An apparent exception seems at first sight to exist in the cordial reception Clytaemnestra accords to her husband, King Agamemnon, when he returns from the Trojan war.  She calls the day of his return the most joyous of her life, asserts her complete fidelity to him during his long absence, declares she is not ashamed to tell her fond feelings for her spouse in public, and adds that she has wept for him till the gushing fountains of her eyes have been exhausted.  Indeed, she goes so far in her homage that Agamemnon protests and exclaims, “Pamper me not after the fashion of women, nor as though I were a barbaric monarch....  I bid thee reverence me as a man, not a god.”  But ere long we discover (as in the case of Achilles), that all this fine talk of Clytaemnestra is mere verbiage, and worse—­deadly hypocrisy.  In reality she has been living with a paramour, and the genuineness and intensity of her “fond feelings” for her husband may be inferred from the fact that hardly has he returned when she makes a murderous assault on him by throwing an artfully woven circular garment over him, while he is taking a bath, and smiting him till he falls dead.  “And I glory in the deed” she afterwards declares, adding that it “has long since been meditated.”

Agamemnon, for his part, not only brought back with him from Troy a new concubine, Cassandra, and installed her in his home with the usual Greek indifference to the feelings of his legitimate wife, but he really was no better than his murderous wife, since he had been willing to kill her daughter and his own, Iphigenia, to please his brother, curb a storm, and expedite the Trojan war.  In the words of the Chorus,

“Thus he dared to become the sacrificer of his daughter to promote a war undertaken for the avenging of a woman, and as a first offering for the fleet:  and the chieftains, eager for the fight, set at naught her supplications and her cries to her father, and her maiden age.  But after prayer her father bade the ministering priests with all zeal, to lift, like a kid, high above the altar, her who lay prostrate wrapped in her robes, and to put a check upon her beauteous mouth, a voice of curses upon the house, by force of muzzles and strength which allowed no vent to her cry.”

The barbarous sacrifice of an innocent maiden is of course a myth, but it is a myth which doubtless had many counterparts in Greek life.  Aeschylus did not live so very long after Homer, and in his age it was still a favorite pastime of the Greeks to ravage cities, a process of which Aeschylus gives us a vivid picture in a few lines, in his Seven against Thebes: