ABSTRACT
This paper examines the mythical characters of Medea in
Euripides' Medea and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' Oresteia as
examples of women who kill their husbands. Medea escapes vengeance
for her crimes whereas Clytemnestra is murdered by her own
son in revenge for killing her husband. While Medea's actions
destroy her husband's life, Medea does not directly attack
him or cause his death. Also, she is semi-divine and a barbarian
sorceress, so she is not held to the same standards as ordinary
women. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, murders her husband
herself and attempts to disinherit her son. Further, she is
mortal and Greek and being a great queen, is a role model
for other Greek women. Therefore, she must suffer the consequences
of her actions.
Medea and Clytemnestra's contrasting fates also reflect the
differences in Euripides' and Aeschylus' different attitudes
and approaches to the concepts of vengeance and gender conflict.
Euripides focuses on the tragedy of the Medea's situation,
whereas Aeschylus is more interested in the conflict between
clan and universal justice, as seen in the dynastic tragedy
of the house of Atreus. These different approaches in philosophy
affect Medea and Clytemnestra's motivations for their actions,
and the consequences.
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INTRODUCTION
Two of the most controversial female figures in Greek mythology,
or even the Ancient World, were Medea and Clytemnestra. Appearing
in the two most famous story cycles of Greek mythology--the
tales of the Argonauts and the Trojan War, they lived within
a few generations of each other, at least in the world of
the myths. The age of the Argonauts, known as the Age of Heroes
in Hesiod (1995, lines 156-69), lasted for two generations
and ended with the Trojan War. As the men of the Argonauts
were all great heroes, stronger and wiser than normal men,
so was Medea a great sorceress who was both greater than normal
women and far worse. Clytemnestra of the Homeric cycle was
the great queen of a great king, who sired equally famous
children. Her half-sister and brother were semi-divine, as
her mother had been seduced by a god. These were women of
great power and wisdom who went on to commit terrible crimes
worthy of the larger-than-life quality of their personalities.
Both were extreme characters who violated the Ancient Greek
ideal of moderation in all things.
Medea and Clytemnestra represented to the Ancient Greek mind
not just what men did not want women to do, but many things
that men felt women did want to do, and would do if allowed
free rein. In effect, they embodied men's fears about free
women. Clytemnestra represented a bad wife, unfaithful, neglectful
and murderous, whereas Medea represented the opposite pole
of bad wife--the woman who was so faithful to her spouse that
she committed murderous, sorcerous and even blasphemous acts
for him. And when he abandoned her, she did to him in revenge
what she had done to others for him. In addition, Medea represented
the ultimate Other, the semi-divine barbarian who came from
beyond the edge of the known Greek world, who did strange
wonders on the one hand and committed barbarous acts on the
other. So, she reflected not only Greek men's fears of women,
but of non-Greeks (Hazel 1996, p.6).
We do not know how much the secret fantasies
of Ancient Greek women reflected the fears of Ancient Greek
men (Reeder 1995, p.10-11). Eastern cults such as those dedicated
to Isis or Dionysius, or chthonic cults such as those dedicated
to Hecate, do indicate that some women could be violent and
antisocial, when they found such an outlet (Gordon 1999, p.
180). The reason why both women (particularly Medea) are popular
now, however, is because they speak to women's fantasies of
power and women's anger today, as well as men's fears of such
violent emotions. Both women committed their crimes after
extreme provocation (Clytemnestra's husband forcibly marries
her after murdering her son, then murders their daughter in
ritual human sacrifice; Medea's consort abandons her and her
sons for an advantageous marriage). These crimes are a rough
sort of vigilante justice that would have been acceptable--even
required--from the men of their day. This is probably why
Ancient male writers felt sympathy for them at the same time
that they condemned the actions of both women. What the men
in both stories did to their wives was so unacceptable by
Greek standards of the day that some retribution had to occur
(deForest 1997, p.10). The major objection of the Ancient
writers was to the extremity of the women's response. In Euripides'
eponymous play, Medea murders both her consort's fiancée
and future father-in-law, then murders the two sons she had
by Jason. In the Oresteia, Clytemnestra takes a lover while
her husband is away at war, murders her husband upon his arrival
home and traumatises her surviving children in various ways
to avoid their retribution, though in the end her son kills
her with his sister's aid.
Another reason why Ancient writers felt a need to write about
these two women is because they are major figures in the two
greatest cycles of Greek mythology who complement their consorts,
who are also major figures. The way that Clytemnestra's husband,
Agamemnon, treats her, and Medea's consort, Jason, treats
her reflects on how the Greeks saw these two great heroes.
In short, Clytemnestra and Medea each brought out their husband's
fatal, tragic flaws.
Writers today feel a need to write about these two wronged
wives, however, because of their other roles in life as much
as their identities as wronged women. Medea was a powerful,
semi-divine sorceress who eventually achieved immortality
for both herself and her surviving children, despite her many
crimes. Clytemnestra was a great queen who took a lover in
addition to her husband and ruled her husband's kingdom in
his absence until her murder by her son many years later.
Aside from their original identities as victims, these are
both strong female figures, and so they are attractive to
modern feminist authors looking for heroines in history and
mythology. These women, despite Medea's exile and Clytemnestra's
ultimate fate, were two powerful and successful women of the
Ancient World. They are both positive and negative role models
for women struggling with similar issues today. They prove
that a woman does not need to be weak to experience difficulties
and tragedies in life or that she can escape making stupid
decisions simply because she is strong. And they also provide
a lesson in what happens when one takes blind and unreasoning
revenge, even in a just cause.
This paper will look at the psychology of Medea and Clytemnestra
in myth and literature to answer why they killed their husbands.
The main focus of the paper will be on their motivations as
shown in the play Medea (by Euripides) and the play cycle
The Oresteia (by Aeschylus). Part One examines the cycles
of myth that surround both women, including possible historical
bases for their existence. Part Two discusses how Medea appears
in Euripides' famous play, Medea. It will discuss her motivations
and reactions in the play, how they resembled, or differed
from, the Medea in Greek myth, and how Euripides' portrayal
of her influenced other writers. Part Three will discuss the
motivations of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus' classic post-Trojan
War trilogy, The Oresteia. Part four examines how modern and
postmodern historians, and feminist scholars, have reevaluated
the behaviour and motivations of both women to fit new models
of female behaviour and women's new attitudes and needs.
PART ONE: MEDEA AND CLYTEMNESTRA IN MYTH
Historical background for Medea and Clytemnestra
One of the questions which writers have often asked over the
centuries has been whether the characters and personalities
of Medea and Clytemnestra were based on two real women of
history, or whether they are completely mythological in origin.
Whatever facts we have are heavily layered in the myths surrounding
the kingdom of Mycenae which succeeded Crete as a power in
the central Mediterranean (Voyatzis 1998, p.133-6). The region
which Medea came from, the Black Sea, was inhabited during
the Bronze Age by tribes with whom the people of the Mediterranean
traded. There was such a place as Troy and the Trojan War,
in which Clytemnestra's husband, Agamemnon, fought, for example,
seems to have occurred around 1260 BC (Bray & Trump 1976,
p.237-8). In fact, the site of Troy, discovered in the 19th
century, was built upon, and sacked, more than once in ancient
times. The layer which appears to correspond to the Trojan
War was part of the seventh level of habitation, and was not
the last.
Agamemnon's kingdom, Mycenae, did exist at this time, although
the attribution of some archaeological material (such as the
famous "deathmask" of Agamemnon) to this king can
be questioned (Fagan 1998, p.222-6). The kingdom of Corinth
to which Medea's consort, Jason, brought her did also exist.
There is also archaeological evidence that other mythical
persons such as Agamemnon, Clytemnestra's husband, Helen of
Troy, her half-sister and launcher of a thousand ships, also
existed.
One should approach the idea of Medea and Clytemnestra as
real, historical figures with caution, however. For one thing,
their personalities are too mythical, too purely archetypal
to be an accurate biographical portrait. If anything, their
crimes are remembered more vividly than anything else about
them, so their memories are probably blacker than either woman
was in reality (Lyons 1996, p.64). The real women, if they
existed, were probably much less neatly mythical. For another,
much of the information which we have for their cultures is
archaeological. We have nothing historical save for oral tradition
that was not written down until at least three or four centuries
later, and most of which is now lost (Pausanius 1918, p.1-11).
The rest stems from the Classical era of Greece, over seven
hundred years after they might have lived, and from the plays
of Aeschylus and Euripides. The women that we see in the plays
probably resemble their Bronze Age historical (or even mythical)
counterparts very little. What Medea and Clytemnestra in these
plays reflect are the views of how some fifth century Athenian
men saw women, but also (particularly in the case of Aeschylus)
what issues these two female archetypes raised for men in
Classical Greece. Aeschylus and Euripides were both constrained
by a theatrical tradition which required them to couch all
of their storylines, characters and moral dilemmas within
the very rich bedrock of Greek myth (Rabinowitz 1995, p.5-6).
Let us first turn to that myth in order to better understand
the basis of the plays and the psychology of these two very
different women within them.
Origins of the myth of Medea
Medea appears in a number of myths and legends from classical
and Dark Age Greece. She appears primarily in Apollonius of
Rhodes' Argonautica (Apollonius Rhodius 1912, passim), but
also in legends relating to Theseus (Pausanius 1918, p.2),
and an ode by Pindar (2001, lines 10-15). Following Euripides'
example, the 1st century Roman Seneca also wrote a play entitled
Medea. To the Greeks and Romans, she was the ultimate barbarian
princess, an ancient version of the African priestess in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness. She was exotic, mysterious, fascinating
and murderous (Luck 1999, p.111-2).
Origins of the Myth of Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra's mythical origins and nature are more straightforward
than Medea's, and also more tragic, as is her fate. Her story
appears obliquely in the Trojan War cycle of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, where she is almost a divine instrument of vengeance
against Agamemnon, or a puppet of Aegisthus, her lover, who
was taking his revenge on Agamemnon for wrongs done to his
father (Homer 1921, Books III and XL). While it is Aeschylus
who deals with her most fully in his trilogy, the Oresteia,
Euripides attempts to rehabilitate the legend of her daughter's
murder to a more "modern" sensibility in his plays
Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris. This, of course,
would have made Clytemnestra's crime all the blacker to his
audience, as Iphigenia, in the plays, is not sacrificed by
her father after all, thus taking away Clytemnestra's pretext
for revenge. Both Sophocles and Euripides deal with her murder
in separate plays about Electra, her daughter, as well.
The mythical roles and dilemmas of Medea
and Clytemnestra
Both Medea and Clytemnestra had strong origins in myth long
before Aeschylus and Euripides dealt with them in 5th century
Athenian tragedy. They were as familiar to the Greeks as Ruth
or Jezebel would be to a 19th century Christian, archetypal
figures of a mythical age. Both women appeared in myth cycles
whose events (where there are historical correlations) and
culture dated to the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece of the 13th
century B.C. During this period, which followed the recent
migrations of the Dorians into the Mediterranean and preceded
the wars, invasions and geological disasters which led to
Dark Age Greece, the Greeks had a very limited sense of their
geographical world. The Black Sea, where Medea originated,
and even Troy, which was in Asia Minor, on the Hellespont
into the Black Sea, were at the very edge of the Greek world.
Thus, the placement of Medea in this region, for example,
immediately identified her as semi-mythical to listeners of
Euripides and placed her outside their usual ethical boundaries
for women. They expected her to act like a barbarian, since
she was. Making her the granddaughter of an Archaic era god
(Helios) and the companion of semi-divine heroes, and making
her sons the eponymous founders of nations, put her even further
into the mythical realm.
PART TWO: EURIPIDES AND MEDEA
A problematical playwright
The youngest of the trio of great tragic playwrights from
5th century Athens, Euripides was born between 485 and 480
BC and died in Macedon in 406, shortly before his contemporary,
Sophocles, died. Euripides came from a good family and, despite
his later reputation for impiety, is recorded as having participated
in religious festivals as a young man. He married and had
three sons but spent his later life living as a hermit. One
of these sons appears to have contributed to his father's
last plays, probably after Euripides' death (Bates 1906, p.160-1).
Euripides produced his first play for the Dionysian Festival
in 455, when he was 30 years old. Despite his great reputation
later on, he won only five first prizes, one of them posthumously.
Nineteen of the some 92 plays that he wrote still survive.
Most of them focussed on the Trojan War, but his most famous
surviving play is Medea. He won third place for it in 431
BC, at the start of the Peloponnesian War.
Euripides acquired a reputation for iconoclasm, blasphemy
and misogyny from the parodies of contemporary comedic playwright
Aristophanes, but there is some question as to whether this
was true (Bates 1906, p.163-4). Aside from the questionableness
of using comedies with contradicting and outrageous biographical
detail as the basis for Euripides' views and intentions, Aristophanes'
accusations do not always adhere to modern definitions. Aristophanes
satirised Euripides in at least two plays, The Thesmophoriazusae
and The Frogs. He accused Euripides of misogyny in the first
play on the basis that Euripides debased the reputation of
women by portraying them in his plays as acting shamelessly
and murderously (Katz 1998, p.115-125). It is difficult to
say now how women would have reacted to these female characters
as well, particularly considering that even the female parts
were played by men. This is assuming that Athenian women went
to plays, which is not necessarily a given, either (Katz 1998,
75).
More so than his contemporaries, Euripides was interested
in the psychology of his characters. He preferred to portray
them as realistically as possible, rather than as mouthpieces
for positions in moral conflicts, as Aeschylus did. Although
other playwrights portrayed violent acts in their tragedies,
Euripides seemed especially interested in the extremes and
effects of violent emotion. Some critics felt that he wallowed
in his characters' pain, suffering and degradation and chose
his subjects accordingly (Bates 1906, p.163-5). On the other
hand, it should be kept in mind that Euripides, like the other
playwrights of his day, kept to a very limited repertoire
of Greek myth--hence his liking for using the Trojan War as
the backdrop for his tragedies.
Making a Barbarian Princess sympathetic
The play itself is claustrophobic in time and place. The entirety
of it is set within Medea's house in Corinth and the events
transpire over the disastrous course of the last two days
of Medea and Jason's marriage. There are only seven characters,
plus the chorus, and two of them are functional characters
who appear only briefly onstage. Yet, an entire city and history
to the tragedy is evoked in the play. Everyone comes to Medea
throughout the course of the play, not the other way around.
This serves to set up a tension and an immediate (even if
unwilling) interest in Medea's situation. The play gives us
Medea's worldview throughout and whatever is about to happen,
we will not be allowed to look away. Whether we like it or
not, we must sympathise with her, at least initially.
Another aspect of the play, which is normal for Greek plays
of this period, is that the most extreme aspects of the action
occur offstage, with the chorus, or a character like a Messenger
or a Nurse, giving an ongoing commentary. Playwrights were
not allowed to show the actual acts of murder onstage. This
also serves to increase our sympathy for Medea as we never
see what she does to her victims, we only hear it told to
us by an observer. The damage that Jason has done to her,
on the other hand, is given to us directly, onstage, in Medea's
spoke, acted pain and anguish. This is another way of drawing
us into Medea's viewpoint and distancing us from her crimes
enough to engage our sympathies.
The play also begins at a critical juncture. It shows us Medea,
not as a powerful sorceress possessed of dark knowledge and
wondrous charms, but as a woman at her most vulnerable and
most victimised--the point when Jason leaves her for another
woman. They have been in Corinth for ten years at this point
and she has borne him two sons. She has no one else, only
him and his children. She has irrevocably abandoned her home,
family and culture for him. She has nothing, not even a home
to go to or money of her own. She has given everything to
him.
Medea as a man and as cunning woman
Initially, Medea is grief-stricken--suicidal, cursing Jason,
her children and herself and wishing herself dead. Even at
this point, however, she is cunning. She courts the audience's
sympathies through the chorus, addressing them directly with
her fear that by showing pride and indifference, she might
alienate them (Hazel 1996, p.7). She also expresses the fear
that as a stranger, she cannot expect sympathy from them due
to her strange appearance and ways. She feels that they will
hate her simply for not being familiar to them as are their
neighbours.
She expresses herself willing to abide by Corinthian ways--her
main complaint, she says, is not with Corinth but with her
husband. She goes on further to lament in detail about woman's
plight, and how she, as a woman, cannot do to Jason what he
can do to her. For a woman to divorce or put away a man is
to dishonour herself. Medea sees the option which Clytemnestra
takes in Agamemnon and consciously rejects it as untenable.
In this way, she immediately gains the sympathies of the chorus
and the audience. Though this is a cunning move, her grief
is genuine enough at this point to show that her feelings
for Jason, however strongly turned from love to hate, would
not allow her to kill him outright. She can only strike at
him indirectly. As the man she once loved, he still holds
that much power over her heart--though little good that will
do him in the end. Moved by her emotional plea that she is
alone in Corinth with no family save for Jason and her sons,
the leader of the chorus assures her that the chorus is on
her side. Further, the leader supports the idea that she should
take revenge on her treacherous husband, unaware of just what
revenge she is capable of exacting.
When Medea goes from grief to rage, however, she alarms the
men in her life to the point that her husband's future father-in-law,
Creon, exiles her from Corinth. He fears (rightly) that she
might try to hurt his daughter if she remains in Corinth.
He has no sympathy for her plight, feeling that she has brought
it upon herself with her anger and accuses her of being a
disruptive and unruly woman, unfit for her sex. Medea pleads
with him, but wins only the space of one day in order to gather
her things and her children and leave Corinth.
A revenge worse than the crime
Despite her brave words, this is Medea at nearly her lowest
point. She is steeling herself to a terrible deed but even
she quails at doing it. This is not just because she truly
loves her children, but also because she sees that her deeds
will hurt her almost as much as her intended victims, and
leave her alone in the world. As the chorus notes gently,
"thou wilt be the saddest wife alive" (Coleridge
2000, line 794).
The character of Medea
In one sense, Medea triumphs completely over her unfaithful
husband at the end of the play. But the revenge that she chooses
is its own punishment. There is a self-destructive aspect
to her vengeance, as if she feels that she, too, must be punished
along with her enemies. The bodies of her children, which
she carries away with her in her chariot, are a concrete symbol
of the grief to come. She will bury them with honour and love,
but afterwards, she will be alone, just as she feared, a permanent
exile. She leaves in almost divine detachment, but the hatred
that she pours upon Jason, even to the end, belies her calm.
Interestingly, Euripides makes no attempt to resolve the paradox
that is Medea. The chorus clearly sympathises with her. Euripides
makes Medea sympathetic, just as he makes Hecuba in The Trojan
Women sympathetic, even though she is a queen of a conquered
enemy. Of course, one must keep in mind that Corinth was a
rival of Athens, and Athens is presented in the play as a
refuge for those in need of justice and compassion. Still,
the fact that Medea, the barbarian, triumphs over Greeks is
remarkable. Perhaps Euripides justifies this because she is
semidivine, and therefore outside of the laws of men. The
course of revenge that she resolves on is clearly abhorrent
to him, but she escapes earthly justice in the end. The gift
of the chariot of dragons shows that the gods sympathise with
her plight, whether or not they approve of her actions. The
latter question of their approval, however, is left unanswered,
ending the play on a dark and strange note.
PART THREE: CLYTEMNESTRA IN THE ORESTEIA
The Pious Playwright
Aeschylus was born in 525 BC in Attica, the first of the three
most famous Greek tragedians from the Ancient World, the other
two being Sophocles and Euripides. Before he was a playwright,
he was a soldier. He was so proud of the fact that he had
fought the Persians at the battles of Marathon and Salamis
that he had these included in his epitaph, but not the prizes
that he won for his plays (Grene 1953, p.1-3). Aeschylus first
began submitting plays to the Dionysian Festival at age 25
but he did not win until age 40. After that, however, he won
steadily until his death in Sicily in 456 BC. He also participated
in smaller festivals, and his prizes are listed variously
as either 13 or 28. He produced 90 tragedies, 52 of which
won prizes. These would have been produced as tetralogies,
with three tragedies being followed by a satyr play (Ibid,
p.4-5). The Oresteia is Aeschylus' only surviving complete
trilogy, though seven of his tragedies survive in all.
Aeschylus came from Eleusis, born of conservative Attic nobility.
This explains the strongly moralistic, religious nature of
his plays. He was also a producer and stage manager of his
plays, and created costumes for his actors.
The Dilemma of Clytemnestra, the Good
Mother/Bad Wife
Of the three great classical writers, Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides, Aeschylus was the first and elder. Though these
three playwrights wrote within each other's lifetimes, they
represented three very different trends. Aeschylus wrote in
the most traditional and archaic sense, dealing with the myths
most directly, as arbiters of dilemmas in moral, societal
debates. Sophocles was equally interested in moral dilemmas,
but more on a personal level, as played out by the characters.
Euripides, finally, was most interested in human drama and
psychology, particularly extreme psychology. He was interested
in character and personality over morality and is noted for
his finely wrought portrayals of women in pain and emotional
turmoil.
Like mother, like son
Ironically, Clytemnestra has more in common with her son and
daughter than Orestes and Electra have with their idealised
father, Agamemnon. In Agamemnon, they create, not a real memory
of a real father who they never really knew, but instead a
sort of antithesis of Clytemnestra. And they invoke him with
all the passion of witchcraft. They believe that they will
stop the cycle of violence with Clytemnestra’s death
at the end of The Libation Bearers. A generation before, their
mother believes the same thing, thinking that one can shed
so much blood and no more at the end of Agamemnon. But the
lesson that Clytemnestra does not learn, and fails to teach
her children to her misfortune, is that blood begets more
blood and hatred more hatred. She says that the feud is over,
but in sending away her son and neglecting her daughter, she
subconsciously acknowledges that the next generation will
repeat the same mistakes, and this time, she will be the victim
(Hazel 2000, p.1-3).
Does Clytemnestra love or hate her children? With Medea, there
is no ambiguity—she loves her sons. In fact, part of
her confidence that Jason will suffer if she murders them
is because it is also the worst thing that she could conceive
of him doing to her. In fact, she fears that he will kill
her sons (or let them be killed) if she does not do so first.
In a sense, she sees herself as sparing them unnecessary suffering.
An unending cycle of vengeance
Clytemnestra is a far more complex character than she should
be, considering the type of evil that she commits. It is bad
enough that she commits murder—not only that, but she
kills her husband after she has cuckholded him. In effect,
she symbolically castrates him twice. She also kills his concubine,
Cassandra and neglects her children later on in favour of
her lover. This clouds her initially clear motivations of
revenge for her husband’s abhorrent act, particularly
since she originally did it, in large part, to avenge her
first-born daughter’s death. Her lover, Aegisthus, is
much weaker than she is, but by the time of The Libation Bearers,
she appears to defer to him, rather than play the strong,
angry wife that she was in Agamemnon. This may be a mistake
that Aeschylus makes, unable to sustain the contrary image
of a strong, manipulative wife. It may also be deliberate,
because Aeschylus wants to balance his powerful portrait of
Clytemnestra at her strongest with Clytemnestra at her weakest,
to show that women who commit such acts are ultimately weaker
than chaste, faithful women rather than stronger. Or perhaps,
he is trying to show how such crimes corrupt. What Aeschylus
seems to show is that crimes of such magnitude are taboo,
not so much because they are evil in the abstract but because
they are damaging to the person who commits them and the society
in which that person acts. They corrupt and corrode the human
spirit, just as acid corrodes metal.
PART FOUR: MODERN INTERPRETATIONS OF
TWO REBELLIOUS WIVES
This is how the Ancient World--myths, Euripides
and Aeschylus (and their audiences)--saw Medea and Clytemnestra.
How did later (and now modern) people see them? Are these
women remembered or forgotten? And is this for the few good
deeds that they did or for their crimes alone? Who is remembered
better and why?
Medea
Medea is frequently more popular than Clytemnestra with modern
historians, as even a cursory search of sources shows. While
Medea appears in her own right, Clytemnestra always appears
in respect to the Oresteia. In Seneca's play, Medea is a force
of nature in her own right (Luck 1999, p.111-13). This is
partly due to the freedom of movement that Medea's character
has with respect to Clytemnestra and partly due to the reputation
of her most famous biographer, Euripides. Euripides’
methods of centering his plays around the foibles and personalities
of his characters, rather than the larger issues and events
that have swept them up in a hurricane of tragedy, are more
popular now than they ever have been, whereas Aeschylus’
more abstract approach has fallen from favour (Hazel 1996,
p.7-8). The Ancient Greeks themselves were divided on the
worth of Euripides’ approach, and before him, that of
Sophocles. The Sophists associated with Socrates, for example,
admired Euripides, even though he was not the first to make
tragedy personal. Sophocles was the first to take a different
approach from Aeschylus, in that his plays turned on the personal
tragedy rather than the cosmic one. However, Euripides took
this a step further to explore the psychology of his characters,
and even further, to explore the psychology of extreme, even
abnormal, characters. Sophocles’ characters were always
noble in their downfall. Euripides’ characters (or so
he was accused) were sordid and impious (Hazel 2000, p.1-2).
Euripides saw more ugliness in the world than Sophocles did,
though it may be argued that Aeschylus’ worldview had
its own share of sordidness. In Aeschylus' plays, the story
of the house of Atreus, for example, encompasses blood feud,
adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, human sacrifice, incest
(implied in both the story of Aegisthus’ birth and the
relationship between Electra and Orestes) the murder of a
husband by his wife, matricide and madness.
Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra, too, represents dike with respect to her husband’s
barbaric act of human sacrifice. Unlike Medea, she does not
escape retribution for her own crimes, though they derive
from as personal and unforgiving a sense of justice as do
Medea's (Ibid, p.67-74). Clytemnestra is Greek and mortal,
and this makes it necessary for her to pay in the same coin
that she gives to her husband. She cannot commit the same
crimes that Medea has and expect to get away with them. For,
unlike Medea, she is a Greek queen not a barbarian demigoddess,
a woman who is a role model for other Greek women. In this
case, she is a bad role model, not a good one like Odysseus'
wife, Penelope. She differs from Medea in several other respects,
even though they commit similar acts and Clytemnestra might
seem to have better reason to react in as extreme a manner
as she does. She is an adulteress, whereas Medea was faithful
to her husband. She kills her husband, whereas Medea does
not touch Jason, only curses him. Medea’s action is
ambiguous—she could be cursing Jason to death, or she
could simply be foretelling his death to hurt him more, to
drive him even to suicide, as Diodorus of Sicily tells it
(Garrison 2000, p.43). Clytemnestra’s act is not ambiguous
at all—she first lures her husband into her trap, then
entangles him in a robe and stabs him. Her meaning and her
actions are very clear, just as she intends them to be. She
never lies about what she did once she has done it, no matter
how much she chooses to justify it afterwards or how much
she covers it up beforehand. Like Medea, she revels publicly
in the boast that she has triumphed over her husband in a
way that he can never revenge. Even her children’s retribution
has more to do with their loss than avenging the murder of
their absent, idolised father, and Clytemnestra’s death
at Orestes’ hands comes about as much because she neglected
her children as because she killed their father. She kills
Agamemnon because she is a good mother. But in killing her
surviving children's father, she seems to forget about being
a good mother and turns away from it, to her own destruction
(Grene 1953, p.25-9).
CONCLUSION
Medea and Clytemnestra are problematical figures
of Greek mythology, both for Ancient and for Modern audiences.
Nowhere are they more problematical than in Euripides' and
Aeschylus' portrayals of them respectively. They were both
strong women who committed terrible acts in mortal struggles
with their husbands. Medea destroyed her husband by murdering
their children together, his fiancée and his future
father-in-law. As a faithful wife in her own way, but also
as a mythical figure, a demigoddess and a barbarian, she escaped
the direct consequences of her actions, just as she did not
murder her husband outright. In Euripides' play, vengeance
is never straightforward and the characters, Medea and Jason
included, create the means for their punishment out of their
own personalities.
Clytemnestra is much more straightforward in her motivations
and actions, as are all of the characters in the Oresteia.
She is an adulteress and a murderer, a passionate but also
neglectful mother. She kills her husband outright, out of
revenge, jealousy, lust, even pride. She then neglects her
children, who destroy her in turn, for her crime is as great
as her husband's and the next generation, having been twisted
by it, must avenge it. Finally, after death, she becomes a
personification of primitive blood vengeance, a ghost that
must be laid before Greek society can rise to the next level
and create a more just society.
Not only did the crimes that these women committed against
their husbands and families disturb and frighten audiences
in Ancient Greece, but they continue to trouble audiences
today. And there are ever-new interpretations of the plays,
such as those Japanese productions of Electra or The Libation
Bearers that put the blame on the children of Clytemnestra,
because they commit matricide and incest (Foley 1998, p.6-7).
Medea and Clytemnestra are not comfortable women, destined
to fade into obscurity like a thousand more virtuous mythical
women. Their actions raise too many eternal questions which
must be answered by each new generation in new ways. As Deborah
Lyons notes in Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient
Greek Myth and Cult, the very crimes that these women committed
have ensured the continuing success of their cults and myths
(Lyons 1996, p.60-5). For Ancient, mythical women like Medea
and Clytemnestra, living sinfully was the best revenge.
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