The Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca must have read Ovid’s treatment of Clytemnestra, because his version of her （in his strange, flawed play, Agamemnon） is a similarly sexual being, tormented by her love and intense desire for Aegisthus.20 She does mention Iphigenia, but not with any particular anguish or need for retribution. As with Ovid’s interpretation, the Senecan Clytemnestra is jealous of her husband’s sexual conquests while he has been away at Troy: Briseis, Chryseis and Cassandra. But unlike our earlier Clytemnestras, this one is afraid that her husband will punish her for her own indiscretions. She even considers suicide. We have come a long way from the fearless, furious woman created by Aeschylus.
But let us return to Clytemnestra in her raging Aeschylean incarnation. More specifically, let’s follow her story through to its end. The second play of the Oresteia is The Libation Bearers. This is a reference to the offerings made at the tomb of the late Agamemnon by Electra and the chorus some years after the events of the previous play. Clytemnestra has been having bad dreams and she believes the ghost of her late husband needs placating. She has sent her daughter Electra to do the honours. Electra prays for her long-absent brother Orestes to come home and avenge their father. We learn that Clytemnestra still rules with Aegisthus.
But Electra is about to have her wish fulfilled: she identifies a lock of hair left as an offering beside her father’s tomb, and she sees a footprint which seems remarkably familiar to her. She concludes that both hair and footprint belong to Orestes, and that her brother must have returned at last. If this seems like a bit of a leap, you are not alone: Euripides mocks this whole recognition scene in his later version of the same story, Electra.
But once the siblings are reunited – along with Orestes’ companion Pylades – they determine to take action against their father’s killer. Orestes has been ordered by no less an authority than the god Apollo to do so. Clytemnestra comes out of the palace to greet these two men whom she believes to be strangers. She welcomes them inside, offers them hospitality. Orestes doesn’t identify himself, instead pretending to have met a man who had news for her: that Orestes is dead. Her response is that of a mother who has lost her son, rather than a woman who fears retribution from him. You’ve stripped away the thing I love, she says: I am utterly destroyed.21
Once they get inside the palace, Orestes kills Aegisthus, but wavers before killing his mother. Clytemnestra realizes she is to be killed by someone who has used trickery, just as she herself had used it to kill.22 For a moment, it seems as though Clytemnestra will talk herself out of trouble: I gave birth to you, she says. I want to grow old with you.23 He is aghast at her words: after killing my father? You want to grow old with me? She blames Moira – Fate – for Agamemnon’s death.
And then she and Orestes share a moment which must resonate with parents and children in less extreme circumstances. You cast me out, he says. She sees things differently: I put you at an ally’s house out of harm’s way. I was sold into slavery, he replies. Oh really, she says: how much did I get for you? We can surely hear the echoes of parents and teenagers arguing through the ages: they agree on the events which have occurred, but their interpretations of those events are poles apart and neither can see the other’s point of view. Mother and son are, in this moment, uncannily alike. But Pylades has reminded Orestes that Apollo demands this retributive killing, and Orestes does as he has been told. Clytemnestra dies reminding him that hounds of vengeance will chase him down.24
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And so they do. There is one more play to come in this trilogy: The Eumenides, which means ‘Kindly Ones’， a new name for the Erinyes, or Furies （following the theory that, if you give something a nicer name, it may behave less alarmingly）。 This final play poses and answers one simple question: was Orestes justified in killing his mother? The Furies, who pursue him relentlessly, think he has committed the unforgivable crime of matricide. But Apollo, and then also Athene, take Orestes’ side: he had a moral obligation to avenge his father and matricide was the necessary consequence of doing so. Whatever we might feel about the question, the play resolves the issue to its characters’ satisfaction: Orestes is acquitted thanks to divine intervention, and the Furies – grudgingly – allow him to continue his life unmolested.
But the play’s resolution does raise another question in our minds: why is Agamemnon’s life valued more highly – by everyone except Clytemnestra – than Iphigenia’s? Why was Agamemnon not pursued by the Furies for the unforgivable crime of killing his daughter? Why was it left to Clytemnestra to avenge her? Why do Electra and Orestes have so much more respect for the wishes of their dead, murderous father than for their living, murderous mother, and indeed their dead, blameless sister? Even if we agree with the conclusion that the trilogy reaches （which is that this cursed family must stop taking matters into their own hands and should instead air their grievances in a court and abide by the verdict – in this case supplied by a goddess）， we are surely left thinking that Clytemnestra had a point, way back in the first play, when she asked the chorus why they were so upset by Agamemnon when they were so unconcerned about Iphigenia. It’s him you should have banished, she told them.25 It seems that Clytemnestra seals her own fate when she values her daughter’s life equally to the life of a king.