Agamemnon — Exodos

The voice of Agamemnon cries from inside the palace: he has been struck a mortal blow, and then again, another blow. The chorus breaks into fragments — each elder saying something different, some calling for action, some for caution, all unable to agree on what must be done. The scene is deliberately theatrical: twelve individual old men with no single will, paralysed by the event they have dreaded and not prevented.

The doors open. Clytemnestra stands in a pool of blood over two bodies — her husband and Cassandra beside him. She does not apologise or weep. She gives the most sustained self-justification in Greek tragedy. She planned this, she says, and carried it through. The gods of the underworld helped her; she gives them thanks. She struck three blows: two for the man himself, one as a gift to Zeus below. She is not the adulteress who seized power while her husband was away. She is the mother of Iphigenia, and the blood she has poured out today is the answering blood for the blood he poured out at Aulis. The law of the blood feud has been fulfilled. The curse, she says, has passed through her and is done.

The chorus mourns and accuses her. She replies steadily: you did not mourn for Iphigenia. You did not mourn for the men who died for Menelaus's wife. You condemn me because I am the woman who did the act, when it was men who did the acts that made this necessary. Then Aegisthus enters — strutting, triumphant, claiming the killing as justice for what Atreus did to his father Thyestes. The chorus turns its contempt on him. He threatens the elders. They defy him. Clytemnestra restores order, barely: put away your swords. There is blood enough.