Clytemnestra held particular fascination for Athenian tragedians writing in the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE Aeschylus made Agamemnon’s murder and its consequences the focus of his trilogy the Oresteia. In the first of the three plays, Agamemnon, the king, newly arrived home from the Trojan War, is murdered by his wife and her lover. In the second play, Choephoroe (or The Libation Bearers), Orestes returns to avenge his father by killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. He is guided by the god Apollo and encouraged by Electra, who has waited many years for Orestes’ return. The title of the third play, Eumenides, is a reference to the Erinyes, or Furies, of Clytemnestra. The Erinyes were spirits that tormented those who wronged relatives, and in Aeschylus’s play they drive Orestes insane because he killed his mother. With the help of the goddess Athena, however, Orestes is acquitted of murder at the court of the Areopagus in Athens, and the Erinyes are placated and given a new name, the Eumenides (Kindly Ones).
Although the major Greek dramatists represented Clytemnestra as a faithless wife and unloving mother, each characterized her differently. Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra is at first a proud and regal figure, capable of masterful speech and manly deeds. Choephoroe depicts her as increasingly fearful of dreams and portents, and terrified when Orestes, whom she thought was long dead, reappears. She dies in the play while begging her son to spare her life.
The Clytemnestra of Sophocles’ tragedy Electra is more openly hostile to her children, exulting over a false report of Orestes’ death and berating Electra for moping about the death of her father. Euripides’ Electra portrays a vain and hypocritical Clytemnestra, who is lured to her death by Electra’s supposedly imminent childbirth. The relationship between the mother and daughter in the play is without love; the two women are deadly rivals.
In the early 20th century, Clytemnestra featured in two important dramatic works, Elektra (1909), an opera by the composer Richard Strauss (1864—1949), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy by American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888—1953). Strauss’s opera is based on Sophocles’ Electra, and O’Neill’s trilogy is an adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, with the drama being set in post—Civil War New England.
Deborah Lyons
Bibliography
Aeschylus, and A. Shapiro and P. Burian, eds. The Oresteia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Euripides, and P. Burian and A. Shapiro, eds. The Complete Euripides, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009—2010. Komar, Kathleen L. Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2003.
See also: Agamemnon; Atreus; Cassandra; Castor and Pollux; Electra; Iphigeneia; Orestes.
World History
