Classical Wisdom Litterae - April 2019

he killed their daughter Iphigenia in a religious sacrifice (without which the Greeks couldn’t have sailed to Troy). Any lingering doubt she may have had is extinguished when she sees her husband arriving home after ten years away bearing, not flowers, tears and apologies, but a royal concubine, Cassandra. Thus her possible motives for wanting to kill Agamemnon are: • Vengeance for her murdered daughter, • Feelings for her new lover (Agamemnon’s cousin, Aegisthus), • Jealously of Cassandra, • The curse of The House of Atreus (which she frequently invokes) or, • Possible madness. The last reason is the only one that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Although the Chorus say to her “the red act drives the fury, within your brain”, she is, initially, remarkably cold and calculating; single and bloody-minded, but certainly not insane. This clarity of purpose is what aids her in tricking Agamemnon into the hubristic act of entering the house on purple tapestries. Purple was an expensive dye obtained from the murex shellfish. To walk on tapestries of this color was an oriental excess, insulting towards the gods, not worthy of a Greek hero. As Philip Vellacott put it: “to a Greek the essence of piety was humility, the conscious acknowledgement that the gods are greater than man, and that man’s greatness is held by their sufferance”. Despite his initial reluctance, Clytemnestra convinces Agamemnon to commit what he knows is an impious act. She does this through a subtle reference to his sacrifice of Iphigenia: “Might you have vowed to the gods, in danger,

Clytemnestra After the Murder, by John Collier, 1882

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