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Cast portrait: Clytemnestra
Reading Troy · cast portrait · released after Odyssey III — Nestor at Pylos
Reading Troy — cast portrait · Clytemnestra
This portrait is released the day Clytemnestra's arc peaks in the cycle, after Odyssey III — Nestor at Pylos. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.
Epics: Iliad (mentioned), Odyssey (extensively, offstage). First appearance: Odyssey 3 (named).
Lineage
Clytemnestra is daughter of Tyndareus and Leda of Sparta, sister of Helen, the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux), and cousin of Penelope. She is the elder sister of Helen by some traditions, the twin sister of Helen by others; both were given as marriage prizes to the brothers Atreus. Helen went to Menelaus and Sparta; Clytemnestra went to Agamemnon and Mycenae. She bore Agamemnon four children: Iphigenia, Electra, Chrysothemis, and the infant Orestes. She is the Odyssey's great dark mirror of Penelope.
The sacrifice and the betrayal
The plot of her grievance precedes the Iliad. When the Greek fleet was at Aulis waiting for the wind to sail to Troy, Agamemnon — at Calchas's instruction — sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to Artemis to obtain favourable winds. He sent for Iphigenia from Mycenae under the pretext that she was to be married to Achilles. When she arrived, she was killed at the altar. Clytemnestra never forgave him. (The story is post-Homeric in its most developed form — the Cypria and Aeschylus and Euripides flesh it out — but the Odyssey knows the bare outline and treats Clytemnestra as the woman whose marital betrayal followed long thought.)
During the ten years of the Trojan War, Clytemnestra became the lover of Aegisthus, son of Thyestes — the cousin of Agamemnon, of the rival branch of the Atreid line. The Odyssey's account makes Aegisthus the principal plotter; later Greek tragedy makes Clytemnestra the principal agent. Either way, the two together planned the murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy.
In the Odyssey
The story of Agamemnon's homecoming and murder is the Odyssey's great structural counter-myth. It is told and retold throughout the poem, by Nestor in Book 3, by Menelaus in Book 4 (via the Proteus episode), by Agamemnon's own ghost in Book 11 and again in Book 24. Each retelling has the same shape: Agamemnon sails home to Mycenae after the war; he is met at the harbour by Aegisthus with feigned welcome; he is brought to a great feast; at the feast he is murdered — slaughtered like an ox at the manger, in Agamemnon's own bitter formula. Cassandra, the captive Trojan princess Agamemnon has brought home as concubine, is killed at his side by Clytemnestra herself (Agamemnon's ghost in Odyssey 11 specifies that Clytemnestra killed Cassandra over his body, refusing him the dignity of having his hand fall on her in death).
Agamemnon's ghost in Book 11 gives Odysseus the warning that structures the entire second half of the Odyssey: do not trust any woman, even Penelope; come home in disguise; do not announce yourself; test your wife before you reveal yourself. Penelope, he says, is wiser than Clytemnestra (he praises her at length), but the lesson of his own death is universal — homecoming is the time of greatest danger.
The vengeance
Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon is followed by years of her ruling Mycenae with Aegisthus. Eventually her son Orestes, raised in exile, returns and kills both his mother and her lover. This vengeance is mentioned often in the Odyssey — Athena holds up Orestes to Telemachus as the model son, the young man who avenged his father. The full development of the Orestes-Clytemnestra story belongs to Aeschylus's Oresteia and to Sophocles and Euripides; Homer gives only the bare narrative.
The structural function
Clytemnestra is the Odyssey's argument for the necessity of Penelope. Every reference to Clytemnestra in the poem is a reference to what Penelope is not. Penelope's twenty-year fidelity, her cunning trick of the loom, her bow-contest stratagem, her final bed-test of Odysseus — all are framed throughout the poem against the dark mirror of the wife who took a lover, plotted with him, and murdered her husband at the welcome feast. The contrast is so insistent that some readers find Penelope's whole portrait shaped by it: she is what Clytemnestra failed to be.
Across the cycle
Clytemnestra does not appear onstage in any of the four cycle epics. She is named once in the Iliad (Book 1, where Agamemnon casually says he prefers his concubine Chryseis to his wife at home — a remark that does not improve her case for fidelity), referenced in Posthomerica, central to the Odyssey's background, alluded to in the Aeneid. Her closest cyclic structural cousin is Helen — the other Tyndarid daughter, the other wife of an Atreid king, the other catalyst of catastrophe. The contrast: Helen is reconciled with her husband by the time the Odyssey opens; Clytemnestra is killed for hers. The other cousin is Dido in the Aeneid — a queen who kills not her returning lover but herself for his leaving.
The scholarship
Read Clytemnestra as the Odyssey's necessary dark mirror — the wife the poem invokes to make the bright fact of Penelope visible. The full development of her into a tragic protagonist with her own grievance and her own dignity belongs to Aeschylus; Homer keeps her almost wholly within the frame of Agamemnon's complaint. Read both Homer and the tragedians and Clytemnestra becomes the cycle's most contested female figure — the murderess whose grievance was real, the dark mirror whose mirroring is also a critique.
This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.