The Greek Myths, Volume2

by Robert Graves

  5. The story of Clymenus and Harpalyce – there was another Thracian character of the same name, a sort of Atalanta – combines the myth of Cinyras and Smyrna (see 18. h) with that of Tereus and Procne (see 46. a). Unless this is an artificial composition for the theatre, as Clymenus’s unmythical suicide by hanging suggests, he will have tried to regain a title to the throne when his reign ended, by marrying the heiress, technically his daughter, to an interrex and then killing him and taking her himself. Alastor means ‘avenger’, but this vengeance does not appear in the myth; perhaps the original version made Alastor the victim of the human sacrifice.

  112

  AGAMEMNON AND CLYTAEMNESTRA

  SOME say that Agamemnon and Menelaus were of an age to arrest Thyestes at Delphi; others, that when Aegisthus killed Atreus, they were still infants, whom their nurse had the presence of mind to rescue. Snatching them up, one under each arm, she fled with them to Polypheides, the twenty-fourth king of Sicyon, at whose instance they were subsequently entrusted to Oeneus the Aetolian. It is agreed, however, that after they had spent some years at Oeneus’s court, King Tyndareus of Sparta restored their fortunes. Marching against Mycenae, he exacted an oath from Thyestes, who had taken refuge at the altar of Hera, that he would bequeath the sceptre to Agamemnon, as Atreus’s heir, and go into exile, never to return. Thyestes thereupon departed to Cythera, while Aegisthus, fearing Agamemnon’s vengeance, fled to King Cylarabes, son of King Sthenelus the Argive.1

  b. It is said that Zeus gave power to the House of Aeacus, wisdom to the House of Amythaon, but wealth to the House of Atreus. Wealthy indeed it was: the kings of Mycenae, Corinth, Cleonae, Orneiae, Arathyrea, Sicyon, Hyperesia, Gonoessa, Pellene, Aegium, Aegialus, and Helice, all paid tribute to Agamemnon, both on land and sea.2

  c. Agamemnon first made war against Tantalus, King of Pisa, the son of his ugly uncle Broteas, killed him in battle and forcibly married his widow Clytaemnestra, whom Leda had borne to King Tyndareus of Sparta. The Dioscuri, Clytaemnestra’s brothers, thereupon marched on Mycenae; but Agamemnon had already gone as a suppliant to his benefactor Tyndareus, who forgave him and let him keep Clytaemnestra. After the death of the Dioscuri, Menelaus married their sister Helen, and Tyndareus abdicated in his favour.3

  d. Clytaemnestra bore Agamemnon one son, Orestes, and three daughters: Electra, or Laodice; Iphigeneia, or Iphianassa; and Chrysothemis; though some say that Iphigeneia was Clytaemnestra’s niece, the daughter of Theseus and Helen, whom she took pity upon and adopted.4

  e. When Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, abducted Helen and thus provoked the Trojan War, both Agamemnon and Menelaus were absent from home for ten years; but Aegisthus did not join their expedition, preferring to stay behind at Argos and seek revenge on the House of Atreus.5

  f. Now, Nauplius, the husband of Clymene, having failed to obtain requital from Agamemnon and the other Greek leaders for the stoning of his son Palamedes, had sailed away from Troy and coasted around Attica and the Peloponnese, inciting the lonely wives of his enemies to adultery. Aegisthus, therefore, when he heard that Clytaemnestra was among those most eager to be convinced by Nauplius, planned not only to become her lover, but to kill Agamemnon, with her assistance, as soon as the Trojan War ended.6

  g. Hermes, sent to Aegisthus by Omniscient Zeus, warned him to abandon this project, on the ground that when Orestes had grown to manhood, he would be bound to avenge his father. For all his eloquence, however, Hermes failed to deter Aegisthus, who went to Mycenae with rich gifts in his hands, but hatred in his heart. At first, Clytaemnestra rejected his advances, because Agamemnon, apprised of Nauplius’s visit to Mycenae, had instructed his court bard to keep close watch on her and report to him, in writing, the least sign of infidelity. But Aegisthus seized the old minstrel and marooned him without food on a lonely island, where birds of prey were soon picking his bones, Clytaemnestra then yielded to Aegisthus’s embraces, and he celebrated his unhoped-for success with burnt offerings to Aphrodite, and gifts of tapestries and gold to Artemis, who was nursing a grudge against the House of Atreus.7

  h. Clytaemnestra had small cause to love Agamemnon: after killing her former husband Tantalus, and the new-born child at her breast, he had married her by force, and then gone away to a war which promised never to end; he had also sanctioned the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis – and, this she found even harder to bear – was said to be bringing back Priam’s daughter Cassandra, the prophetess, as his wife in all but name. It is true that Cassandra had borne Agamemnon twin sons: Teledamus and Pelops, but he does not seem to have intended any insult to Clytaemnestra. Her informant had been Nauplius’s surviving son Oeax who, in vengeance for his brother’s death, was maliciously provoking her to do murder.8

  i. Clytaemnestra therefore conspired with Aegisthus to kill both Agamemnon and Cassandra. Fearing, however, that they might arrive unexpectedly, she wrote Agamemnon a letter asking him to light a beacon on Mount Ida when Troy fell; and herself arranged for a chain of fires to relay his signal to Argolis by way of Cape Hermaeum on Lemnos, and the mountains of Athos, Macistus, Messapius, Cithaeron, Aegiplanctus, and Arachne. A watchman was also stationed on the roof of the palace at Mycenae: a faithful servant of Agamemnon’s, who spent one whole year, crouched on his elbows like a dog, gazing towards Mount Arachne and filled with gloomy forebodings. At last, one dark night, he saw the distant beacon blaze and ran to wake Clytaemnestra. She celebrated the news with sacrifices of thanksgiving; though, indeed, she would now have liked the siege of Troy to last for ever. Aegisthus thereupon posted one of his own men in a watchtower near the sea, promising him two gold talents for the first news of Agamemnon’s landing.

  j. Hera had rescued Agamemnon from the fierce storm which destroyed many of the returning Greek ships and drove Menelaus to Egypt; and, at last, a fair wind carried him to Nauplia. No sooner had he disembarked, than he bent down to kiss the soil, weeping for joy. Meanwhile the watchman hurried to Mycenae to collect his fee, and Aegisthus chose twenty of the boldest warriors, posted them in ambush inside the palace, ordered a great banquet and then, mounting his chariot, rode down to welcome Agamemnon.9

  k. Clytaemnestra greeted her travel-worn husband with every appearance of delight, unrolled a purple carpet for him, and led him to the bath-house, where slave-girls had prepared a warm bath; but Cassandra remained outside the palace, caught in a prophetic trance, refusing to enter, and crying that she smelt blood, and that the curse of Thyestes was heavy upon the dining-hall. When Agamemnon had washed himself and set one foot out of the bath, eager to partake of the rich banquet now already set on the tables, Clytaemnestra came forward, as if to wrap a towel about him, but instead threw over his head a garment of net, woven by herself, without either neck or sleeve-holes. Entangled in this, like a fish, Agamemnon perished at the hands of Aegisthus, who struck him twice with a two-edged sword.10 He fell back, into the silver-sided bath, where Clytaemnestra avenged her wrongs by beheading him with an axe.11 She then ran out to kill Cassandra with the same weapon, not troubling first to close her husband’s eyelids or mouth; but wiped off on his hair the blood which had splashed her, to signify that he had brought about his own death.12

  l. A fierce battle was now raging in the palace, between Agamemnon’s bodyguard and Aegisthus’s supporters. Warriors were slain like swine for a rich man’s feast, or lay wounded and groaning beside the laden boards in a welter of blood; but Aegisthus won the day. Outside, Cassandra’s head rolled to the ground, and Aegisthus also had the satisfaction of killing her twin sons by Agamemnon; yet he failed to do away with another of Agamemnon’s bastards, by name Halesus, or Haliscus. Halesus contrived to make his escape and, after long wandering in exile, founded the Italian city of Falerii, and taught its inhabitants the Mysteries of Hera, which are still celebrated there in the Argive manner.13

  m. This massacre took place on the thirteenth day of the month Gamelion [January] and, unafraid of divine retribution, Clytaemnestra decreed the thirteenth day a monthl
y festival, celebrating it with dancing and offerings of sheep to her guardian deities. Some applaud her resolution; but others hold that she brought eternal disgrace upon all women, even virtuous ones. Aegisthus, too, gave thanks to the goddess who had assisted him.14

  n. The Spartans claim that Agamemnon is buried at Amyclae, now no more than a small village, where are shown the tomb and statue of Clytaemnestra, also the sanctuary and statue of Cassandra; the inhabitants even believe that he was killed there. But the truth is that Agamemnon’s tomb stands among the ruins of Mycenae, close to those of his charioteer, of his comrades murdered with him by Aegisthus, and of Cassandra’s twins.15

  o. Menelaus was later informed of the crime by Proteus, the prophet of Pharos and, having offered hecatombs to his brother’s ghost, built a cenotaph in his honour beside the River of Egypt. Returning to Sparta, eight years later, he raised a temple to Zeus Agamemnon; there are other such temples at Lapersae in Attica and at Clazomene in Ionia, although Agamemnon never reigned in either of these places.16

  1. Hyginus: Fabula 88; Eusebius: Chronicles i. 175–6, ed. Schoene; Homer: Iliad ii. 107–8 and Odyssey iii. 263; Aeschylus: Agamemnon 529; Pausanias: ii. 18.4; Tzetzes: Chiliades i. 433 ff.

  2. Hesiod, quoted by Suidas sub Alce; Homer: Iliad 108 and 569–80.

  3. Apollodorus: iii. 10. 6 and Epitome ii. 16; Euripides: Iphigeneia in Aulis 1148 ff.

  4. Apollodorus: loc. cit.; Homer: Iliad ix. 145; Duris, quoted by Tzetzes: On Lycophron 183.

  5. Homer: Odyssey iii. 263.

  6. Apollodorus: Epitome vi. 8–9.

  7. Homer: Odyssey i. 35 ff. and iii. 263–75.

  8. Euripides: Iphigeneia in Aulis 1148 ff.; Sophocles: Electra 531; Pausanias: iii. 16.5 and ii. 16.5; Hyginus: Fabula 117.

  9. Hyginus: loc. cit.; Aeschylus: Agamemnon i. ff. and 282 ff.; Euripides: Electra 1076 ff.; Homer: Odyssey iv. 524–37; Pausanias: ii. 16. 5.

  10. Aeschylus: Agamemnon 1220 – 1391 ff., 1521 ff. and Eumenides 631–5; Euripides: Electra 157 and Orestes 26; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 1375; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid xi. 267; Triclinius on Sophocles’s Electra 195; Homer: Odyssey iii. 193 ff. and 303–5; xi. 529–37.

  11. Sophocles: Electra 99; Aeschylus: Agamemnon 1372 ff. and 1535.

  12. Aeschylus: loc. cit.; Sophocles: Electra 445–6.

  13. Homer: Odyssey xi. 400 and 442; Pausanias: ii. 16. 5; Virgil: Aeneid vii. 723; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vii. 695; Ovid: Art of Love iii. 13. 31.

  14. Sophocles: Electra 278–81; Homer: Odyssey iii. 263; xi. 405 and vi. 512 ff.

  15. Pausanias: ii. 16. 5 and iii. 19. 5; Pindar: Pythian Odes i. 32; Homer: Iliad iv. 228.

  16. Homer: Odyssey iv. 512 ff. and 581 ff.; Tzetzes: OnLycophron 112–114 and 1369; Pausanias: vii. 5. 5.

  1. The myth of Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Clytaemnestra, and Orestes has survived in so stylized a dramatic form that its origins are almost obliterated. In tragedy of this sort, the clue is usually provided by the manner of the king’s death: whether he is flung over a clifflike Theseus, burned alive like Heracles, wrecked in a chariot like Oenomaus, devoured by wild horses like Diomedes, drowned in a pool like Tantalus, or killed by lightning like Capaneus. Agamemnon dies in a peculiar manner: with a net thrown over his head, with one foot still in the bath, but the other on the floor, and in the bath-house annexe – that is to say, ‘neither clothed nor unclothed, neither in water nor on dry land, neither in his palace nor outside’ – a situation recalling the midsummer death, in the Mabinogion, of the sacred king Llew Llaw, at the hands of his treacherous wife Blodeuwedd and her lover Gronw. A similar story told by Saxo Grammaticus in his late twelfth-century History of Denmark suggests that Clytaemnestra may also have given Agamemnon an apple to eat, and killed him as he set it to his lips: so that he was ‘neither fasting, nor feasting’ (White Goddess, pp. 308 and 401). Basically, then, this is the familiar myth of the sacred king who dies at midsummer, the goddess who betrays him, the tanist who succeeds him, the son who avenges him. Clytaemnestra’s axe was the Cretan symbol of sovereignty, and the myth has affinities with the murder of Minos, which also took place in a bath. Aegisthus’s mountain beacons, one of which Aeschylus records to have been built of heather (see 18. 3), are the bonfires of the midsummer sacrifice. The goddess in whose honour Agamemnon was sacrificed appears in triad as his ‘daughters’: Electra (‘amber’), Iphigeneia (‘mothering a strong race’), and Chrysothemis (‘golden order’).

  2. This ancient story has been combined with the legend of a dispute between rival dynasties in the Peloponnese. Clytaemnestra was a Spartan royal heiress; and the Spartan’s claim, that their ancestor Tyndareus raised Agamemnon to the throne of Mycenae, suggests that they were victorious in a war against the Mycenaeans for the possession of Amyclae, where Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra were both honoured.

  3. ‘Zeus Agamemnon’, ‘very resolute Zeus’, will have been a divine title borne not only by the Mycenaean kings, but by those of Lapersae and Clazomene; and, presumably, also by the kings of a Danaan or Achaean settlement beside the River of Egypt – not to be confused with the Nile. The River of Egypt is mentioned in Joshua xv. 4 as marking the boundary between Palestine and Egypt; farther up the coast, at Ascalon and near Tyre, there were other Danaan or Achaean settlements (see 69.f.).

  4. The thirteenth day, also observed as a festal day in Rome, where it was called the Ides, had corresponded with the full moon at a time when the calendar month was a simple lunation. It seems that the sacrifice of the king always took place at the full moon. According to the legend, the Greek fleet, returning late in the year from Troy, ran into winter storms; Agamemnon therefore died in January, not in June.

  113

  THE VENGEANCE OF ORESTES

  ORESTES was reared by his loving grand-parents Tyndareus and Leda and, as a boy, accompanied Clytaemnestra and Iphigeneia to Aulis.1 But some say that Clytaemnestra sent him to Phocis, shortly before Agamemnon’s return; and others that on the evening of the murder, Orestes, then ten years of age, was rescued by his noble-hearted nurse Arsinoë, or Laodameia, or Geilissa who, having sent her own son to bed in the royal nursery, let Aegisthus kill him in Orestes’s place.2 Others again say that his sister Electra, aided by her father’s ancient tutor, wrapped him in a robe embroidered with wild beasts, which she herself had woven, and smuggled him out of the city.3

  b. After hiding for a while among the shepherds of the river Tanus, which divides Argolis from Laconia, the tutor made his way with Orestes to the court of Strophius, a firm ally of the House of Atreus, who ruled over Crisa, at the foot of Mount Parnassus.4 This Strophius had married Agamemnon’s sister Astyochea, or Anaxibia, or Cyndragora. At Crisa, Orestes found an adventurous playmate, namely Strophius’s son Pylades, who was somewhat younger than himself, and their friendship was destined to become proverbial.5 From the old tutor he learned with grief that Agamemnon’s body had been flung out of the house and hastily buried by Clytaemnestra, without either libations or myrtle-boughs; and that the people of Mycenae had been forbidden to attend the funeral.6

  c. Aegisthus reigned at Mycenae for seven years, riding in Agamemnon’s chariot, sitting on his throne, wielding his sceptre, wearing his robes, sleeping in his bed, and squandering his riches. Yet despite all these trappings of kingship, he was little more than a slave to Clytaemnestra, the true ruler of Mycenae.7 When drunk, he would leap on Agamemnon’s tomb and pelt the head-stone with rocks, crying: ‘Come, Orestes, come and defend your own!’ The truth was, however, that he lived in abject fear of vengeance, even while surrounded by a trusty foreign bodyguard, never passed a single night in sound sleep, and had offered a handsome reward in gold for Orestes’s assassination.8

  d. Electra had been betrothed to her cousin Castor of Sparta, before his death and demi-deification. Though the leading princes of Greece now contended for her hand, Aegisthus feared that she might bear a son to avenge Agamemnon, and therefore announced that no suitor could be accepted. He would gladly have destroyed Electra, who showed
him implacable hatred, lest she lay secretly with one of the Palace officers and bare him a bastard; but Clytaemnestra, feeling no qualms about her part in Agamemnon’s murder, and scrupulous not to incur the displeasure of the gods, forbade him to do so. She allowed him, however, to marry Electra to a Mycenaean peasant who, being afraid of Orestes and also chaste by nature, never consummated their unequal union.9

  e. Thus, neglected by Clytaemnestra, who had now borne Aegisthus three children, by name Erigone, Aletes, and the second Helen, Electra lived in disgraceful poverty, and was kept under constant close supervision. In the end it was decided that, unless she would accept her fate, as her sister Chrysothemis had done, and refrain from publicly calling Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra ‘murderous adulterers’, she would be banished to some distant city and there confined in a dungeon where the light of the sun never penetrated. Yet Electra despised Chrysothemis for her subservience and disloyalty to their dead father and secretly sent frequent reminders to Orestes of the vengeance required from him.10

  f. Orestes, now grown to manhood, visited the Delphic Oracle, to inquire whether or not he should destroy his father’s murderers. Apollo’s answer, authorized by Zeus, was that if he neglected to avenge Agamemnon he would become an outcast from society, debarred from entering any shrine or temple, and afflicted with a leprosy that ate into his flesh, making it sprout white mould.11 He was recommended to pour libations beside Agamemnon’s tomb, lay a ringlet of his hair upon it and, unaided by any company of spearmen, craftily exact the due punishment from the murderers. At the same time the Pythoness observed that the Erinnyes would not readily forgive a matricide, and therefore, on behalf of Apollo, she gave Orestes a bow of horn, with which to repel their attacks, should they become insupportable. After fulfilling his orders, he must come again to Delphi, where Apollo would protect him.12