The watchman is overjoyed when he sees the light of the beacon signalling that Troy has been overthrown: finally his long wait is at an end. He hurries inside to tell his queen that Agamemnon has been victorious at Troy, and will be on his way home. The chorus now take centre stage: they are old men, too old to have left to fight alongside their king a decade earlier. They don’t yet know the war has been won, and when Clytemnestra enters and begins lighting fires to honour the gods, they ask her what has prompted this flurry of religious enthusiasm. She doesn’t answer, and they turn their attention to the past. Specifically they sing of the death of Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigenia, whom they describe in emotive terms – a sacrificial victim, an animal cowering in distress.3 They tell the whole ugly story: how the Greek army was stranded at Aulis ten years before, and could not find the weather to sail to Troy; how Artemis had to be appeased before the weather would change; how Calchas – their priest – explained that Artemis demanded a sacrifice of blood, the blood of a young woman, of the daughter of Agamemnon, the son of Atreus. They describe Iphigenia pleading with her father when she realized what was about to happen to her. Or rather, what her father was about to do to her. He told his men to gag her, so she could not curse him. Mute, she gazed at her attackers, wishing she could speak.
At this point, when our capacity for horror is almost overwhelmed, the chorus break off. They won’t describe the actual moment of Iphigenia’s death. It is worth noting that, in this entire passage, they never mention her name. Have they dehumanized her, turned her into a nameless sacrificial victim? Or can they just not bear to add to the pain of remembering this young woman too closely? Either way, they know that her mother keeps her memory alive: mnamōn mēnis teknopoinos4 – ‘Rage, remembering, child-avenging’。
There will be many other versions of Clytemnestra in every artistic medium, but there are few who command our sympathy more than this one, at this moment. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is utterly repugnant. Whatever our views on the revenge Clytemnestra will go on to take during this play, and the retribution which will be exacted against her in turn, she is the mother of a daughter who has been slaughtered like an animal. Is it any wonder she nurses an unquenchable rage against the man who committed such a crime? Would we not think less of her if she had simply forgiven Agamemnon and moved on? This is an important question to ask, not least because Aeschylus is unusual in having made the death of Iphigenia so central to Clytemnestra’s motivation. Iphigenia died ten years before the day on which the action of the play occurs. And yet it is presented to us, in all its cruelty, right at the beginning of the play. The night-watchman saw the fire that told him Troy had fallen. He rushed to tell Clytemnestra the news offstage. The chorus then sang, at length, about the death of the young Argive princess. Nothing can happen in the play until we have addressed this unresolved trauma.
When the chorus finish and their leader turns to speak to Clytemnestra directly, he uses an extraordinary phrase: ‘I come honouring your power, Clytemnestra.’5 The Greek word for power is kratos – it is the root of words like democracy, autocracy, kleptocracy. It is not a nebulous, vague word, which might imply anything from empty charisma to being a figurehead in her husband’s absence. Kratos is specific: political might, ruling power. These men don’t simply kowtow to Clytemnestra because her husband is their king, they are open in telling her that they respect her power. Clytemnestra responds with a proverb: Let dawn be born from mother night. Motherhood is right at the front of her mind. We can surely conclude that it is never anywhere else, that this powerful woman is motivated, first and foremost, by her relationship to her murdered daughter.
Clytemnestra explains to the chorus that Troy has fallen. She appears already to know more than her watchman could have told her, because she makes a pointed reference to the behaviour of the Greeks inside the city of Troy. So long as they respect the temples and shrines of the Trojan gods, they’ll be all right, she says.
Does she know that the Greeks have done the absolute opposite of this, or does she just suspect it because her opinion of Agamemnon and any men he commands is already so low? Presumably the latter, because how could she know that Priam, the ancient king of Troy, had been slaughtered in a temple? How could she know that Cassandra, a priestess of Apollo, had been raped? The Greeks have shown no respect for the gods, and it is hard to avoid imagining a tone of glee in Clytemnestra’s words here. This is a woman who has spent ten long years waiting to avenge her daughter. She knows there are limits even to her power. If the Greeks and Agamemnon behaved well towards the gods, perhaps her time would never come, and Iphigenia’s murder would go unanswered. But her wishes have come true: the untrammelled cruelty of the Greeks cost Iphigenia her life, and that cruelty has not diminished over a decade of brutalizing combat. How could it?