The chorus respond with another song about the horrors of war and the fall of Troy. And then Agamemnon’s herald rushes onstage to announce the king’s imminent arrival. Clytemnestra explains that she had known this was coming as soon as the beacons announced the war was won. She cedes no political ground at all: she is ahead of all these men who surround her. The herald and the chorus exchange mutually hostile opinions on Helen （to whom they attribute blame for the war）， who is of course Clytemnestra’s sister.
Finally, at almost the halfway point of the play, Agamemnon makes his entrance, riding in a chariot. This play may be named after him, but he is not the lead character: Clytemnestra has more stage time and more dialogue. Her husband comes onstage with the booty he has seized from Troy, accompanied by Cassandra, the daughter of Priam and Hecabe, a priestess of Apollo. Agamemnon offers thanks to the gods for their assistance in razing Troy and in bringing him back home. The word he uses for the destruction of Troy is diēmathunen – to grind to dust, to destroy completely. His enthusiastic prayer seems out of place when we recall Clytemnestra’s earlier description of the desecration of Troy’s temples by his men. Not least because he is accompanied by a priestess, whose body should be sacrosanct. But Agamemnon has made Cassandra his war bride: he has raped her, like the temple in which she served and the city which was her home.
Agamemnon speaks first to the gods, and then to the chorus of old Argive men. He does not address his wife, although she is onstage for at least the second half of his speech （stage directions are an irritatingly modern invention, so we can’t always be completely sure when characters appear and disappear）。 His priority is not a family reunion, but presenting himself to the men of his city. When he has finished speaking, Clytemnestra responds in kind. She too speaks to the chorus, telling them how lonely it is for a woman when her husband goes away to fight a war. We might be suspicious of her motives, but there is a ring of truth in the pain she describes as messengers arrived, one after another, each bearing news of injuries, disasters. If her husband had received all the wounds he was reported to have incurred, she explains, he would have more holes in him than a net.
What are we to make of this speech? We surely don’t believe Clytemnestra’s portrait of herself as a lonely, wretched woman, lost in a limbo between wife and widow （although this portrayal must have been true for many more Greek wives than not. We’ll see the complications which arise from it with Penelope, as she waits twice as long – twenty years – for her husband Odysseus to return home from the Trojan War）。 We know Clytemnestra has been waiting avidly for his return, has sent out watchmen so that she may be the first to know when Troy falls. Is she describing her behaviour accurately and only lying about her reasons? Did she wait for every messenger as she claims, desperate to hear if Agamemnon was injured? Not because she wanted to hear he was safe but because she wanted to hear that he was not? Did she curse each messenger because they seemed to taunt her: Agamemnon must surely be dead by now, and yet somehow he lives? Or was she sincerely desperate for news that Agamemnon was unhurt, even though her motivation was much darker than anyone has realized? Did she want Agamemnon home safe for one reason and one reason only: so that she could kill him herself?
Then Clytemnestra shows us how devastatingly clever and cunning she is. Finally, she turns to speak to Agamemnon. All these rumours about him were so traumatic for her, she tells him, that more than once she fastened a noose around her neck. Others had to cut her down or she would not be alive today. And that is why Orestes, their son, is not present: he has been sent away for his own wellbeing. He’s being cared for by a close friend so he would not witness his mother’s suffering.
Thus Clytemnestra offers a pre-emptive excuse for the absence of their son from the palace. Agamemnon must surely have expected Orestes to be here, welcoming his father home （Clytemnestra doesn’t need to make the same excuses about their surviving daughter, Electra. Perhaps fathers didn’t worry so much about being greeted by their daughters. Or perhaps Agamemnon specifically doesn’t think too much about his daughter, having killed her older sister, as we were reminded at the start of the play）。 Not only does Clytemnestra offer a perfectly good reason for Orestes being absent, she has weaponized her own unhappiness to give her story greater plausibility. She hasn’t sent Orestes away because she’s a bad mother and doesn’t care about him, or because she’s a bad wife and doesn’t mind if he’s not there to welcome his father. She has sent him away because reports of Agamemnon being injured were so frequent and so distressing that her repeated suicide attempts were upsetting for Orestes, so he is elsewhere for his own good. I hesitate to prejudice your reading of the play, but I would say it is at this moment that we might describe Clytemnestra as ‘a piece of work’。 She just cares too much. Well, we’ll see. Oh, and were you wondering why she isn’t tear-stained from all these nights spent weeping over Agamemnon’s potential injuries? Of course, she has an explanation for that too: she has wept all her tears already, in the long nights when she suffered instead of sleeping.