Clytemnestra
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 9 June 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
"Rock star classicist" and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. In these series she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Today Natalie stands up for Clytemnestra, who has been characterised as the worst wife in Greek mythology. This is open to debate: she's certainly a good mother, if a little bit murderous of her husband. But it turns out that Agamemnon probably deserves it. After all he sacrifices one of their daughters to Artemis without a second thought and then turns up at home years later with Cassandra, the future-seeing woman he has 'won' as a prize (also read: trafficked and enslaved) at the Battle of Troy. These actions demonstrate a certain lack of respect for his wife, as well as cruelty of the highest order. Cassandra reads the room, obviously, but nobody listens to her. Clytemnestra has a good legal brain and states her case convincingly. But it's unlikely to end well.
With Professor Edith Hall. Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Today, I am standing up for Clytemnestra. |
| 0:13.4 | Now, I'm not going to lie to you, standing up for Clytemnestra is a bit of a challenge, |
| 0:18.6 | because she's widely regarded as one of the worst wives, if not the worst |
| 0:23.9 | wife in all of Greek myth. And that is saying something. I'm not going to lie to you. For reasons |
| 0:29.1 | which we will come to, although the fact that her husband is still complaining about her from |
| 0:33.8 | the underworld in book 24 of Homer's Odyssey should probably give you an idea. |
| 0:39.0 | So I'm just going to confess up front that I don't think she is the worst wife in Greek |
| 0:45.9 | myth. I think she's a good mother who finds herself in an intolerable situation and becomes |
| 0:53.1 | a bit murderous. Let's go with a bit murderous. |
| 0:57.3 | And I'm so confident of my argument that I thought we would start with the most murderous |
| 1:02.6 | version of her and my favourite version too. And that is Iskilis' play Agamemnon, the first play |
| 1:09.9 | of the Oristea, which is the only complete trilogy, |
| 1:12.5 | which survives to us of Greek tragedies from the 5th century BCE. |
| 1:16.2 | So let's go through the play in some detail, because you know I love to. |
| 1:21.7 | It was first performed in 458 BCE at the Dionysia Festival, the theatre festival to the God Dionysus. |
| 1:28.5 | The play begins with a watchman, seeing a beacon which tells him that Troy, where his master |
| 1:34.1 | Agamemnon, has been away fighting for 10 years, has finally fallen. |
| 1:39.1 | He hastens off to tell the Queen, Clytemnestra, she has been ruling this Greek city state, the city state of |
| 1:46.0 | Argos, since Agamemnon went away. So already we know that there's tension between the world |
| 1:53.2 | Eskilis is depicting and the one his audience lives in. Upper class women in 5th century BC, Athens, were kept cloistered, so they were unlikely |
| 2:04.4 | to have spoken to men they weren't related to at all, probably just close relatives, close-bell relatives, |
... |
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