Clytemnestra

Also Known As: Greek Κλυταιμήστρα Klytaimestra, the form the Attic tragedians use; also Κλυταιμνήστρα Klytaimnestra, the epic spelling; from klytos, “famed,” with either medomai, “to plot,” or a root meaning “to woo,” giving “famed for scheming” or “famously courted”; Latin Clytaemnestra
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: She holds a kingdom alone for ten years and kills the king who comes back to it, using patience, a bath, a garment with no armholes and a blade.
Role in Mythos: She is the hinge of the curse on the House of Atreus, converting her husband’s inherited guilt into a murder that forces her son to choose between two irreconcilable blood debts.
Relation to Humans: She is mortal, and everything she does is done with mortal means, which is exactly why the Greeks found her so difficult. Her story was told and retold as a warning about what a wife left alone with power might turn out to want.

A man had been lying on the roof of the palace at Argos for a year, elbows down like a dog, watching the mountains for fire. The queen had put him there. When the beacon finally caught on Arachnaion and the whole chain from Ida burned through in a single night, he got up and danced on the tiles in the cold, and then he stopped himself, because there was something inside that house he was not willing to say aloud. Clytemnestra had been ready for ten years.

She was a Spartan, daughter of Tyndareus and Leda, sister to Helen and to Castor and Polydeuces. The tellings split her family down the middle at conception: Zeus came to Leda as a swan, and of the children that followed, Helen and Polydeuces were the god’s and Clytemnestra and Castor were the king’s. So the sister who launched a thousand ships had immortal blood and the sister who ended a war with a kitchen knife did not. Stesichorus offered a different origin for the trouble. Tyndareus, sacrificing one day to all the gods, forgot Aphrodite, and the slighted goddess made his daughters twice-wed, thrice-wed and husband-deserting. Sparta, in other words, blamed her father.

Agamemnon was not her first husband. In the version Euripides gives her, she was married to Tantalus, son of Thyestes, and Agamemnon killed him and dashed her newborn son on the ground before taking her to wife against her will. Her brothers came after him in arms and were bought off by Tyndareus. She had therefore already buried one child by that man’s hand before the fleet ever gathered, and the play lets her say so to his face, in the flat tone of a woman reciting an old account.

Then came Aulis. A thousand ships lay with their sails hanging slack, the wind gone dead out of the strait, the crews rotting on the beach and the seers saying Artemis wanted payment. Agamemnon sent home for Iphigenia on a lie about a marriage to Achilles. What happened next is the moment Greek poetry never stopped circling: the girl lifted over the altar like a young goat, her saffron robe pouring down to the ground, her father’s men gagging her mouth with a bridle so that she could not curse the house, and her eyes going from one man to the next with a look each of them would remember. The wind came back. The ships went to Troy. Clytemnestra went home to Mycenae and began to wait.

She ruled for ten years and she ruled well, which no source disputes and several resent. Aegisthus, her husband’s cousin and the surviving son of Thyestes, came to her with a grievance of his own inherited from the generation above them both. Homer says she resisted him at first, being a woman of sound understanding, and that Agamemnon had left a singer behind with instructions to watch her. Aegisthus took the singer out to a deserted island and left him there for the birds. It is a small, cold detail in a long poem, and it tells you more about the ten years than any speech does.

The homecoming is the scene the tragedians built everything around. Clytemnestra came out to meet the chariot with a welcome so extravagant it embarrassed the men listening, and had crimson cloth unrolled from the yard to the threshold, urging her husband to walk on it. He hesitated, said it was the sort of honour you give a god, and then walked. Inside, there was warm water, and steam, and the ordinary safety of a bath after a decade of war. She threw over him a robe sewn shut, a garment with no way out, and struck him twice, and he groaned twice and his legs went. Then she struck a third time, she says, as an offering to the Zeus of the dead. She stood there afterwards with his blood on her face and told the elders of Argos that she was as glad of the dark spray as sown ground is glad of rain when the buds are breaking. Cassandra, the Trojan prophet he had brought home as a prize, died beside him.

The record does not agree about the hand that held the blade. In the Odyssey it is Aegisthus who does the killing, ambushing Agamemnon at a feast and cutting him down like an ox at the manger, with Clytemnestra as accomplice and as the one who murders Cassandra with her own hands. Agamemnon’s ghost, telling it to Odysseus among the dead, dwells on the indignity: he lay dying with his hands beating the floor, and she would not even close his eyes or his mouth. By the time of Pindar and Aeschylus the axe has moved. She does it, alone, in the bath, and the play gives her the whole speech. Nobody in the ancient world could quite settle whether that made her worse or made her real.

Nothing survives that describes what she looked like. Athenian vase painters gave her an axe, a torch and a stride, and Aeschylus gives her a phrase instead of a face: the chorus calls her heart man-counselling, meaning it plans, which for them was an accusation and not a compliment. She wins every conversation she enters. That is her whole armoury, and it holds until the day her son comes back.

Orestes had been sent away as a child. He returned with Pylades, met his sister Electra at their father’s grave, and killed Aegisthus first. In the night before it, Clytemnestra dreamed she gave birth to a snake, and put it to her breast, and it drew blood along with the milk. When the boy stood over her she pulled open her dress and told him to look at the breast he had fed from. He faltered. Three lines from his friend were enough, and he did it, and the Furies came for him out of the floor before her body was cold. They were her creditors, not his, and they only ever answered to a mother’s blood. What eventually stopped them was not a stronger god but a court: a jury on the hill of Ares in Athens, a tied vote, and Athena’s stone thrown for acquittal. It took the invention of a legal system to get out from under Clytemnestra.

Pausanias, walking the ruins of Mycenae centuries later, was shown where they had put her. Agamemnon and the men killed with him lay inside the wall. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus were buried a little way outside it, since they were held unworthy of a place within. A great vaulted tomb near the Lion Gate still carries her name on the maps, though that attribution belongs to nineteenth-century archaeologists reading Pausanias with a spade in hand rather than to anyone who knew her. The naming stuck anyway. Three thousand years on, she is still being put just beyond the wall, and still refusing to stay there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Clytemnestra in Greek mythology?

Clytemnestra was the queen of Mycenae, daughter of Tyndareus and Leda of Sparta, sister of Helen, and wife of Agamemnon. She ruled the kingdom for the ten years her husband was at Troy and killed him on the day he came home, then reigned with her lover Aegisthus until her son Orestes killed her in turn.

Why did Clytemnestra kill Agamemnon?

She had three reasons, and the ancient sources weight them differently. Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis to buy a favourable wind for the fleet; Clytemnestra had taken Aegisthus as her lover during the ten years of the war; and the House of Atreus carried a curse that made each generation avenge the last. Euripides adds a fourth, that Agamemnon had killed her first husband and her infant son before marrying her by force.

Did Clytemnestra kill Agamemnon herself?

The sources disagree. In Homer’s Odyssey, Aegisthus does the killing at a feast and Clytemnestra assists, though she murders the captive Trojan princess Cassandra with her own hands. In Pindar and in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Clytemnestra acts alone: she traps Agamemnon in the bath inside a robe sewn shut and strikes him three times.

How did Clytemnestra die?

Her son Orestes killed her, avenging Agamemnon, after first killing Aegisthus. She is said to have bared her breast and reminded him that he had nursed at it, and he hesitated before going through with it. The Furies then pursued Orestes for matricide until a court on the Areopagus in Athens acquitted him on Athena’s casting vote.

What does the name Clytemnestra mean?

The first part of the name comes from klytos, meaning famed or renowned. The second part is disputed: the tragedians’ spelling Klytaimestra points to a verb meaning to plot or contrive, giving something like “famed for scheming,” while the epic spelling Klytaimnestra suggests a root meaning to woo or court, giving “famously courted.”