With Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra some things are strangely similar. Once again the rhetoric is immensely powerful; it, and she, dominate the stage. Once again much of that power comes from the uncanny closeness of what she says to the truth (Neustadt 1929, 254-61; Thalmann 1985, 226). She sees the way the world is; she deceives, but she rarely lies - indeed, much of the uncanniness lies in how closely she represents the truth, but in chilling ways that her onstage hearers cannot grasp. Once again communication is skewed and once again her listeners may be overpersuaded, but here their response is clearly in line with what she intends. If Ajax’s speech conveys control, it is only intellectual control of the way he now sees the world to be; the issue lies in the gap between that and his inability to control that world and his place in it more directly. Clytemnestra's speech is so unnerving because she controls a good deal more. Her intellectual control is matched by her control of her listeners’ response, and the control over events that this gives her. (Contrast Cassandra, whose grasp of events is at odds with her inability to persuade or dominate.) And once again this is Clytemnestra’s performance, playing the part of the faithful and welcoming wife, even if this role-playing is not figured as metatheatrically as it is in Euripides’ Electra. Hers is not the only force at play: but for most of Agamemnon she is so powerful because she is at one with those other forces, even comes close to embodying them, so that it is uncertain whether she is ‘‘unforgetting Child-avenging Wrath’’ incarnate ( mnamOn Minis teknopoinos, 155, with the differing views of Fraenkel 1950 and Denniston and Page 1957 ad loc). All the more telling, then, that toward the end of the play her rhetoric is no longer so controlling, and the dynamic of encounters starts to be different.
The chorus’s first address to the Queen marks their respect for her ‘‘power’’ (kratos), ‘‘for it is right to honor the wife of one’s leader when the throne is left empty of the male’’ (or ‘‘when the male throne is left empty’’; Agamemnon 258-60). No doubt in their mind, then, about where power should lie when the male is present. We soon see a control that cuts much deeper. When she explains how she knows that Troy has fallen, the ‘‘beacons speech’’ (281-316; Goldhill 1984, 38-39) is suggestive not merely for the disquieting places and names the signal has visited on its path - Lemnos, Cithaeron, the ‘‘Arachnaean heights’’: as so often in the Oresteia, the imagery touches a truth deeper still, the sense in which the flames of Troy are indeed licking toward Argos where they will engulf a second royal house. She can see and her language can convey the scenes of destruction at Troy; she knows the dangers too, that the conquerors may disrespect the gods, and dangers may strike before they can return home. In prosily realistic terms, she cannot know this. All she can infer from the signal is that the Greeks have taken the city. Yet the power of her description persuades the chorus, at least until they pull themselves up 120 lines later (475-87); and the audience in the theater knows it is true, even before the herald in the next scene confirms so much (including the devastation of the altars, 527). That audience already senses too the deadly double-speak. Clytemnestra wants the army to get home safely: ‘‘if the army comes without transgressing against the gods, the suffering of the dead may still be wakeful’’ (345-47). Which dead? Not merely those at Troy, though those as well. There is another among the dead whose suffering makes demands, and that is Iphigenia. Tragic rhetoric is often unnerving because it fails to persuade, or because it makes people believe things that are false. Yet here we have no lies and no failure of persuasiveness - only a closeness to truth in a form that goes beyond anything normal or comfortable or safe.
Agamemnon is expected: Clytemnestra sends the herald back to him with a message.
Report this to my husband, that he should come as quickly as he can, a darling to the city: when he comes may he find in the house a faithful wife just as he left her, a good guard-dog for him and an enemy to those who are hostile; and one who is the same in all other ways too, one who has broken no seal in all those years: I know no pleasure, nor any slanderous talk from any other man, any more than the dipping of bronze. (604-12)
Not all that is as ‘‘heavy with truth’’ (613) as she claims, but it again grazes the truth (Thalmann 1985, 226). The wish - ‘‘may he find’’ - is one which has different purchase in Clytemnestra’s mindset from the way Agamemnon might take it: she is indeed the woman of the sort he left, a guard-dog of the house - with a hint there of her half-sister Helen, so frequently denouncing herself in Homer as ‘‘dog-faced,’’ and Clytemnestra is no more chaste a wife than she (Goldhill 1984, 56); yet she is ‘‘faithful’’ in a different sense, to those whose claims are higher than her husband’s; now she will indeed be an enemy to those who are hostile; the ‘‘seal’’ she has not broken through the long years may be less to do with chastity, more with the commitment to vengeance she has in store.
But most unnerving of all is the extremity of her language, now and when Agamemnon returns: ‘‘a darling to the city’’ (not to herself, we notice) here leads on to similar extravagance of phrasing in Agamemnon’s presence:
If he had suffered as many wounds as the story channeled back to us, he would have more holes in him than a net; if he had been killed as often as the stories multiplied, he would have been a second three-bodied Geryon boasting of a triple cloak of earth, dying once in each form...In my dreams I would be woken by the gentle breezes of a trumpeting gnat, seeing more sufferings than could happen in the time I slept. (86672, 891-94)
Her imagery again chimes closely with that of the trilogy as a whole (cf. Gould 1978, 59-61). There is a sense in which Agamemnon has been wounded more than he knows by the fighting at Troy, that this all is like a net that enfolds more than he (or even she, yet) may sense, that there are three waves of killing at stake. Thus she has dreamed - and was that in fear, or in hope? And did those dreams come from within, or from a deity who knows future as well as past (as dreams so often come from deities, and will come later in the Oresteia)? Still, that time has now passed:
Now, after bearing all that, with ungrieving heart I would describe this man as the watchdog of the halls, the forestay cable that saves the ship, the firm-fixed column of the lofty house, the only child to a father, the spring-stream for a thirsty traveler, the land that appears to a despairing sailor, the fairest day to see after storm. (895-903)
Not all is false: she is indeed glad that he has returned, and would not have wished him to die by others’ hands; and as in Hippolytus the imagery of house is all too pertinent, and the stability of the oikos does depend on him. And still she is ‘‘performing’’ (McClure 1999, 72-92, esp. 78-79); this is the role of the faithful wife. Yet she is performing too well, and the hyperbolic language strikes chill.
That is partly because it is performative in a fuller sense. ‘‘Let envy [phthonos] be absent,’’ she goes on (904): for envy, both human and divine, can so easily be stirred by god-like language like that, and the words can in themselves cause the result which she desires. This is the prelude to the tapestry-scene, when in Agamemnon’s own deeds as well as in Clytemnestra’s words he will run those risks. There may be a further way too that the language here prepares for that scene. Scholars have detected an ‘‘oriental’’ tinge to Clytemnestra’s phrasing (Fraenkel 1950, 410; Hall 1989, 204-6; Steiner 1994, 170): can this be the right way to address a Greek king, hot from the defeat of the Eastern foe? Perhaps it can; we have already followed in the first stasimon a train of thought suggesting that what had been true of Troy may turn out true of Argos too; a moment later, and Clytemnestra will be shrewdly asking, ‘‘what would Priam have done, if he had achieved what you had?’’ as a way of enticing Agamemnon to tread those silks (935). What is happening in that tense interchange is much discussed and disputed, especially the question of why Agamemnon is persuaded so easily. (For discussion of this most powerful and enigmatic of all tragic scenes see especially Fraenkel 1950, 441-42; Denniston and Page 1957, 151-52; Lloyd-Jones 1962; Easterling 1973; Taplin 1977, 308-16; Buxton 1982, 106-8; Goldhill 1984, 75-78; McClure 1999, 80-92.) Perhaps the force of Clytemnestra’s own personality is important, and Agamemnon is bullied; perhaps the audience again senses forces at play that go beyond Clytemnestra herself, but with which she meshes perfectly (something that is reinforced by the way her language picks up themes and images that are much more pervasive in the play); certainly, again, her own command of argument is important too, here articulated not in continuous logic but in bewildering switches of point of attack. But we need not rule out psychology as well, and as in Hippolytus it is the psychology of the hearer rather than the speaker that is in point. As with Phaedra the arguments that persuade are transparently weak, and as with Phaedra this makes them all the more revealing. This may indeed be the way to speak to Agamemnon; that is partly because it chimes in with the dynamic of other irresistible forces, but his own mentality may also be not so far from an Eastern king’s. There are multiple reasons why what happened at Troy should be living on, and about to happen again in Argos.
For the moment, Clytemnestra’s control is total, and Agamemnon is as good as dead already. But then things falter. She cannot dominate Cassandra: controlling men with words is one thing, but Cassandra is female and silent (see Mossman, chapter 22 in this volume). Soon Clytemnestra has no more need to perform. Like the nurse in Hippolytus, she can revel in her change of tack - ‘‘I have said much before to suit the moment; now I shall not be ashamed to say the opposite’’ (1372-73) - but unlike the nurse Clytemnestra is now, not then, speaking straight. Her language is now shocking in a different way, with explicit sexual imagery - extraordinary in tragedy - as she celebrates her orgasm of delighted triumph:
As he breathed out the sharp slaughter of his blood he struck me with a dark shower of his deathly dew, and I responded with pleasure no less than at the god-given refreshment that brings the bud to birth... (1389-82)
Yet the chorus refuses to be cowed, and as the scene goes on Clytemnestra’s tone changes too. She moves from iambics to anapests, chiming in more closely (though not completely) with the chorus’s lyrics. Instead of vaunting her own part in this, she now talks of the daimOn who afflicts the house: you may say it is my deed, but...
It was the old, piercing avenging spirit that took the form of the dead man’s wife and brought this sacrifice of a grown man to join the young, in vengeance for the dread feasting of Atreus. (1500-1503)
Once again this is not false, indeed it is all too true - but it is not the same tone as before. Soon she is pleading with this daimOn to go away and assault another house, not this: she is content with a small part of her possessions, if only she can free the halls of this madness (1566-76).
True, Aegisthus now appears, and her domination of onstage males can be momentarily reasserted. It remains telling that her language has come to control events less decisively just as its grasp of their true significance has become greater. The next wave of destruction is beginning, and in Libation Bearers others will have their roles to perform and pretences to enact. She has become more like Ajax, with intellectual control, an understanding of her place within the rhythm of events, coupled with an insight that she will not be able to control those events as she wishes. But whereas in Ajax’s case - or in that of Herodotus’ Xerxes at the Hellespont (7.44-52) with his acquiescence in the dangerous role that history has given him - the rhetoric is no less impressive for being calmer, Clytemnestra’s words falter rather than drive. The psychology they illuminate is no longer her victim’s, it is her own.
World History
