Clytemnestra

• 1. Introduction

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  Clytemnestra, a queen of Greek mythology, earned a blunt verdict from the author and classicist Madeline Miller. Miller wrote, "after Medea, Queen Clytemnestra is probably the most notorious woman in Greek mythology." That reputation rests mostly on one act of violence, yet the ancient storytellers never agreed on how it happened. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, her part is unclear and her character is far more subdued. In the great Athenian tragedies, she looms over the stage. So who was she, and what did she actually do? Who held the blade, and why? Even her name turns out to carry a mistake that changes its meaning.

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• 2. A Name Misread

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  The Greek form of her name, Klytaimnestra, is commonly glossed as "famed for her suitors." That reading is a later mistake. It grew from a false link to the verb mnaomai, which means to woo or court. The original form is believed to have been Klytaimestra, without the letter n. The spelling people use today does not appear before the middle Byzantine period. Latin writers sometimes spelled it Clytaemnestra. Homeric poetry, interestingly, shows awareness of both explanations. Aeschylus seems to have heard something different in the name. In certain wordplays, he appears to connect it with medomai, a verb meaning to scheme or contrive. Combine that with klutos, meaning celebrated, and the result is a much more pointed description: "famous plotter." Whether she deserved that label depends on the family she came from, and that family began in Sparta.

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• 3. A Spartan Princess

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  Tyndareus and Leda, the King and Queen of Sparta, were the parents of Clytemnestra. According to myth, Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan, and she became pregnant. The same night, she lay with her husband. She later gave birth to two eggs. Helen and Pollux emerged from the one fathered by Zeus. Castor and Clytemnestra emerged from the one fathered by Tyndareus. Her other sisters were Philonoe, Phoebe and Timandra. The poet Stesichorus offered a darker explanation for the family's troubles. He said Tyndareus forgot to honor Aphrodite during a sacrifice to the gods. Insulted at being left out, the goddess cursed his daughters to become adulterous wives. Most accounts give Clytemnestra two husbands, Agamemnon and Aegisthus. Some sources name a third, Tantalus. Agamemnon killed him before taking Clytemnestra as his wife, and the child she had with Tantalus was killed as well. Another myth makes Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus rival suitors. Menelaus was king of Sparta. Agamemnon won Clytemnestra, and Menelaus won Helen. Through the marriage, Clytemnestra became queen of Mycenae and bore four children: Orestes, Electra, Iphigenia and Chrysothemis. Only one of those four would be sent away on a false promise.

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• 4. The Wind at Aulis

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  At the port city of Aulis, the Greek fleet sat waiting for a wind that would not come. The ships had gathered to retrieve Helen, whom Paris had taken to Troy. Her husband Menelaus had called on all her former suitors for help, Agamemnon among them. The winds stayed consistently weak. The priest Calchas then delivered a prophecy. The winds would turn favorable if Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis. This was to atone for his killing of a deer sacred to her. Agamemnon needed Clytemnestra to cooperate, so he told her that Iphigenia was to marry the hero Achilles. Clytemnestra sent the girl. When Iphigenia reached Aulis, she was sacrificed. The winds turned, and the troops set sail. The war they sailed toward would last ten years.

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• 5. Years of Absence

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  While Agamemnon fought at Troy, Clytemnestra began a love affair with Aegisthus. He was her husband's cousin and the son of Thyestes. Ancient authors disagree about how it started. In some versions she was seduced, and in others she entered the affair on her own. Either way, the pair began plotting the king's death. The reasons given for her decision change from one telling to the next. In one, she is furious about the sacrifice of Iphigenia. In another, Aegisthus talks her into it so that he can take the throne and avenge his own father. In a third, she is insulted that Agamemnon has taken Cassandra as a concubine and treats her with special favor. That last motive depends on a captive whom Agamemnon brought home from Troy.

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• 6. Three Versions of a Murder

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  Cassandra, a Trojan princess, arrived in Mycenae as Agamemnon's war prize. She was also a seer, cursed by Apollo so that no one would ever believe her prophecies. The sources agree that Agamemnon was killed on his return. They disagree on who did it. It might have been Aegisthus, Clytemnestra, or the two together. In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, one of the best-known versions, Clytemnestra is conniving and bloodthirsty. Aegisthus, who wants to avenge his father, encourages her desires. She welcomes her husband home, helps him down from his chariot and escorts him into the palace. Cassandra stays outside in the chariot. There she foresees that Clytemnestra will murder Agamemnon and says so aloud. A crowd listens but cannot make sense of her words. Inside, Clytemnestra waits until Agamemnon is in his bath. She then wraps him in a net and stabs him three times with a blade. Cassandra, accepting her fate, walks into the palace and is killed too. When the crowd discovers the deed, Clytemnestra revels in it. She announces that she has at last avenged the murder of Iphigenia. Euripides tells it differently. In his Electra, Electra claims that her mother joined the plot but that Aegisthus struck the fatal blow. Homer's Odyssey gives a third account. There, the ghost of Agamemnon says that Aegisthus and Clytemnestra threw a feast and then attacked by surprise. They killed him along with a number of his soldiers, and Clytemnestra killed Cassandra alone. In every version, one person was waiting for the news: her son Orestes.

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• 7. Orestes Returns

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  Seven years after the murders, Orestes came home to Mycenae. Aegisthus had taken the throne by then and ruled with Clytemnestra as his queen. The couple had three children, a son named Aletes and two daughters, Erigone and Helen. Orestes had come to take revenge for his father. With help from his sister Electra, he killed Clytemnestra, Aegisthus and their children. Clytemnestra cursed him with her dying breath. The Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance, then haunted him. Eventually he was freed from their torment and took the throne of Mycenae. Some versions of the myth say he married his half-sister Erigone. They had two children, Tisamenus and Penthilus. Aeschylus built an entire trilogy around this chain of killings.

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• 8. A Queen Retold

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  In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Clytemnestra is a central figure in all three plays. She murders Agamemnon in the first and is murdered herself in the second. Her death leads, in the final play, to the trial of Orestes before a jury of Athena and 12 Athenians. Her role is the largest of any character in surviving Greek tragedy. Later artists have reshaped her again and again, sometimes as a villain and sometimes as a sympathetic antihero. Eugene O'Neill retold the Oresteia in Mourning Becomes Electra and renamed her Christine Mannon. In Ferdinando Baldi's Spaghetti Western The Forgotten Pistolero, she becomes Anna Carrasco, played by Luciana Paluzzi. The modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham made a two-hour ballet called Clytemnestra in 1958. Opera took up the story too. In 1967, the South African composer Cromwell Everson turned Aeschylus into Klutaimnestra, the first Afrikaans opera. It has four acts and premiered on the 7th of November 1967 in Biesenbach Hall, Worcester, Western Cape. John Eaton wrote a one-act opera called The Cry of Clytemnestra, which recounts the events leading up to and including the murder of Agamemnon. Film and television followed. In the 1977 film Iphigenia, the Greek actress Irene Papas plays her. In the 2003 miniseries Helen of Troy, Katie Blake does. Recent writers have given her new voices. Yael Farber's 2007 play Molora sets the Oresteia in post-apartheid South Africa, amid the hearings of its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There, Clytemnestra is an extremely abusive mother. Colm Toibin's 2017 novel House of Names largely removes the divine elements and uses three narrators: Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra. Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships, from 2019, retells the Trojan War from the perspective of the women involved, and Clytemnestra is one of several narrators. Costanza Casati's 2023 novel Clytemnestra makes her the protagonist. Her name has even reached the sky, because the asteroid 179 Klytaemnestra is named after her. In Christopher Nolan's 2026 film The Odyssey, Lupita Nyong'o plays both Clytemnestra and her sister Helen.

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