Menelaus found him alive, there would have been no burial mound at all, only dogs and birds. Pausanias records the actual arrangement: Aegisthus and Clytemnestra lie at some distance outside the walls of Mycenae, judged unworthy of the ground where Agamemnon and his murdered companions were buried. Even Pausanias hesitated over the verdict, though. He could not say for certain, he wrote, whether Aegisthus began the wrong, or whether Agamemnon had sinned first by killing Tantalus, son of Thyestes, who had been Clytemnestra’s first husband.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Aegisthus in Greek mythology?

Aegisthus was the son of Thyestes and the lover of Clytemnestra, with whom he murdered King Agamemnon on his return from Troy. He then ruled Mycenae for seven years, according to the Odyssey. Agamemnon’s son Orestes eventually came home and killed him.

Why was Aegisthus named after a goat?

The Latin mythographer Hyginus says Aegisthus was exposed as a baby by his mother Pelopia and found by shepherds, who put him under a she-goat to nurse. Hyginus explains the name from the Greek word for goat. He lists Aegisthus alongside other figures raised by animals, such as Romulus and Remus with their wolf.

Who were Aegisthus’s parents?

Every source makes Thyestes his father. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Aegisthus says he was Thyestes’ third child, driven into exile as a baby. In Hyginus and Apollodorus, an oracle told Thyestes to father a son on his own daughter Pelopia, and Aegisthus was that son, born to avenge Thyestes on his brother Atreus.

How did Aegisthus kill Agamemnon?

In the Odyssey, Aegisthus posted a watchman for a year, hid twenty men in his hall, invited Agamemnon to a feast and killed him there with all his companions. Apollodorus says Clytemnestra trapped Agamemnon in a shirt with no sleeves or neck before he was cut down. Hyginus says Aegisthus and Clytemnestra killed him with an axe while he was sacrificing.

How did Aegisthus die?

Aegisthus was killed by Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, who returned to avenge his father. In the Odyssey this happens in the eighth year of Aegisthus’s reign. Euripides has Orestes strike him in the back with a cleaver while Aegisthus bends over a sacrifice to the Nymphs, and Pausanias says he was buried outside the walls of Mycenae as unworthy of a place inside.