The Dokimasia pot in Boston shows a different emphasis, as mentioned above: Aegisthus is the killer, Clytemnestra not much more than an axe-wielding cheerleader. But a fourth-century BCE krater in the Hermitage Museum18 in St Petersburg shows a more murderous Clytemnestra. In fact, it shows a naked Agamemnon cowering behind his shield as Clytemnestra bears down upon him with her axe raised above her head, her cloak billowing behind her. This piece was made in Magna Graecia （southern Italy today, but populated with Greek settlements at the time）， which raises an interesting question about whether these wine-drinkers enjoyed the sight of a murderous wife more than their Athenian counterparts. And if so, why?
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Clytemnestra is usually presented as an archetypally bad wife. The only question tends to be her motivation, which makes her more or less sympathetic, more or less threatening to the society which depicts her. Our earliest descriptions of her are in the Odyssey, where she acts （in narrative terms） as a dark reflection of the archetypally good wife, Penelope. The poem follows Odysseus on his extended journey home to his long-suffering wife, while she copes with the invasion of her home by a gang of young men, the disrespect of her son and plenty more. She is held up throughout Greek myth as a model wife to her absent husband. But the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming punctuates the poem, not least when Odysseus visits the Underworld in Book Eleven and meets his now-dead comrade. He asks Agamemnon how he died, whether Poseidon had wrecked his ship or whether he’d been killed by men whose livestock he was trying to pilfer. Magnificently, Odysseus manages to conjure up scenarios he himself has experienced and will experience: his heroic self-absorption is an ever-present risk to his own （and his men’s） survival in this poem. Agamemnon says no, it wasn’t Poseidon and nor was he killed by men defending their land. It was Aegisthus, he says, with help from my wife. He uses the vocabulary of ritual slaughter, just as Clytemnestra will go on to do, in Aeschylus’ play. The Homeric version is more of a bloodbath, however: this Agamemnon saw his men slaughtered too, like pigs. He then compares it to a battle, which makes the domestic details all the more shocking: palace tables stacked with food and wine, the floor beneath them covered in blood. He says he heard Cassandra being killed by Clytemnestra while his own life ebbed away. Clytemnestra didn’t even look at him as he died, did not even close his eyes and mouth after death. He advises Odysseus to return home cautiously, although he does also suggest that Penelope isn’t the murdering kind, ‘not like my wife’。
So Homer’s Clytemnestra is not quite as terrifying for men as Aeschylus’ version: she doesn’t kill her husband, although she does stand by as he is killed and has been involved in planning his murder. Obviously for women, and specifically for Cassandra, she is precisely the same degree of murderous. And for the Homeric Agamemnon, Clytemnestra’s affair with Aegisthus is the root of her evil. There is no suggestion that this Clytemnestra might be avenging the death of her daughter, or indeed that she might have political ambitions to rule in her husband’s stead, both of which were part of her character in Aeschylus. At least as far as Agamemnon tells things here, she was solely motivated by desire for Aegisthus. Clytemnestra is nothing more than an adulteress.
It is this motivation which will come to define Clytemnestra when Roman authors get hold of her. For Ovid, in his Ars Amatoria or The Art of Love, she is driven by sexual jealousy, which only really manifests itself when she sees Agamemnon’s infidelity up close.19 She stays chaste while she can imagine Agamemnon is faithful to her. She heard the rumours about Chryseis and Briseis （both women whom Agamemnon had claimed as war brides in the Iliad）。 But it is only when he returns home with Cassandra, and Clytemnestra sees the relationship for herself, that she begins her own revenge-affair with Aegisthus. So Ovid is continuing a tradition which deprives Clytemnestra of her status as queen and Fury, but he also removes the responsibility for Agamemnon’s murder from her. The implication is that Agamemnon is responsible for his own downfall: if he had had the good sense to keep his mistress away from his wife, he might have lived to a ripe old age.
Of course, Ovid is writing a very different kind of poem from Homer’s epic Odyssey or Aeschylus’ tragedy Agamemnon. The Ars Amatoria is a bright, racy, jokey guide to having illicit sex in Rome （produced at a time when the new emperor, Augustus, was cracking down on adultery. At least, other people’s）。 So Ovid has every reason to turn Clytemnestra and Agamemnon into a suburban couple whose swinging habits get out of control, rather than treating them with the epic grandeur of our earlier Greek authors. Here we find no reference to Iphigenia, no reference to Clytemnestra’s designs on the Argive throne. Ovid knows so much about Greek myth that we know he is being deliberately cheeky here: reducing Clytemnestra – and Medea, a little earlier in the same passage – two famously wronged women who respond with remarkable violence to their abuse – to little more than vexed housewives kicking up a fuss.