Gender Issues in Aeschylus' Oresteia Trilogy

The Oresteia cannot be understood without reference to the curse of the house of Atreus of Argos, which is bound up with the legend of the Trojan war. The curse began when Atreus killed sons of his brother Thyestes, who had seduced Atreus's wife. After a banquet in which Atreus fed Thyestes's children to him, Thyestes laid a curse on Atreus's descendants. Atreus's two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, married two sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen, respectively, and when Helen either eloped with or was abducted by Paris to Troy, Agamemnon, like Menelaus, assembled an army of Greeks and prepared to sail for Troy. But that was made possible only after Agamemnon succumbed to a demand by the goddess Artemis that he offer his daughter Iphigenia as a propitiating sacrifice. That sacrifice accomplished, the Greeks set sail, and spent some 10 years winning the war and reuniting Helen with Menelaus (Olson 171ff; Graves 50ff passim).

The end of the Trojan war and the return of Agamemnon to Argos begins the action of the Oresteia. In the Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, who is also Agamemnon's cousin, murder Agamemnon and his war prize-concubine Cassandra, of the royal house of Troy. In the second play, The Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra's exi

s the homebody, offering Agamemnon fulsome and public praise upon his appearance, fussing at her women to facilitate his grand entry into the palace. In words that drip with irony, she calls for justice to "lead him to a home unlooked for. The rest my care that never sleeps will order justly" (Ag. 21). Olson says that despite her wickedness, "it is impossible not to respect her, not to admire her." He continues: Her principal wile is her femininity. She insists upon that again and again, knowing that as long as she emphasizes that, no one will suspect her, for no one associates a character like hers, or such deeds as she contemplates, with womanhood. In reality she is "masculine-minded," not feminine. There is very great irony in that the watchman, the Chorus, and others faintly and dimly recognize this in her, without in the last understanding the full implications of this. . . . And there is further irony in the fact that the Chorus comes to distrust her report because she is a woman, and because women are gullible (Olson 185; emphasis in original). The murder of Agamemnon is a mother's justice and the act of a woman scorned, and Clytemnestra has contempt for the chorus of old men . Kitto says that it is also the act of an unf