Aeschylus' Oresteia: The Power of Clytemnestra

Abstract

In 1948 Winnington-Ingram made what is still the most eloquent feminist evaluation of Clytemnestra. He concluded that the Oresteia is based on conflict between the sexes; that Clytemnestra hates Agamemnon for being a man and wants his power; and that in his strong portrait of Clytemnestra and purposely inconclusive trial scene of Eumenides, Aeschylus protests the ‘personal tragedy’ of Athenian women. In 1941, Thomson had claimed the opposite: that the trilogy proves Aeschylus' support for the status quo of economically based male superiority. More recently Jones has interpreted the trilogy as the tragedy of the (largely economic) wastage of the oikos, the House of Atreus, by the sexually deviant Clytemnestra, with Aeschylus favoring the status quo. And in a perceptive literary analysis Vickers concluded that Aeschylus ‘evidently shared the Greek attitude to the lesser sex’ and that his ‘exorcism’ of Clytemnestra in Eumenides is a ‘sustained concentration of moral disapproval rarely equalled in literature.