Well, I think that she did one thing kinda wrong, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Anyway, we’re talking about Clytemnestra and her rather tumultuous marriage to Agamemnon, who I have and will always contend is the worst.

The best place to start is probably with her birth. Clytemnestra is one of the four children Leda, who were all hatched from eggs because Zeus decided to take the form of a swan to get busy with her. Because Zeus had this weird thing of seducing mortal women in the form of farm animals. This, notably, also makes her the sister of Helen of Troy, and her brothers Castor and Polydeuces.

Also, Zeus wasn’t Clytemnestra’s dad wasn’t Zeus, but rather Leda’s actual husband, King Tyndareus of Sparta. Which is not how that works at all, but we’ll just go with it.

Anyway, there are a couple of different versions of how Clytemnestra ended up marrying Agamemnon. The most basic and probably earliest versions have Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus getting exiled to Sparta, where they married Clytemnestra and Helen respectively.

A newer version comes to us courtesy of Euripides, and is a lot bloodier. In this version, Clytemnestra was already married to King Tantalus of Pisa. Agamemnon comes along, murders him and their child, and basically claims Clytemnestra as his wife. This most likely involved him…assaulting her, by the way.

Yeah, not really the most auspicious start to a marriage.

However they wind up together, they do end up popping out quite a few kids. For our purposes, the two most important are Iphigenia and Orestes.

Speaking of Iphigenia, I already talked about what happened to her in more detail in a previous post. Either way, here are the broad strokes: Agamemnon wants to join the Trojan war, but they pissed Artemis off somehow and now there’s no wind to sail their ships. So he lures Iphigenia to be sacrificed by telling her he’s marrying her off to Achilles.

This is a perfectly fine arrangement that very much doesn’t come back to bite him in the ass later on.

So Agamemnon heads off to fight the Trojans, and leaves Clytemnestra to find herself a new man in the form of Aegisthus, her husband’s cousin. Which, good for her, because Agamemnon sucks. Things go along pretty well, at least until Agamemnon comes back from the war, with the captured Trojan princess Cassandra in tow.

Clytemnestra does not take this well. By which I mean she stabs both her husband and Cassandra while they’re in the bath. Cassandra, who had the gift of prophecy, totally saw this coming, by the way, but couldn’t do anything about it because she was cursed by Apollo.

This, by the way, was the thing that I was alluding to at the beginning of the post was her killing Cassandra. She totally didn’t deserve it, since her only crime was being kidnapped by an asshole.

Anyway, Cassandra and Aegisthus both rule Mycenae for a good seven years, or at least until her and Agamemnon’s son Orestes comes back from exile. Goaded by his sister Electra, Orestes kills both his mother and his stepfather in revenge, which kicks off the Athenian legal system, according to Aeschylus.

So the moral here is don’t murder an innocent kidnapping villain, and Agamemnon is the worst.