Clytemnestra

Clytemnestra is Agamemnon's wife, and is the only character to appear in all three plays of the trilogy (in the third she appears as a ghost). In some versions of the Atreus/Agamemnon myth she is a daughter of an Amazon, a legendary race of warrior women, while in others she is the sister of Helen of Troy, the woman Agamemnon and the rest of the Greeks fought a ten-year war to rescue. Either way, she is the embittered, angered mother of Agamemnon's sacrificed daughter. During Agamemnon's ten years of absence, she has nursed a grudge, planned her murderous revenge, and found solace in the arms of Aegisthus, Agamemnon's rival and Thyestes' only surviving son. Thyestes has his own reasons for wanting Agamemnon dead (see "Atreus", above, and "Aegisthus" below). Clytemnestra is strong, fierce, passionate, desperate, and manipulative. She switches back and forth between the loving wife to...