3.276–328

Menelaus’s steersman died at Sounion, at the southern tip of Attica, struck down by the “gentle arrows” of Apollo, Homer’s way of describing what we would call a natural death. Good captain that he was, Menelaus paused to bury his shipmate, then continued down the coast toward home without Nestor. But even then, Zeus had other plans, sending a storm that split Menelaus’s fleet in half at Cape Maleia. One group ended up in Crete, while Menelaus, with five ships, was blown down to Egypt.Ever resourceful, he spent some time gathering plunder.

Nestor now circles back to Aegisthus, who ruled in “golden Mycenae” for seven years, until Orestes returned to avenge his father’s murder:

"τῷ δέ οἱ ὀγδοάτῳ κακὸν ἤλυθε δῖος Ὀρέστης
ἂψ ἀπ᾽ Ἀθηνάων, κατὰ δ᾽ ἔκτανε πατροφονῆα,
Αἴγισθον δολόμητιν, ὅ οἱ πατέρα κλυτὸν ἔκτα.
ἦ τοι ὁ τὸν κτείνας δαίνυ τάφον Ἀργείοισιν
μητρός τε στυγερῆς καὶ ἀνάλκιδος Αἰγίσθοιο:"

"But in the eighth year came brilliant Orestes, an evil for him,
back from Athens and killed his father’s murderer,
crafty-minded Aegisthus, who killed his glorious father.
And after the killing, he ordered from the Argives a funeral banquet
for his hateful mother and the cowardly Aegisthus."

Odyssey 3.306–10

Once again, Orestes surfaces as a model of the good son for Telemachus. Aegisthus alone is blamed for the murder of Agamemnon, and the poet mentions Orestes’s matricide only obliquely, a telling omission since portrayals of Clytemnestra as her husband’s vengeful murderess, later dispatched with her lover by Orestes, riveted theater audiences in Classical Athens. Looking the figure of Clytemnestra as she appears in Homer and later in Athenian tragedy tells us something about the differences between the two genres and the societies in which they appeared.

In the three dramatic treatments of the story, Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides (458 BCE) and the two later Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides (420-413 BCE), Clytemnestra is a dominant figure, powerful and repellent. Her description of the murder of her husband with a sword in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is at once gruesome and orgasmic:

οὕτω τὸν αὑτοῦ θυμὸν ὁρμαίνει πεσών:
κἀκφυσιῶν ὀξεῖαν αἵματος σφαγὴν
βάλλει μ᾽ ἐρεμνῇ ψακάδι φοινίας δρόσου,
χαίρουσαν οὐδὲν ἧσσον ἢ διοσδότῳ
γάνει σπορητὸς κάλυκος ἐν λοχεύμασιν.

Falling there he gasped out his life,
spewing out a pungent gout of blood,
striking me with black drops of bloody dew,
and I reveled as in the god-given gleam
of the green shoot bursting into life.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1388–92

The imagery is so dense as to defy translation. Clytemnestra sees the blood of her murdered husband as at once the rain that brings forth new life and semen, giving birth to death within her. This fertilizing source will seed more pain and death in the second play of the trilogy, Libation Bearers, when Orestes returns from exile to murder her and Aegisthus. When he confronts his mother, she bares her breast and begs him to spare her, a scene filled with sexual tension (Aesch. Choe. 896–930). The matricide, so muted in Homer, becomes in the 5th century a central and disturbing focus, charged with forbidden desires and familial strife. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s daughter Electra becomes the dominant figure in the later plays by Sophocles and Euripides that focus on the matricide of Orestes, but Clytemnestra continues to be a powerful figure. Electra’s hatred of her mother and intense, perhaps sexual, attachment to her father’s memory, reactions that go against the traditional expectations for gender relations in a patriarchal society, provide much of the emotional energy in these productions.

The Orestes plays that have survived were produced in a period of great societal upheaval, when Athenians created their democracy and, in the process, questioned the fundamental values that guided the previous political and social arrangements, all under the pressure of a deadly plague and a war with Sparta that lasted twenty-five years. The new focus on intra-familial antagonism and perverse sexual desires in the treatments of the story by Athenian dramatists may well reflect this creative turmoil. In particular, the figure of the angry woman left at home while her husband is away fighting wars becomes a frightening specter. Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra is the first but hardly the only example of the dangerous woman who has somehow escaped the bounds of a traditional patriarchal household. Electra’s obsessions in the later plays also threaten to compromise the power of males. The trend reaches a crescendo in Euripides’s Medea, produced in 431, the first year of the Peloponnesian War, the story of an angry wife with supernatural powers, who is betrayed by her husband and murders her young children in a spectacular act of revenge.

The Odyssey, which came into something like its present form in the period from 725–700 BCE, models a different kind of society. Though scholarly consensus has the poem reflecting to some extent the unsettled political and social conditions following the fall of the great Mycenaean palace economies, the dominant model for the civic and familial organizations we see in the poem is small inherited kingdoms. The family structure, though sometimes put under pressure from without, is fairly stable, with firm expectations about gender roles. Marriage arrangements, though the king and queen may show genuine affection for each other, are seen in the context of the household as an economic and political unit, safeguarding the wealth of the household and ensuring its passage from one generation to another. Such arrangements produced anxiety about the legitimacy of children and encouraged the attempt to control women. The specter of a wife betraying her husband sexually would dominate the imagination of storytellers in this kind of society, more than matricide or “unnatural” sexual attachments within a family.  

Clytemnestra’s name appears only three times in the Odyssey, in Nestor’s earlier description of her seduction (265) and in the bitter memories of Agamemnon’s ghost in Hades (11.422, 439).  Her character functions, along with Helen, as a cautionary tale about a once-loyal wife who succumbs to temptation and betrays her absent husband. In Nestor’s first mention of her, she is the victim of “enchantment,” by Aegisthus, a proper wife with good intentions (φρεσὶ … ἀγαθῇσι, 266): who at first resisted the unseemly act of adultery, only giving in after being “bound” by the “doom of the gods (269), a phrase perhaps suggesting some degree of diminished responsibility despite her eventual willingness (ἐθέλουσαν, 272). Later, in the toxic atmosphere of Agamemnon’s anger in the Underworld, her portrait is more negative (δολόμητις, 422; κυνῶπις, 424), but her role in the murder of Agamemnon is still muted, as she remains unnamed (ἔκτα σὺν οὐλομένῃ ἀλόχῳ, 410).

There are a few moments of tension between Telemachus and Penelope, but they are prompted by Telemachus’s frustration with his mother’s reluctance to settle the question of succession by remarrying and thus delaying the orderly passage of property in Ithaka (e.g., 2.130–37; see also 23.344–53). The potential for sexual tension between mother and son that Athenian dramatists exploited with their treatment of the matricide never appears in the Odyssey, with one intriguing exception. When Penelope declares that she will marry whoever strings Odysseus’s bow, Telemachus appears ready and able to win the contest, but stops short when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, gives him a stern nod and the crisis evaporates (21.118–30) (see essay on Book 1, 25-26). The family of Agamemnon presents a dark paradigm for relations between Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, but only through the specter of the queen’s infidelity and the need for revenge from the prince.Matricide and incest are topics that surface in a later and very different world.

Further Reading

Olson, S. D. 1990. “The Stories of Agamemnon in Homer’s Odyssey. Transactions of the American Philological Association 120: 57–72.

Van Nortwick, T. 2015, Late Sophocles: The Hero’s evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus, 7–41. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.