We might think Agamemnon is rather gullible to fall for all this deceit. And perhaps he is. Nothing about his character as it’s presented in Homer’s Iliad would suggest that we are dealing with a cunning or even moderately clever man: the brains in the Greek camp belonged to Odysseus, Nestor and others. But even if Agamemnon were more immediately sceptical of the words of a woman whose child he once murdered, it would do him little good. He is simply outclassed. We will see a similar dynamic at play between Jason （who is much cleverer than Agamemnon） and his wife, Medea, in Euripides’ play.
But then Clytemnestra almost takes things too far. She gestures to her slave-women who have carried their finest tapestries out from the halls of the palace. She tells them to place these gorgeous cloths on the ground so that Agamemnon can walk on them. She doesn’t want him to set foot on the dusty earth beneath his chariot wheels, but to walk only on this luxurious purple fabric. This may seem odd to us, but not especially shocking: these tapestries could be like carpets or fancy rugs. But Agamemnon’s response shows us that Clytemnestra is in fact asking him to do something deeply transgressive.
He almost accepts the praise which Clytemnestra has offered him as his due. But, he says, it would be more suitable if it came from someone else, and not from his wife. The lavish treatment she is proposing makes him uncomfortable. Walking on these tapestries would be hubristic: it is what a god or a barbarian might do. We see an interesting division in his notion of masculinity here. Luxury is too good for a mortal man and belongs in the realm of the gods. But it is also too exotic, too foreign, too other, and any man indulged in this way resembles a foreigner, a barbarian, not a Greek.
What might the tapestries have been like, to provoke such an extreme reaction from Agamemnon? They are clearly far more precious than carpets or rugs. During the Bronze Age, when this play is set – perhaps the twelfth century BCE, many hundreds of years before it was written – the wealth of a royal house was not held in money, which didn’t yet exist. It was held in gold and other precious metals. And it was also held in fine tapestries like the ones Clytemnestra is proposing her slaves throw down on the ground. With no industrial processes, weaving was a formidably time-consuming task. Thin fabrics would have taken longer to create than any other kind: a finely spun yarn needs many more lines of weaving to make the same-sized cloth as could be produced far more quickly using a thick yarn. And patterns would also be much more intricate, because the fineness of the fabric allowed for more detail to be woven into it.
The colour was also a source of their value. Purple-red fabrics were coloured with murex: a sea snail whose secretions are the basis of this dark, regal purple dye. This was imported from the east, probably the Phoenician city of Tyre. The same dye would be used to create imperial purple in Rome, many centuries later. A vast quantity of murex would have been needed to colour the yarn for a large tapestry, and it was an extremely expensive, labour-intensive process to produce it. Clytemnestra and Agamemnon both refer to the enormous cost of the dye – the purple is equal in value to silver,6 Clytemnestra says. To be clear, the dye alone is this valuable: that’s before it has been used on the threads which will be woven into the delicate tapestries.
One more thing to note about murex is that it produced a colour which we might call red, or crimson, or purple. But it would have been a dark, visceral shade. So when Clytemnestra plays on Agamemnon’s vanity, tells him his victory is so great that he deserves the cloths beneath his feet, persuades him to walk over them in his bare feet, she achieves two things. The first is for the characters within the play: they see Agamemnon bending to his wife’s will, and walking over these priceless tapestries as she has ordered. He is being flattered into behaving like a potentate, while she has won their first exchange in ten years. He does as she commands.
The second is for the audience watching the play. We have seen Agamemnon return home, riding his chariot, carrying his spoils, accompanied by his war bride. And now we see this man step down from his chariot, barefoot, and walk into his palace over a river of glistening red. Even those who don’t know his story cannot fail to see that he walks through blood to get home.
As he steps down from his chariot, he exhorts his wife to take care of ‘this foreign woman’7 and magnanimously reminds her that the gods favour kind masters because no one chooses to become a slave. Would this sentiment sound more reasonable coming from a man who hasn’t literally enslaved the woman he is describing? Perhaps. But of course, our response is scarcely relevant: Clytemnestra’s is the one he should be worrying about. And she is being presented with the actual living proof of her husband’s infidelity, and asked to be nice to her. One finds oneself wondering if Agamemnon has ever met his wife before today. Perhaps he had received a blow to the head on the battlefield. Of course we could argue that, in both the Bronze Age when the play is set and the fifth century BCE when the play is written and performed, very different expectations of male and female fidelity were common: Athenian men could have sex with non-Athenian women （with or without payment） and their marriages were regarded as completely secure. Women, unsurprisingly, had no such freedom. But merely because an inequality is the status quo doesn’t mean that the person on the receiving end of that inequality is going to like it, least of all when you literally parade the disparity in front of her. And of all women you might not want to further irritate, Clytemnestra should be right near the top of your list.