Clytemnestra

By seizing her husband’s home to found her own maternal line, Clytaemnestra makes herself a man. She is right in — unlike Electra — accepting the sexual union… On the other hand, Electra is right in focusing the whole life of the couple around the husband’s hearth

Vernant argues that Clytemnestra and Electra each embody a partial truth about bilateral kinship and gender, and that Clytemnestra’s usurpation of the patrilineal hearth constitutes a structural inversion of properly gendered social order.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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The hostility between Cassandra and Clytemnestra. Their direct rivalry concerning Agamemnon illustrates one feature of the daughter and mother relation—the rivalry between two women for the sexual gratification by the same man.

Klein reads the Clytemnestra–Cassandra opposition as an Oedipal rivalry in which the daughter-figure’s success in possessing the father-figure generates the mother’s murderous retaliation, illustrating the genesis of persecutory anxiety within the feminine Oedipus complex.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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Clytemnestra is a prime example of a wife who felt no aidos for her husband’s bed, and it is she who is contrasted with the faithful Penelope in Odyssey 11… how Clytemnestra has poured aischos on herself and all women to come.

Cairns establishes Clytemnestra as the definitive counter-example of wifely aidos in archaic Greek ethical thought, whose lack of shame-before-the-marriage-bond contaminates the honour of all women and sets the negative pole against which Penelope’s virtue is measured.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993thesis

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Clytemnestra implants in Agamemnon the suggestion that an action which is not absolutely and in itself inappropriate is positively appropriate in any circumstance… she deflects this concern by appealing to other circumstances in which the character of the act may differ.

Cairns analyses Clytemnestra’s rhetorical manipulation of Agamemnon over the crimson tapestries as a deliberate exploitation of the contextual relativity of aidos, designed to neutralise his shame-inhibition and implicate him in transgression.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993thesis

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the staff set in the hearth symbolizes the royal seed (sperma) placed earlier by Agamemnon in Clytaemnestra’s womb… Just as in her wifely role she should always have effaced herself before her husband, as a mother Clytaemnestra should ef[face herself]

Vernant interprets Clytemnestra’s dream symbolism as proof that the Oresteia mythologizes a patrilineal theology of the hearth in which the mother’s body is a mere vessel and Clytemnestra’s suppression is ideologically necessary to the transmission of royal lineage.

Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis

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Choai-Bearers, the libation play, begins with Clytemnestra’s choai to Agamemnon and ends with her blood shed… This play’s first choai are those which Clytemnestra’s ghost remembers pouring to Erinyes.

Padel traces the ritual logic of libation through the Oresteia, showing how Clytemnestra’s successive acts of pouring — to Agamemnon, then to Erinyes — create a symmetry of liquid violence that culminates in her own blood being shed.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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Sophocles’ Electra says Clytemnestra lived with her accursed lover, ‘fearing no Erinys.’ Electra summons Erinyes who ‘look on when people die unjustly and when beds are secretly dishonored,’ implying that Erinys monitors the marriage bond as well as murder.

Padel demonstrates that Clytemnestra’s defiance of the Erinyes in Sophocles articulates the archaic Greek understanding of Erinys as guardian of both marital fidelity and blood-vengeance, with Clytemnestra’s immunity becoming a theological provocation resolved only through her son’s crime.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis

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when the moira of the gods fettered her (him) so that she (he) was overcome, then Aegisthus took the minstrel to a deserted island… Aegisthus of his own free will took Clytemnestra of his own free will to his own house.

Adkins uses the ambiguous moira formula governing Clytemnestra’s adultery as a test case for Homeric attitudes toward compulsion and free agency, showing that divine determination and fully imputed personal responsibility coexist without logical resolution in early Greek moral thought.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis

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Clytemnestra’s argument is simple: she killed Agamemnon justly because he sacrificed her daughter. Electra’s is less simple… ‘You say you killed father; what argument could be more aischron than that, whether you killed him justly or not?’

Cairns analyses the Sophoclean debate between Clytemnestra and Electra as a collision between competing frameworks of justice and shame in which the claim of dikē cannot be separated from the charge of aischron conduct.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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When Orestes asks why the Erinyes chasing him did not chase Clytemnestra for killing her husband, they answer, ‘She was not hom[ogeneous blood]’

Padel uses the Erinyes’ reply to Orestes to expose the gendered asymmetry built into archaic blood-law: Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon falls outside the Erinyes’ remit because spousal blood is not treated as kindred blood, a jurisprudential distinction the Oresteia stages as a crisis.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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it is not even so obviously aischron for Clytemnestra to have killed Agamemnon, though Clytemnestra is a woman, as it is for Agamemnon to have been killed in such a manner. Even Clytemnestra’s condition becomes most evidently aischron when, in the next world, she wanders unavenged.

Adkins argues that the dominant shame-value logic of the tradition renders Agamemnon’s undignified death more conspicuously aischron than Clytemnestra’s act of killing, and that Clytemnestra’s own shame accrues most forcefully only through her post-mortem unavenged state.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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presenting Clytemnestra as eager to sleep with her suitor and murder her husband would cast a disturbing light on Odysseus’ own wife, Penelope… the matricide is carefully erased from the story.

The Odyssey commentary identifies the systematic minimisation of Clytemnestra’s agency as a structural narrative strategy designed to protect Penelope’s symbolic integrity and to manage anxieties about wifely fidelity that the parallel story would otherwise expose.

Homer, The Odyssey, 2017supporting

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‘You are carried away by fury,’ Electra tells her mother. Passion ‘drives’ the

Padel cites Electra’s accusation against Clytemnestra to illustrate the tragic vocabulary of daemonic possession — passion as a force that ‘drives’ the self beyond rational control, complicating the attribution of personal moral agency.

Padel, Ruth, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting

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her complaint is based on her own failure to show proper aidos, to respond appropriately to another’s timē; at the same time… El.’s motives are of the same moral character as Clyt.’s

Cairns argues that Sophocles’ Electra is morally compromised by sharing the same retaliatory logic as Clytemnestra, so that the very aidos-violations Electra attributes to her mother are mirrored in Electra’s own conduct.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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Clytemnestra goes on to offer him her hand as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, and he reiterates his aidos (833-4) in terms of his fear of what Agamemnon might do were he to touch what he should not.

Cairns examines a scene in Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis where Clytemnestra’s manipulation of social aidos occasions an ironic encounter with Achilles, whose shame-responses she strategically misreads in order to advance her maternal purpose.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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the ritual limit to prosperity imagined by Clytemnestra. These textiles are also, it has been shown, closely associated, both verbally and visually, with the textile t[radition]

Seaford briefly invokes Clytemnestra’s crimson-textile scene as an instance of the ritual moderation of prosperity, using it to illuminate the symbolic opposition between money’s unlimited circulation and the bounded ceremonial economy of the household.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside

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