Agamemnon

The denouement of the play is marked by the reentry of the triumphant Clytemnestra after her murder of her husband. In ancient performances, she likely would have been standing over the covered corpses of Agamemnon and Cassandra as she spoke. Clytemnestra’s speech at the beginning of the exodus finally sheds light on her previously concealed plots and motivations. She describes the “conflict born of ancient bitterness” (1377) that defined her relationship with Agamemnon following his sacrifice of Iphigenia to the gods and explains that all of her actions prior to this point were dissimulation—false and empty words spoken “to serve necessity” by concealing her true thoughts and feelings (1372). This version of Clytemnestra was shocking at the time of the play’s original production; in fifth-century Athens, women were expected to cloister themselves in their homes and devote themselves to their domestic duties. They did not typically play a role in public life. In a famous passage of his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides has Pericles define the noblest kind of woman as she “who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.45, Trans. J. M. Dent). Clytemnestra aggressively flouts this notion of feminine virtue. She is, in many ways, a masculine character, as the chorus and other characters note throughout the play; As she speaks to the chorus in the exodus, she warns against speaking to her as though “I were a woman and vain” (1401).

Clytemnestra also exemplifies the play’s moral ambivalence and ambiguity, which become particularly acute in the exodus. Clytemnestra is convinced that she murdered Agamemnon “in strength of righteousness” (1406), in retribution for his sacrificing their daughter before he sailed to Troy. Ascribing this motivation to her may have been an innovation on Aeschylus’s part, as earlier sources for the myth of Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon tended to emphasize her treachery without connecting the murder with the sacrifice of her daughter. By giving Clytemnestra a complex—even sympathetic justification—Aeschylus complicates the idea of justice put forward in the play. Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon is treacherous but not presented as entirely unjust. It becomes part of the cycle of violence that characterizes the house of Atreus. This cycle of violence and the curse underlying it are finally fully explained in the exodus as well, when Aegisthus enters the stage and describes his role in the grisly affair. The murder of Agamemnon is constructed as another casualty in the seemingly endless chain of violence that began, as Aegisthus shows, with the bloody rivalry between Atreus—Agamemnon’s father—and his brother, Thyestes.

Even though the death of Agamemnon was fated to happen and may even be understood as an example of the justice of the gods, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus also behave unjustly in carrying out the murder. Because of this, the murder of Agamemnon does not end the cycle of violence—as Clytemnestra and Aegisthus hope it will. Rather, it perpetuates it. The chorus hints at what will come next by speaking of Orestes and praying that he will return to avenge his father. This, indeed, is precisely what will happen in the next play of the trilogy, the Libation Bearers.