Written By Bethany Hicks-Gravener
12/10/2025
The theme of honour comes up time and time again when we look at the genre of ancient theatre that is Greek tragedy. Honour between and of the family, military honour, kingly honour, honour after death—arguably it can be considered as the glue that patches these theatrical stories together. Within Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, we yet again see this idea of honour, but what makes Aeschylus’ play stand out is that it is being performed by a woman, Clytemnestra, as an act of avenging her murdered daughter, Iphigenia. The question we can then ask ourselves is: through her actions, is Clytemnestra also avenging the loss of her motherhood?
The Clytemnestra that we meet in Aeschylus’ play is the queen of Argos (note: the translation of the play I am using is Philip Vellacott’s, in which Agamemnon is stated to be the king of Argos) and the wife of Agamemnon. Agamemnon has been gone from Argos for ten years whilst fighting on the Greek side in the Trojan War. Prior to the commencement of the war, the Greek soldiers were stuck at Aulis due to a lack of wind, meaning they were unable to sail. As a result of the holdup, the Greek kings recruited a seer to tell them what they must do in order to sail to Troy. The seer told Agamemnon that he had offended the goddess Artemis, and that, in return, she demanded the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s eldest child, Iphigenia. Iphigenia and her mother, Clytemnestra, travelled to Aulis under the guise that Iphigenia was to be married to the hero Achilles. However, when they arrived at Aulis, they discovered Iphigenia’s fate. In Agamemnon’s ten-year absence from Argos, Clytemnestra had been ruling in his stead—and in those ten years, her anger concerning Agamemnon’s actions towards their daughter had festered within her, turning her into the calculated murderess that we meet at the commencement of the play.
The Agamemnon opens with the announcement that Troy has finally fallen and that Agamemnon will be returning home to Argos. In front of the chorus, which is made up of the male Elders of Argos, Clytemnestra plays the role of the rejoicing wife, eager for her husband to return safely to her: she cautions that “there still // remains the journey home: God grant we see them safe!” (341-342). But despite this, the audience knows that the Clytemnestra that is in front of us is not the true Clytemnestra, that in fact she is putting on a performance for the chorus. This is shown when she says, “those whom no wakeful anger of the forgotten dead // waits to surprise with vengeance” (345-346). The Elders take this comment to be in reference to the Trojan soldiers that Agamemnon has killed, but for the audience, it is the first reference to how Iphigenia’s death is all-consuming for Clytemnestra, and how it is the only thing she has thought about for the past decade. In her grief, Clytemnestra falls into what Olga Taxidou refers to as the “mother-machine, where the natal and maternal functions are analysed and sometimes conflated,” allowing Iphigenia’s death to control Clytemnestra’s actions within the play.
Agamemnon then returns to the palace of Argos—his war-prize, the Trojan princess Cassandra, alongside him—where he is welcomed home by his wife. She makes him walk along a carpet of crimson tapestries; he acquiesces to her request, symbolising his pride and lack of respect for the gods, as walking along the carpet would be an honour reserved for the divine. This is an ironic move from Clytemnestra, one that seals in her mind that the death of Iphigenia could have been prevented. By walking along the carpets, Agamemnon is displaying his callousness towards the gods. This act shows that he does not care about the repercussions of the gods anymore, since the Trojan War gave him exactly what he wanted—power over the Greek kings and victory in war. Agamemnon’s legacy is secure. Once Agamemnon is inside the palace, he is drawn a bath, and it is there that Clytemnestra kills him. Clytemnestra then emerges back on stage and presents the chorus and the audience with the dead body of her husband. The chorus are, unsurprisingly, horrified at her actions, but Clytemnestra turns to them to defend herself, “why, once before, did you not dare oppose this man? // … when his own fields were white with flocks, must sacrifice // his child, and my own darling, whom my pain brought forth,” (1414-1418). She sees her actions as the only acceptable way to avenge her daughter’s death and to bring honour to her memory. Clytemnestra scolds the chorus for forgetting Iphigenia, their own princess, and in her speech, she is angry that they show more concern over Agamemnon’s death than they ever did for Iphigenia’s.
It is in this latter part of Aeschylus’ play that Clytemnestra truly rips off the mask that she was wearing at the beginning. No longer is she acting the devoted wife; she is proud of her actions, and she isn’t hiding that fact. As is stated by Laura McClure, “Clytemnestra’s verbal practices are strikingly free of the ritual language associated with women, particularly lamentation,” suggesting the idea of a new ‘masculine’ Clytemnestra at the play’s close. This idea of a ‘masculine’ Clytemnestra is especially interesting because if she were really a man avenging her child, then her actions would most likely be viewed very differently by both the chorus and the audience. It is her status as a woman that makes her actions so particularly shocking. It is here, in the last part of the Agamemnon, when we see this truthful Clytemnestra, that we are really able to see her express her emotions fully. To the chorus she states, “when on my virgin daughter // his savage sword descended, // my tears in rivers ran,” (1520-1522). It is expressly clear to the audience in this moment how important Clytemnestra’s motherhood is to her. Through losing her eldest daughter, Clytemnestra feels as though she has lost a part of her motherhood. During the course of the Trojan War, she sent her son away for his safety, and her grief over Iphigenia destroys the relationship she has with her other daughter, Electra. Agamemnon, both directly and indirectly, has stripped Clytemnestra of her motherhood for his own benefit; she can never forgive him for that.
To conclude, the theme of honour controls Clytemnestra throughout Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Clytemnestra is trying to honour her deceased daughter whilst at the same time avenging her: “for Iphigenia, Clytemnestra is willing to kill her husband”. She also displays a sense of honour for herself by killing her husband. Clytemnestra is, in a way, honouring her own emotions and allowing herself to justify the pain she has felt these ten years. Clytemnestra’s revenge is deeply personal, and it is centred around her desperation to cling to her eldest daughter. At the crux, Clytemnestra knows that no amount of violence is going to bring Iphigenia back to her, so she believes that her only option is to inflict pain on him whom she holds responsible in the hope that it will lessen her grief only the slightest bit.
Bibliography
Aeschylus. Agamemnon, edited by Philip Vellacott.
Chesler, Phyllis. ‘Mother-Hatred and Mother-Blaming: What Electra Did to Clytemnestra’. In Woman-Defined Motherhood, edited by Jane Price Knowles and Ellen Cole, 71-81. London: Routledge, 2014.
McClure, Laura. ‘Chapter Three Logos Gunaikos: Speech and Gender in Aeschylus’ Oresteia’. In Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama, edited by Laura McClure, 70-111. Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Taxidou, Olga. ‘Tragedy: Maternity, Natality, Theatricality’. In Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy, edited by Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, 43-59. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Featured Image Credit: https://femminaclassica.com/clytemnestra-the-twilight-of-the-matriarch/
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