What drove Queen Clytemnestra to murder her husband, Agamemnon? As Susan C Wilson writes, she had enough of a motive given the savage history of his family and his treatment of her children; enough to demand vengeance in Bronze Age society.
What springs to mind when we consider Clytemnestra from Greek mythology? Adulterous wife of Agamemnon? Killer of that hero, on his return from commanding the Greeks during the Trojan War?
From ancient times to the present day, Clytemnestra has been viewed as an archetypal female villain, the kind of wife a husband should dread. She is sly, deceptive, overly ambitious, too intelligent, vengeful – an unnatural woman, who upends the natural order.
She flouts what it means to be a wife, which, along with motherhood, was a woman’s expected role. This makes Clytemnestra ‘manly’. To emphasise her ‘manliness’, her lover, Aegisthus, is frequently portrayed as a coward, hiding behind her skirts while she commits murder.
Even Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess enslaved by Agamemnon after the destruction of her own family and city, describes Clytemnestra in these terms*:
‘O aweless soul! the woman slays her lord —
Woman? what loathsome monster of the earth
Were fit comparison? The double snake —
Or Scylla, where she dwells, the seaman’s bane,
Girt round about with rocks? some hag of hell,
Raving a truceless curse upon her kin?’
* Quoted in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, translated by EDA Morshead
When setting out to write her story in Clytemnestra’s Bind, I wanted to explore Clytemnestra’s motives for acting as she did. What alternative choices might she have had as a woman in ancient Greece, assailed by a series of tragedies at the hands of one man?
The novel opens with a little-mentioned event from her earlier life that survives in just a few ancient sources, including Pausanias’ Description of Greece and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. These sources mention her as having a first husband, Tantalus, who is variously king of Pisa or Lydia. His father is Thyestes or Broteas.
Agamemnon murders this first husband, along with the couple’s baby son, before taking Clytemnestra as his wife. Not an auspicious start to a marriage.
Now for some tangled family background: Tantalus’ father, Thyestes, was the brother of Agamemnon’s father, Atreus. Thyestes and Atreus quarrelled over the throne of Mycenae, which led to a series of appalling treacheries, including Atreus feeding several of Thyestes’ sons to their unwitting father.
After that horrific supper, Thyestes fled Mycenae but later returned and defeated Atreus. Thyestes exiled Atreus’ sons – Agamemnon and Menelaus – but they later overthrew him.
Given that Agamemnon defeated Thyestes and, at some point in time, killed a king named Tantalus, whose father is Thyestes, I decided in Clytemnestra’s Bind to make Tantalus and Thyestes co-rulers of Mycenae.
There is no evidence for an organised penal system in Late Bronze Age Greece, no law courts for seeking redress, no prisons. But justice in ancient Greece was imperative, and offenders deserved punishment. In early times, this meant taking vengeance into one’s own hands.
And because the honour or guilt of one family member was the honour or guilt of all, a killer’s male kin were in danger of reprisals from the victim’s family. They might face a choice of kill or be killed. This had ruinous implications for the House of Atreus, whose murderous inclinations were turned inwards.
How were Tantalus and his little son to receive justice, when their natural avenger, their kinsman, was also their killer? My Clytemnestra, grieving widow and mother, vows to take vengeance into her own hands. This unwomanly decision is all the more reprehensible by the fact that it means killing her new husband, her lord and master, Agamemnon.
But she swiftly becomes pregnant to her foe. She gives birth to Iphigenia, followed in time by two more children, and finds herself in a bind: if she succeeds in avenging her dead husband and baby, what will happen to her new family?
If she kills their ruthless father – the most powerful king in the land – will her children be in less danger, or more? And what will happen if she fails?
Those familiar with Clytemnestra’s story know that history repeats itself. Agamemnon deals her a second devastating blow, bringing the events of Clytemnestra’s Bind to a place more familiar to modern audiences.
Clytemnestra’s choice between protecting the living and avenging the dead becomes even starker.
Successive books in The House of Atreus trilogy will explore the aftermath of Agamemnon’s latest violation of family. And Clytemnestra makes the choice that led one of Greek mythology’s most capable women and most devoted of mothers to be maligned with the reputation of arch-villainess.
Clytemnestra’s Bind by Susan C Wilson is published on 15 June, 2023.
Her debut novel, this is the first in Susan C Wilson’s House of Atreus trilogy. Clytemnestra’s Bind was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition in 2019.
Connect with her on Twitter: @BronzeAgeWummin
Images:
- Clytemnestra after the Murder by John Collier, 1882: Guildhall Art Gallery via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Feast of Thyestés and Átreus by Václav Jindřich Nosecký and Michael Václav Halbax, c1700: Zákupy Castle via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- Agamemnon seated on a rock and holding his sceptre, identified from an inscription. Fragment of the lid of an Attic red-figure lekanis by the circle of the Meidias Painter, 410–400BC: Museo Nazionale Archeologico in Taranto, by Jastrow for Wikimedia (public domain)
- The Anger of Achilles (Iphigenia, her parents, and Achilles, in Aulis) by Jacques-Louis David, 1819: Kimbell Art Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
