The prosecution’s case is that this woman conspired with the now-dead slave-woman and persuaded her to commit murder. The young man has no evidence for his claims, but this doesn’t prevent him from imagining the moments in which the slave-woman carried out the poisoning, after the food had been eaten. And he doesn’t think it was her own idea. Rather, she was carrying out the plan of tēs Klutaimnēstras tautēs – ‘this Clytemnestra here’。1
We don’t know the verdict, nor do we have the speech presented by the woman’s son in her defence. We can assume the latter would have focused on the lack of evidence, the lack of motive, and the absence of a close connection between the stepmother and the woman put to death for the poisoning. Murder is not something we do lightly on another person’s behalf: the entire plot of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train hinges on the sheer unlikeliness of such behaviour. Given that years have passed since the father’s death – and given that his half-brother is defending the case against him – it seems more likely that the plaintiff was engaged in a property dispute with his step-family and was using the murder accusation to further his claims, or pressure the family into paying him off.
The only piece of evidence the young man offers – and ‘evidence’ is a strong word in the context – is the claim that his stepmother had tried to poison his father on an earlier occasion. She counterclaims that the substance she had given his father then was not poison, but a love potion （a mistake also made by Heracles’ final wife, Deianeira, in Sophocles’ play The Women of Trachis）。 In a society where women had very little freedom and their husbands were legally within their rights to have sexual relationships with other women, the fear of losing your husband （and with him, your home and your children） must have been immense. The incentive to use a love potion was considerable.
So the young man might have compared his stepmother to Deianeira, who inadvertently poisons the great Heracles. He might also have compared her to Medea, whose witchy skills with poison made her one of the more fearsome women in Greek myth. But instead, he compared her to Clytemnestra. Perhaps it’s because the actual poisoning was done by another woman, so the comparison with Deianeira or Medea would have been at one remove. Or perhaps the reason for mentioning Clytemnestra was more visceral, given that juries in Athenian courts were all-male. Clytemnestra is the ultimate bad wife, in the same way that Medea is the ultimate bad mother. Clytemnestra was the woman men feared coming home to. Was she craven with lust, driven by revenge, determined to wield power in the polis – city – as well as in the home? Whichever version of Clytemnestra’s story men read, or saw, or heard, they came across the same troubling phenomenon: a woman who did not know her place.
The version of Clytemnestra’s story with which the men in the jury would have been most familiar would – we might imagine – be the power-hungry version we meet in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, first performed in 458 BCE. The play begins with a watchman who is keeping lookout for a beacon: the flaming signal which will tell him that Troy has finally been taken by his king, Agamemnon, and his fellow Greeks. But the man has been ordered to keep watch by Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and queen of the Argive Greeks. She has been ruling them in his ten-year absence.
This in itself is a highly irregular state of affairs, incidentally. Male anxiety over what women might do in their absence is a theme which runs through Athenian society, no more obviously than in the legal system. Upper-class women were kept cloistered, and would have been unlikely to speak to any men at all, other than close relatives. The fear that a woman might leave the house and catch the eye of a man other than her husband amounted to almost a collective neurosis: the penalty for adultery was more severe than the penalty for rape. The cloistering of women makes it hard to know when they were allowed where, even accompanied by their husbands. But it is a fascinating quirk of fifth-century BCE theatre that the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and especially Euripides are full of powerful, frightening women capable of murder, torture and infanticide. Yet, as mentioned earlier, it is more likely than not that women weren’t in the audience of the Dionysia to see these representations of their mythological counterparts. The characters themselves were played by men, wearing masks as all characters in Greek plays did. And, equally oddly, men congregated to watch and enjoy these plays in spite （or perhaps because?） of the fact that they featured women behaving so badly. Though there are some indications that this particular play was not often performed after its initial appearance,2 so perhaps Aeschylus’ version of Clytemnestra was too much for all but the sturdiest men in the theatre.