CLASSICAL MYTH OF DANGEROUS WOMEN

Classical myths abound in dangerous women: women who in one way or another bring men to death. Often they are motivated by a passion for revenge and they kill out of rage, or jealousy, or grief. Sometimes the power of their sexuality causes death. Sometimes they kill by accident, out of ignorance or even out of love. But always some extreme emotion drives them on until their victim or victims lie dead. In this chapter we shall be looking in detail at just a few of these dangerous women.

We often get our clearest picture of them from the Athenian tragedies that survive from the fifth century BC. Many hundreds of plays were put on stage in Athens at the festivals of Dionysos, the god of drama, and almost all have been lost. But we still possess thirty-three of them, in many of which we see these women in action – and often very bloody action.

When these plays were staged, tragedy had been in existence for a relatively short while: since about 530, according to the traditional date of its origin. So during the fifth century myths were being dramatized for the very first time, and the plays were turning the characters of mythology for the first time into living, breathing people on stage. Mythical women often become dramatic characters of great power, dominating the action. Often too a tragedy focuses on the woman’s predicament more than on the man’s, dwelling on the pain of women in extreme situations, and on their reactions to that pain. And this is when these mythical women become dangerous.

So let us begin by considering four particularly dangerous women who kill their victims with their own hands: Klytaimnestra, Hecuba, Medea and Prokne. Their aim is to gain revenge on a man who has wronged them, so instead of sitting passively by on the sidelines, which might have been seen as the typical female role, they step decisively into the male role of action. Yet they cannot easily attack using direct violence, because they are physically weaker than the men they see as their enemies. So they use their own skills – inventiveness, persuasion and deceit – to achieve their aims. And deceit should be viewed in no critical spirit, since deception (dolos in the Greek) was seen as a reasonable way to achieve an honourable revenge. We have only to think of the heroic Odysseus of the Odyssey, that arch-deceiver, who uses deceit and violence to end up exactly where he belongs, in his wife’s bed at home in his own palace. These women too use deceit to achieve revenge on their enemies, and the weapons they choose are taken from within their own domestic sphere of influence.

We should be careful not to judge these women in modern terms. Revenge can be viewed as both honourable and heroic. And as we shall see, these women appear to be justified also by the results of the vengeance which they take so decisively.

KLYTAIMNESTRA

We have seen how the great Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led out a huge fighting force of Greeks to recover his eloping sister-in-law Helen, and how he sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia to raise winds to take his fleet to Troy (p. 317). His wife Klytaimnestra never forgave him, and in his absence during the subsequent ten-year-long war she took his enemy Aigisthos as her lover. When Agamemnon at last returned home victorious, together they murdered him.

This story, with its aftermath of revenge killings, was familiar long before the fifth century BC. It occurred first in Homer and was well illustrated in ancient art, but it comes to its most vivid life in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, with the archetypal Klytaimnestra of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the first play in his Oresteia trilogy, dominating all others. Before this production, as far as we can tell, Klytaimnestra and Aigisthos had been seen as joint partners-in-crime in Agamemnon’s murder, with Aigisthos taking the dominant role – exactly as depicted on a famous Attic vase known as the ‘Boston Oresteia Krater’, painted about a dozen years before the Oresteia was produced. In the centre of the picture is Agamemnon, covered in a filmy robe and staggering backwards. Blood is pouring from his chest. Facing him is Aigisthos, with drawn sword; he has struck once and is about to strike again. Behind Aigisthos is Klytaimnestra, with axe in hand, following on in support.

In Aeschylus, however, the situation is entirely different. His Klytaimnestra carries out the murder entirely on her own, while Aigisthos’ part has dwindled into relative insignificance: he has become a coward, a blustering weakling, who appears onstage only at the end of the play. It is Klytaimnestra, the ‘woman with the heart of a man’ (10–11), who has nursed her rage and grief down the long years since Iphigeneia’s death and now kills Agamemnon with a fierce joy, netting him in a robe while he is unarmed and vulnerable during his bath. Aeschylus has made her a powerful and awe-inspiring figure, one needing the help of no man to kill her treacherous husband.

Standing alone at the doors of her palace, she greets Agamemnon on his return from Troy. She pretends to welcome him home, using words that are a masterpiece of double meaning, and by which he is completely taken in. Even when she makes veiled references to their dead daughter, he fails to see below the surface. Iphigeneia is in her thoughts when she says: ‘Our child does not stand here at our side, the child who sealed our pledges, mine and yours, our child who should be here ...’ (877–9). Only at the end of these words does she add their son’s name, ‘Orestes’. And again: ‘For me the gushing fountains of my tears have dried completely up, and left no drop within’ (887–8), which Agememnon understands as tears for his absence. But these were tears, wept long since, for Iphigeneia, which are now replaced by hatred for her daughter’s killer.

‘With such a greeting do I reward him,’ she says. ‘Let ill-will be absent, for many were the evils that I endured before’ (903–5). He thinks she speaks of her loneliness in the long years without him, but once again she is referring to Iphigeneia’s murder. And so she is greeting her husband in the way that he deserves – with death.

She lures him indoors to his destruction, persuading him to walk into the palace over the crimson cloths that her servants lay down for him. ‘Now, my beloved,’ she cries, ‘step down from your chariot. Let not your foot, my lord, sacker of Troy, touch the earth. Servants, what are you waiting for? You have been told to strew the ground where he must walk with tapestries. Let there be spread before the house he never expected to see, where Justice leads him in, a crimson path’ (905–11). And on Klytaimnestra’s command, down flow the tapestries, red as blood, symbol of the blood that Agamemnon shed when he killed Iphigeneia, of all the blood that he shed at Troy, of his own blood about to be shed. Entirely ignorant of the fate his wife plans for him, he walks over the blood-red tapestries into the palace that he believes a safe haven, into Klytaimnestra’s power, and to his death.

Quite alone too she kills him, and with him his Trojan concubine, Kassandra. Once Agamemnon is indoors, Klytaimnestra helps him to his bath, then puts him out of action with woven cloths that she throws over him. (A woman’s primary domestic role was the weaving of the household fabrics, and fabric in a woman’s hand can often become a kind of weapon.) Only then, when he is helpless, does Klytaimnestra attack him, using either an axe or a sword – both weapons are referred to, rather vaguely, in the Greek text, so we may imagine whichever we prefer.

Agamemnon’s death cries are heard from inside the palace. Then the doors open to disclose Klytaimnestra standing over the bodies of her victims, her bloody weapon in her hand. Exultant at having at last achieved her revenge, she describes this long-awaited murder (1381–92):

‘That he might not escape nor ward away his death, like one who catches fish I cast around him a net with no way out, a vast and deadly wealth of robes. I struck him twice, and with two great cries he buckled at the knees and fell. When he was down I struck a third blow, a thank-offering to Zeus, lord of the Underworld, saviour of corpses. Thus he fell and belched out his life, and as he died he poured forth his blood and spattered me with a dark and crimson rain, and I rejoiced as the sown corn rejoices, drenched with god-given showers when buds break forth in Spring.’

So Agamemnon ends with Iphigeneia avenged. In Libation Bearers, the second play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, Klytaimnestra herself is murdered by her son Orestes in revenge for Agamemnon’s death (p. 441). In the third play, Eumenides, Orestes is tried for matricide. The jury’s votes turn out to be equal, which implies a state of balance and equal justification/condemnation for both his and Klytaimnestra’s actions. It is only when Athene gives the casting vote in Orestes’ favour, on the grounds that murder of a man is a more serious matter than murder of a woman, that he is acquitted and the cycle of bloodshed comes to an end. The date of Aeschylus’s Oresteia was 458 BC, and as far as we can tell this was the first time that this myth had been dramatized, and so the first time also that this avenging Klytaimnestra had, as it were, appeared in the flesh. Certainly, out of all the plays left to us, Aeschylus’s Klytaimnestra is the earliest of these dangerous women to dominate the stage, as she steps out and boldly takes action against the man who has wronged her. Since then there have been many such. But when the palace doors open in the Agamemnon, and we see her standing over her victims, her bloody weapon in her hand, she is also in a sense standing right at the head of the western tradition of theatre, as the very first woman of her kind.

HECUBA

Klytaimnestra takes a bloody revenge for the death of a child, and so, in Euripides’ Hecuba, does Hecuba. She was once queen of Troy, the wife of old King Priam, but when the play opens, Troy has fallen to the Greeks, the Trojan men have all been slaughtered, and the Trojan women are being carried off as slaves for the victors. The setting is the Greek encampment on the coast of Thrace, and here Hecuba spends her days lamenting, worn down with grief for the death of her husband, Priam, and for the deaths of her sons, killed in battle.

Yet more grief is still to come for her. Now another death takes place: her daughter Polyxena is sacrificed by the Greeks to appease the soul of the dead Achilles. Yet in all this sorrow Hecuba has one solace: she has one son still alive – or so she thinks. At some time during the war she sent her youngest son, Polydoros, to live with Polymestor, the king of Thrace, and now she believes him still safe and well. She is wrong, for Polymestor has betrayed her trust and has murdered the boy for the sake of the gold that he brought with him. Hecuba learns this bitter truth soon after Polyxena’s sacrifice, when Polydoros’s body is found washed up by the sea.

Now Hecuba is changed from a figure of helpless grief and despair to one of raging, avenging fury. When Polymestor visits the Greek camp, she lures him and his two little sons into her tent with the bait that she knows will be most effective: she promises him more gold. With no hesitation he steps into her trap, and once he is inside the tent, she and her women overcome him by their sheer numbers. As Hecuba herself says: ‘Women in a mass are terrible, and with the aid of deception (dolos) they are hard to combat’ (884). They hold Polymestor down, then take his sword and kill his sons, and they gouge out his eyes with their brooch pins. So for punishment, instead of having a quick and easy death, he is left alive to suffer just what his treachery has cost him.

This is a savage revenge indeed, but Euripides’ Hecuba is a true descendant of the Hecuba of Homer some three hundred years earlier. In the Iliad (24.212–14), when Achilles has killed her son Hektor, she says: ‘I wish I could set my teeth in the middle of his liver and eat it. That would be vengeance for what he did to my son.’

After his blinding, Polymestor predicts Hecuba’s strange end: that on the ship carrying her to Greece she will be transformed into a bitch with eyes of fire, and will plunge into the sea to her death. The nearby headland will be called ‘Bitch’s Grave’, kunos sema (Kynossema, in the Thracian Chersonese), and will act as a landmark for future sailors. It is difficult to interpret this, but we know that fiery eyes were a sign of a supernatural being, and that the Furies were often likened to dogs, hunting down their prey – and certainly Hecuba acted like a Fury in human form, avenging a desperate wrong. This metamorphosis now offers her an escape from the slavery she loathed, and it seems also to grant her a kind of immortality. Kynossema is said still to re-echo with her mournful howling.

MEDEA

Klytaimnestra and Hecuba both avenge the death of a child. In the Medea of Euripides, Medea avenges her husband Jason’s infidelity when he marries another woman, and she takes the most extreme revenge possible, by killing the children she has borne him.

Jason should have known better than to cross her so blatantly, for he was well aware that he was married to a woman of dangerous power. With her magical skills she had helped him defeat the fire-breathing bulls and win the Golden Fleece. After this he carried her off in the Argo to be his wife, and she very soon showed herself to be a woman who kills. As they were sailing away, hotly pursued by her father Aietes, she murdered her little brother, Apsyrtos, then dismembered him and scattered his fragmented body over the sea. Aietes, who loved his son, stopped to pick up the sad remains to give them proper burial, and Medea and Jason escaped.

Then when the Argo returned to Iolkos, she arranged the death of Jason’s enemy, King Pelias. She used her witchcraft to rejuvenate an old ram by cutting it up and boiling it in a cauldron with magic herbs (p. 156). When it jumped out as a lamb, Pelias’s daughters were so impressed by Medea’s skill that they were persuaded to try the same spell on their ageing father. So Pelias too was killed and chopped up and boiled, but this time Medea left out the appropriate herbs – and that was the end of him. ‘And what his daughters received was not even enough to bury,’ says Pausanias tersely. Jason and Medea fled from Iolkos and took refuge with Kreon, the king of Corinth.

Corinth is the scene of Euripides’ play. Some years have passed and Medea has had two sons by Jason, but, as the Nurse says in the Prologue, ‘Now all is hostility, and love has turned sick’, because now Jason has deserted Medea and has married the daughter of Kreon, the king. The play centres on Medea’s revenge. Savage with jealousy and rage, she at first plans to murder all three of the people who have wronged her – Jason, Kreon and the new bride. But her final revenge is more terrible than this. Certainly she kills Kreon and the new bride, but she also kills the children she has had by Jason, and leaves him alive to suffer forever the dreadful results of having betrayed her.

To achieve her vengeance, she hides her rage and pretends forgiveness for Jason and friendship for his new bride. She will prove her goodwill, she says, by sending beautiful gifts to the girl. Jason is completely deceived by Medea’s role of repentant wife. Her weapon is poison: this she spreads on a beautiful coronet and robe (so again a woven fabric comes into play) and sends them to her victim. The girl takes the deadly gifts with delight. Quite unsuspecting, she puts on her new adornments. At first she is entranced by her appearance, but soon the poison turns to flame, and robe and coronet consume her with a fierce fire. ‘And the flesh dropped from her bones like resin from a pine torch,’ says the servant who reports her death.

Then Kreon, in an agony of grief, takes his daughter’s body in his arms, crying, ‘I wish I might die with you, child.’ And die he does. When he has had his fill of lamentation, he tries to lay her corpse down and stand up, but finds that he is stuck fast to the robe ‘as ivy clings to laurel shoots’. In struggling to free himself, he too is killed, the frail flesh ripped from his bones.

Medea does not stop here: she goes on to kill her own two sons as well – and this deliberate murder of the children seems to have been an innovation to the legend made by Euripides himself. In earlier versions too the children died, but for other reasons. In one version, Medea unintentionally killed them while she was trying to make them immortal. In another version, the people of Corinth killed them. In yet another, Kreon’s family killed them in revenge after Medea had killed Kreon. But Euripides makes Medea herself choose to murder them as the most potent part of her revenge, because this is the greatest pain that she can possibly inflict on her treacherous husband.

Even though his Medea commits such a horrendous deed, Euripides creates in her a character with whom it is easy to sympathize, a woman very definitely wronged by a selfish, self-satisfied and insensitive Jason. He also puts into her mouth a long and justly famous monologue, in which she agonizes as to her right course of action, and whether she can really bring herself to kill her own sons (1021–80). Her decision sways this way and that.

She begins by lamenting that now she must be parted from her children: she must go into exile, while they, unknowing, are to die. All for nothing she bore them and brought them up, and now she will have no joy of them; she will never see them married, and they will never look after her when she is old or give her burial when she dies. (These are the kind of things so often said by a mother over a dead child.) Her sons smile at her, and ‘What shall I do?’ she cries. And then (in paraphrase) ‘No, I can’t do it. Farewell, my plans. Why should I hurt their father by hurting myself twice as much?’

Then she hardens her resolve once again, only to be overcome a second time by love and pity. Finally, despite her anguish, her grim purpose triumphs over her deepest maternal feelings, and the decision is taken for death: ‘And yet I have no choice. Now the princess is already dying by her gifts. I must kill my sons before my enemies do so. I have to travel the cruellest of roads, and send these children on a crueller road still.’

Yet when the time has come for the boys to die, Medea’s last words before she kills them show that, by gaining the ultimate revenge on Jason, she is hurting herself quite as much. They also strangely show the murder to be that of a loving mother. Kreon and the princess are dead, so the children are now certain to die too, since the Corinthians will insist on revenge. Their kindest death will be by the hand of the mother who bore them (1236–50):

‘My course of action is clear: to kill my children with all speed and then leave this land; not delay and give my children over to be killed by another and less loving hand. They are bound to die in any case, and since they must, then I shall kill them, I who bore them. Come, my heart, steel yourself. Why do I put off doing the terrible deed that must now be done? Come, wretched hand, take the sword, take it; go forward to the point where life turns into grief. No cowardice, no memories of your children, how dear they were, how your body gave them birth. For this one brief day forget your children – and then mourn them. For even though you kill them, yet they were dear.’

At the end of the play Medea escapes in a chariot drawn by winged serpents, sent to her by her grandfather Helios, the Sun-god, and she is carried off to safety in Athens (where, the later myth tells us, she married King Aigeus). She appears suddenly, high in the air above the stage, on the divine plane where normally only the gods appear. This dragon-chariot was also Euripides’ own innovation and must have been a tremendously effective coup de théâtre. Vengeance accomplished, at whatever cost to herself, Medea gloats over the broken and grieving Jason down below. ‘You don’t know yet what grief is,’ she says to him, ‘wait till you’re old.’

Thus Medea ends up in triumph over the man who wronged her, and the arrival of the chariot suggests divine approval for what she has done. Medea has been presented in heroic terms throughout, and she has avenged herself on her enemy, Jason, even at the most extreme cost to herself, the deaths of her own children. So it seems that the Sun-chariot comes as a reward for her heroic revenge; for, in a sense, her self-sacrifice.

But her self has been sacrificed in another sense too, for the Medea who appears high in her chariot seems now to have become something more than human, untouched and untouchable by human hands and by human emotions. Jean Anouilh, in his 1946 version of Medea, has Medea commit suicide in the flames of her sons’ funeral pyre after she has murdered them. In Euripides too, although Medea stands in triumph on her dragon-chariot, her dehumanization makes the ending a kind of death.



PROKNE

Prokne was the daughter of Pandion, the king of Athens, and was married to Tereus, the king of Thrace. Like Medea, she killed her own son to take vengeance on her husband, and her horrific act was famously dramatized in Sophocles’ tragedy Tereus. This is now lost, apart from fragments, but we possess an ancient summary of the play, and Ovid gives a moving account of the myth in his Metamorphoses (6.424–674) which must owe much to the earlier Greek version, so the story can be easily pieced together.

Prokne and Tereus had a son, Itys. Nevertheless, as the years passed, Prokne grew lonely, so she asked Tereus to go to Athens and fetch her sister, Philomela, to visit her. He did so, but as soon as he saw Philomela’s beauty, he was inflamed with lust and planned to make her his own. With no idea of what lay in store for her, she pleaded with her father to be allowed to visit her dear sister, and Pandion agreed.

They set off, and on the journey Tereus raped her. When they arrived in Thrace he imprisoned her, then to stop her telling of what he had done, he cut out her tongue. Leaving her well guarded, he went home to his wife and told her that her sister was dead. Prokne was deeply grieved. Yet tongueless though Philomela might be, this did not stop her from telling her story: like all women she was skilled in the art of weaving, and now she wove a tapestry (fabric again) telling what she had suffered. When at last it was complete, she sent it by a friendly servant to her sister.

Prokne deciphered the harrowing tale and went at once to fetch Philomela, smuggling her back into the palace. Then she set her mind on revenge. She killed her little son Itys – presumably her aim, as with Medea, was to leave her husband to suffer for the rest of his life with no son and no hope, rather than give him a quick death. Then the sisters cut up the little boy’s body and cooked his flesh. Prokne served it to Tereus, and he ate, and afterwards, replete, he asked her where Itys was. She told him. At once he leapt up to attack his son’s murderers, but at this moment the gods intervened and turned all three of them into birds.

Tereus became a hoopoe (a royal, crested bird), continually uttering the question he had asked his wife just before his metamorphosis, ‘Pou?’, ‘Pou?’ (‘Where?’, ‘Where?’). Philomela, having no tongue, became a swallow, who merely twitters inarticulately. Prokne was turned into a nightingale, forever singing her son’s name in mourning, ‘Itu!, Itu!’ (The Roman poets, oddly, reversed the fates of the two women, with Prokne becoming the swallow and Philomela the nightingale. This is the version most often adopted in post-classical treatments, so that ‘Philomel’ has become a common poetic epithet for the nightingale.)

We cannot say exactly how Sophocles’ play presented Prokne, but we know that she and Philomela were the heroine sponsors of the Pandionid tribe, roughly one-tenth of the citizens of Athens. The women were held in high regard throughout the city and were honoured for their resolute reaction to cruelty and oppression, so we must assume that Tereus reflected such a spirit. Once again, as with Medea, we may imagine the dramatized Prokne as valiantly destroying the dearest thing she had, her own son, so as to deal her enemy the greatest harm.

Thus, even though Sophocles’ Tereus has been lost, we can still define the powerful story, which was told and retold by later writers, inspiring creative artists down to this day. And the nightingale still laments – as in the gloriously lyrical words of Swinburne in his Itylus, where he speaks of ‘The woven web that was plain to follow / The small slain body, the flower-like face’, and memorably depicts the nightingale as bird of mourning, calling to her sister:

Sister, my sister, O fleet sweet swallow,
Thy way is long to the sun and the south;
But I, fulfilled of my heart’s desire,
Shedding my song upon height, upon hollow,
From tawny body and sweet small mouth
Feed the heart of the night with fire...

(how better could one define the nightingale?) and she ends:

… The hands that cling and the feet that follow,
The voice of the child’s blood crying yet,
Who hath remembered me? Who hath forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget
.

ELEKTRA

Before we move on from the women who kill for revenge, we should include Elektra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Klytaimnestra and the sister of Orestes. Even though she committed no murder herself, she supported her brother and urged him on, when he returned to Mycenae to avenge their father’s death. She plays no part in early versions of the myth, and although she is mentioned by the lyric poets, it is in fifth-century tragedy that she comes into her own and plays this central role in Orestes’ vengeance.

Her first appearance is in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers (458 BC), a play named after the Chorus who come with Elektra to offer libations at the tomb of Agamemnon. Here at the tomb she is reunited with Orestes, and brother and sister together invoke Agamemnon’s ghost to support the coming vengeance, but Elektra herself plays no further part in the murders. The focus here is mainly on Orestes, and it is he alone (though supported by the presence of his friend Pylades) who kills first Aigisthos, and then Klytaimnestra.

In the Elektra of Euripides, Elektra’s part in the vengeance has been developed. In this play she has been married off to a poor farmer to ensure that she will bear no son with a claim to the throne, but she is still a virgin, since her husband, respecting her noble birth, has refused to take advantage of her. She is mad for revenge on her father’s killers, while Orestes is weak and indecisive, and although he confidently kills Aigisthos, he is altogether unhappy about killing his mother. Elektra is the dominant figure, and it is she who plans how to kill Klytaimnestra, then drives Orestes on to do so, even grasping the sword with him when his own nerve fails at the crucial moment of murder. Afterwards she is as full of remorse as before she was full of desire for revenge.

It is arguably Sophocles’ Elektra that presents for us the quintessential Elektra. The main focus of the play is Elektra herself, steadfast and enduring, passionately grieving her father’s murder and passionately set on revenge. At the time of Agamemnon’s death she rescued the young Orestes from the murderers, who would have killed him too if they had had the chance. She sent him to be brought up in safety at the court of Strophios, the king of Phokis. Now when the play opens, many years later, she is longing for him to return, and sings:

‘Never shall I cease my dirges and painful laments as long as I look on the bright rays of the stars and on this light of day. No, like the nightingale, slayer of her young, I will cry aloud, for all to hear, sorrows without end before my father’s doors. O house of Hades and Persephone, Hermes of the Underworld and hallowed Curse, and Furies, holy daughters of the gods, who look upon all those who die unjustly and those who have their marriage-beds defiled: come, help me, avenge my father’s murder and send my brother home.’ (103–18).

And again (164–86): ‘On and on without end I wait for him, living my sad life forever without a child, without a husband, drowned in tears, bearing this fate in which my sorrow finds no end … For me the best part of my life has already passed away in hopelessness, and I have no strength left.’

Yet unknown to Elektra, Orestes has already returned, coming back to Mycenae with his friend Pylades, the son of Strophios, and with the old tutor who brought him up. Obedient to the command of Apollo, he has his plan of vengeance worked out: the old tutor will announce Orestes’ death in a chariot race at the Pythian Games, while he himself and Pylades will arrive carrying a funeral urn supposedly containing Orestes’ ashes. This will have the dual effect of gaining them entrance to the palace and of lowering Klytaimnestra’s guard. (Aigisthos, at this point, is temporarily away from home.)

The plan works perfectly. First the tutor vividly describes Orestes’ horrific death, thrown from his chariot and mangled in the traces. Klytaimnestra, after a momentary pang, is overcome with triumphant relief that now her son, whose vengeance she feared, is dead, and she takes the old man into the palace as her honoured guest. Elektra is heartbroken. And who will avenge her father now? She turns to her sister Chrysothemis for help in killing Aigisthos, but Chrysothemis thinks this a crazy plan. Of the two girls, she is the prudent daughter, too fond of the material advantages in being a princess of Mycenae to risk losing them by any display of active hostility. ‘I know this much,’ she says to Elektra (332–40), ‘I too am grieved at our situation, so much so that if I could find the strength I would show them what I think of them. But as it is, it seems best to me to lower my sails in time of trouble ... everything.’

So it is no surprise that she denounces Elektra’s plan as folly, refusing to dare anything that might put her comfortable life at risk. Elektra now resolves to kill Aigisthos alone and unaided, but it does not come to this. Orestes and Pylades come upon her as they arrive to deliver the funeral urn, and all thoughts of vengeance are flown as she takes the urn in her hands and laments over what she believes to be her dear brother’s ashes. Now she wants only to die (1126–70):

‘O last memorial of the life of Orestes, the dearest of men to me, how far from the hopes with which I sent you forth do I receive you home! For now you are nothing carried in my hands, but I sent you off from home, child, radiant. I wish that before this I had died, before I stole you with these hands and sent you to a foreign land, saving you from murder, so that on that very day you would have lain there dead, and had your share in our father’s grave. But now, far from home, an exile in another land, you died unhappily without your sister near. And I, to my grief, did not wash or dress you with the hands that loved you, nor lift you as was right, a weight of sorrow, from the blazing pyre. No, sadly you had your rites from alien hands, and so are come to us, a little weight inside a little urn.

‘All sorrow now for my care of you long ago, gone for nothing; I gave it you often with labour of love. For you were never more dear to your mother than you were to me, and I was your nurse, and not the servants, and always you called me sister. Now with your death, in a single day all this is ended; like a hurricane you have gone and swept it all away. Our father is gone; I am dead because of you; you yourself are dead and gone. Our enemies are mocking us, and our mother, who is no mother, is mad with joy – she of whom you often sent me secret messages, that you would come yourself as an avenger. But this our evil fortune, yours and mine, has torn away, and sent you on to me as you are now, no more the form I loved, but dust and empty shadow.

‘What sorrow! O body pitiable! You who were sent, to my grief, on a dreadful journey, my dear love, how you have ended me! Yes, ended me, dearest brother! Therefore receive me to this little room of yours, nothing to nothing, that with you below I may live for all the time to come. For when you were on earth I shared all with you equally, so now I long to die and share your grave. For I see that the dead no longer suffer pain.’

Orestes has taken Elektra, clad in rough clothes, for a servant, and it is only when he hears these words of love and grief that he realizes this must be the beloved sister who brought him up. He gently makes himself known to her, and Elektra’s move from despair to joy, when at last she believes that the man standing beside her is in fact the living Orestes himself, gives us one of the most moving recognition scenes in extant Greek tragedy.

Orestes goes into the palace to kill Klytaimnestra, while Elektra stands at the doors to keep watch for Aigisthos. At the first death-cry of her mother she shouts: ‘Strike, if you have the strength, a second blow.’ Orestes strikes again, and Klytaimnestra gives a last cry. There is no time to linger over her death, for now Elektra sees Aigisthos approaching. She tricks him into believing that Orestes, his enemy, is indeed dead, and that his corpse is within the palace. ‘Can I see the body with my own eyes?’ asks Aigisthos.
‘Indeed you can,’ replies Elektra, ‘though I don’t envy you the sight.’

At the command of Aigisthos, the doors are opened and Orestes and Pylades bring out the covered body of Klytaimnestra. ‘Zeus,’ cries Aigisthos piously (and truthfully), ‘what I see here must be someone brought down by the gods’ displeasure.’
‘Take the coverings off the face,’ he commands; and then, eager to share this triumphant moment with his wife: ‘Call Klytaimnestra!’
‘No need,’ says Orestes. ‘She’s nearby.’

And then (in what has been called ‘the most glorious moment of pure theatre in all Greek tragedy’) Aigisthos lifts the covers and recognizes the body beneath. He starts back in horror, realizing what fate now awaits him. Orestes drives him indoors to meet his death, and the play ends with the Chorus rejoicing that Elektra has come, at long last and after much suffering, to freedom and fulfilment.

Elektra, like Antigone, is one of the great female figures of Greek myth and Greek tragedy. She has been an inspiration to a great many later artists – perhaps most notably to Richard Strauss in his opera Elektra, which has as its libretto a play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, based on Sophocles’ Elektra. Sophocles’ play ends with Elektra’s joy as she is reunited with her dear brother and triumphs over her enemies. Hofmannsthal develops that joy, so that Elektra, uplifted by victory, dances in triumph until she collapses and dies. (An aftermath to vengeance very different from the mythical one, where Elektra married Pylades and had two sons by him, Medon and Strophios.)

Moreover modern psychology has given the name ‘Elektra complex’ to a girl’s fixation on her father and jealousy of her mother, the counterpart of Freud’s Oedipus complex. There is even a hint of the Elektra complex in ancient tragedy for, in Euripides’ Elektra, Klytaimnestra says to Elektra (1102–4): ‘My child, love for your father is in your nature. This happens sometimes. Some children belong to their fathers, while others love their mothers more.’

Other things apart from revenge can be dangerous. There is also, for instance, the power of sex: sex in its many aspects can be a killer. The most obvious example from mythology is Helen – wife of Menelaos, king of Sparta – who was not only the most beautiful woman who ever lived, but also the archetypal sexually dangerous woman. Helen’s beauty brought death to thousands of men, after Aphrodite offered her love as a bribe to Paris when he judged the beauty contest between the three squabbling goddesses. Helen’s love seemed to him more desirable than all the imperial power offered by Hera, or the military victories offered by Athene, so he chose Aphrodite as the loveliest of the three, then claimed his prize, carrying Helen off to Troy. Menelaos wanted her back, so he and his brother Agamemnon sailed out with a huge fighting force of about 100,000 Greeks to recapture her. The resulting war lasted ten long years, and many Greeks and Trojans died because of Helen.

Homer is indulgent towards Helen in the Iliad, where even as the long war drags on, the Trojan elders on the walls of Troy say of her: ‘No one could blame the Trojans and well-greaved Achaians if, for so long a time, they suffer pain and hardship over a woman like this. She looks terribly like the immortal goddesses (3.156–8).’ Later writers were not so kind, and she was often bitterly blamed for setting the Trojan War in motion by her infidelity and for causing the deaths of so many men. Hostility to Helen thus runs through much of what we have left of fifth-century tragedy, such as Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, where the chorus sing of Helen stepping lightly through the gates of Troy, bringing to the Trojans her dowry, death (403–8). When they welcomed her as Paris’s bride, they little realized that they were bringing into their midst a lion cub, sweet and loving at first, who as time passed would reveal its true nature and repay those who cherished it with blood and death (717–49). Helen, says Aeschylus, was suitably named, for ‘hel’ in Greek means ‘destroyer’, and Helen did indeed bring death and destruction to men, to ships, to cities (681–98).

At the other extreme from Helen are the women who rejected sex, like the virgin huntress Atalanta. Her father abandoned her in the wilds when she was born because he wanted only male children, and she survived only because a she-bear heard her crying and suckled her until some hunters found her. They adopted her and brought her up, and when she grew to womanhood she too became an expert hunter and was interested only in manly pursuits. She took part in the Kalydonian Boarhunt, where she shot the boar and drew first blood, and she famously wrestled against Peleus, and won, at the funeral games of Pelias, king of Iolkos. She had no desire for marriage: many men wished to wed her, but she would have none of it. Confident in the speed of her feet, she swore that she would never marry unless her husband could first beat her in a foot race. Suitors might run against her, but only on the understanding that if they lost, they would die.

In spite of this threatening fate, many men were moved by her beauty to risk their lives. And they were given every chance: they had a head start and ran naked, while Atalanta ran fully clothed and armed. But always she caught up with them before they reached the finishing line and speared them as they ran. Thus many men died for love – until one final suitor tried his luck. This was Hippomenes (sometimes called Melanion), who unlike Atalanta’s other suitors had the wit to invoke Aphrodite’s aid on his behalf. The goddess gave him three golden apples, so he began his contest with his would-be bride, armed with the means of her defeat. Three times he threw down an apple as they raced, and three times she lost precious ground as she ran aside to pick it up. The third time Aphrodite intervened to make the golden apple heavier, and with a final burst of speed the joyful Hippomenes passed the winning post.

And so he married his love, who in the end seems to have happily given up her freedom. The story goes that one day the couple, overcome by passion, made love in a sacred precinct, and because of this sacrilege were transformed into lions (some said into the lions that drew the goddess Kybele’s chariot). So we may assume that Atalanta had at last found joy in sex after rejecting it for so long.

In contrast to this, the Amazons (no chapter on ‘dangerous women’ can ignore these female warriors) shunned as far as possible the entire male sex, and for life. Their home was rather vaguely located to the east or north-east of Greece, at the outer reaches of the known world, and there they lived resolutely apart from men. They looked on sex simply as a means of procreation, so they would copulate occasionally with males from neighbouring tribes, but naturally they reared only the female infants born to them.

The Amazons’ name was thought to mean ‘breastless’ (maza, ‘breast’), and was said to derive from their custom of amputating the right breast to facilitate their use of weapons during battle (the left breast was needed to suckle their daughters). But there is no trace of this physical singularity in ancient art, where Amazons are a popular subject from the seventh century BC onwards, both in vase-painting and sculpture, and are often depicted with their (intact) right breast exposed. They are usually shown in full combat, fighting with spears and bows, and sometimes axes. Several of the great heroes – Herakles, Bellerophon, Theseus – were thought to have battled successfully against the massed tribes of Amazons, and the conflicts between these warrior-women and victorious Greeks were generally seen as symbolizing the triumph of Greek civilization over the forces of barbarism.

Finally, there are several Greek myths, similar to the biblical tale of Potiphar’s wife, that tell the story of an older, married woman who sets out to seduce a young and unmarried man. When he rejects her, which he always does, she wants revenge, so she accuses him to her husband of rape, or attempted rape. The husband tries to kill the young man (and usually fails) and the woman comes to a bad end.

For instance Stheneboia, the wife of Proitos, king of Tiryns, tried to seduce the young hero Bellerophon. When he rejected her, she accused him to her husband, and Proitos sent him off to his father-in-law Iobates, king of Lycia, with a sealed message demanding death. Iobates set Bellerophon fearful tasks to accomplish, which should have killed him – but he completed them all triumphantly, and Iobates rewarded him with lands and riches and the hand of his own daughter in marriage. Bellerophon then went back to Tiryns to take vengeance on Stheneboia for her lies. He persuaded her to mount the winged horse Pegasos with him, then flew out high over the sea and flung her down to her death.

A similar story is told of Astydameia, the wife of Akastos, king of Iolkos. Her victim was the hero Peleus (who later married the sea-goddess Thetis and became father of the great Achilles). When Akastos heard the false tale of attempted rape, he was unwilling to kill Peleus directly, so he took him hunting on Mount Pelion, that haunt of wild Centaurs, and during the night, while Peleus was asleep, he stole his sword and hid it in a pile of cow dung. He then left him on the mountain, alone and defenceless, hoping that either wild beasts or the ferocious Centaurs would kill him.

His hope was almost fulfilled, for the Centaurs gathered to attack Peleus, but just in time the wise and kind Centaur Cheiron appeared and gave him back his sword. So Peleus escaped, and in due course he returned to Iolkos with an armed force to take his revenge. He sacked the city, then killed Astydameia, cut her in two, and marched his army into Iolkos between the severed halves of her corpse.

PHAIDRA

The same type of story was told of Phaidra, wife of the great Theseus, king of Athens. Phaidra was just such a shameless woman as Stheneboia and Astydameia, and when she fell in love with her stepson Hippolytos she tried – and failed – to seduce him. Wanting revenge for her rejection, she lied to Theseus that Hippolytos had tried to rape her, and Theseus cursed his son and called on his father Poseidon to kill him. The god sent a huge bull from the sea, which stampeded Hippolytos’s terrified horses. His chariot crashed and he was dragged to his death, tangled in the reins. (According to one interpretation, his name means ‘torn apart by horses’.) Phaidra, her treachery exposed, committed suicide.

This story was the theme of Euripides’ lost tragedy Hippolytos, his first version of the legend for the stage. We have only fragments of this play left, but he also wrote a second Hippolytos which we possess in its entirety, and this became the basis for Racine’s great tragedy Phèdre and many later adaptations. In this second version, the presentation of Phaidra is rather different. Yes, she is in love with Hippolytos, but quite against her will: the love has been forced on her by Aphrodite, who is angry because of the chaste Hippolytos’s neglect of her and his exclusive worship of the virgin huntress Artemis. Aphrodite herself explains this at the beginning of the play and outlines her plan for the young man’s destruction. Theseus will curse his son, and Hippolytos will be killed. ‘And Phaidra, although she will keep her honour, yet she will die,’ adds the goddess (47–50). ‘For I do not care for her suffering as much as having my enemies pay a penalty that satisfies me.’

Phaidra’s reaction to feeling what she knows is a truly shameful love is entirely virtuous (392–401):

‘When love wounded me, I tried to find the best way of bearing it. I began by keeping quiet and concealing this disease … Secondly I determined to bear the madness decently and conquer it with self-discipline. And third, when I was failing to master desire by these means, I decided to die.’

And so she has been starving herself, preferring death to the dishonour of yielding to her passion. Unfortunately she is not allowed to waste away in silence, because her nurse worms out of her the secret of her obvious illness and is fatally swift to interfere. She tries to convince Phaidra to give in to all-powerful Love (443–50):

‘The tide of Aphrodite in full flood cannot be borne. To the man who yields to her, she comes gently, but she seizes the man who is proud and arrogant, I tell you, and then she tortures him. Aphrodite roams through the air and is in the swell of the sea. Everything is generated from her, for she is the one who sows the seed of desire, from which all of us on earth are born.’

‘What you need,’ declares the nurse roundly, ‘is not fine speaking, but the man’, and she goes indoors to approach Hippolytos on her mistress’s behalf, despite Phaidra’s pleas that she do nothing of the kind.

Hippolytos is appalled. Phaidra, listening at the door, hears his horrified reaction as he curses and abuses the nurse, calling her ‘whore’s matchmaker’ and ‘betrayer of her master’s bed’, following this with bitter condemnation of the entire female sex. ‘Zeus,’ he begins (616–27),

‘why did you create and put on earth with men so vile and worthless a thing as woman? If you wanted to propagate the human race, you didn’t have to do it through women. Better that men should buy children from you, paying at your temples in gold or iron or bronze, each man what he could afford. Then they could live in freedom in their own homes, without women. Women are a great curse to men.’

Now that her shameful secret is out, Phaidra resolves there and then that the only thing left to her is to die. She hangs herself from the rafters. But to defend her children against a disgrace which they do not deserve, she leaves a suicide note for Theseus, accusing Hippolytos of rape.

Theseus returns home to find his wife dead and his son, supposedly, the cause of it – and Hippolytos is honourable enough to keep his stepmother’s secret, so he says nothing to excuse himself. As in the usual story, Theseus curses him and Poseidon sends the bull from the sea. In the final scene, Hippolytos is carried onstage in his death agonies, and father and son are reconciled after Artemis tells them the truth of Aphrodite’s machinations and of Phaidra’s innocence.

Yet this Phaidra, for all her virtue, has been in effect just as deadly as her earlier counterpart, the shameless would-be seducer. And from Hippolytos’s fate we conclude that, just as unrestrained yielding to the sexual impulse, as in the case of Helen, can bring death in its wake, so can the complete rejection of sexual love. We deny Aphrodite and all she stands for at our cost.

AGAUE

We can say the same about the god Dionysos, as evidenced by Euripides’ tragedy Bakchai, named after the followers of the god who form the Chorus of the play. The drama centres on the tragic fate of Pentheus, the young king of Thebes, though it can be argued that his mother Agaue, our final ‘dangerous woman’, suffers a fate more tragic still.

As we have seen, Medea and Prokne killed their own children to gain revenge on the men who had wronged them. Agaue too kills her own son, but unwittingly, believing him to be a mountain lion, then still in a state of delusion she carries his severed head home in triumph, thinking it a splendid trophy of the hunt. In one of the most painful and moving scenes in the whole of Greek tragedy, she is brought to recognize what she carries so proudly as the head of her son, and to realize too her own part in his destruction.

The play opens with Dionysos himself coming to Thebes in the disguise of one of his own priests. He is in a sense coming home, for he is the son of Zeus and Semele, the daughter of Kadmos, the old king of Thebes.

Semele is long since dead, burnt up by Zeus’s lightning bolt, and her sisters Agaue, Ino and Autonoe have always refused to believe that she was ever united with the great god. In their opinion, she was seduced by some mortal man, then lied that her lover was Zeus to cover the shame of her pregnancy. Dionysos has now punished them by driving them mad, along with all the other women of Thebes, and they are living up on Mount Kithairon as maenads, worshipping this new god with impassioned zeal.

Young Pentheus returns home and tries to remedy this critical situation. He imprisons the stranger, this dangerous ‘priest’, and even when he sees that Dionysos easily escapes from his prison, and hears that the women on the mountain are performing miraculous feats in the god’s name, he refuses to countenance Dionysos’s divinity. Finally the god drives him mad too, and dresses him in women’s clothes, and takes him up Kithairon to spy on the women there.

We learn the tragic outcome from a messenger, one of the palace servants who accompanied Pentheus and the god on their journey. When they came to the glen where the maenads were, Dionysos, with miraculous power, pulled down the topmost branch of a towering pine-tree and seated Pentheus on it, then let the tree slip upright once again, carrying Pentheus with it. Then the god cried aloud to the women: ‘I bring you the one who mocked you, and me, and my holy rites. Now punish him.’ This, in the servant’s words, is how they did so (1084–1142):

‘The high air fell still. The wooded glade held its leaves in stillness, and you could not hear the cry of any beast. The women, not having heard the words clearly, stood up and gazed around. Again the god commanded them, and when the daughters of Kadmos recognized the clear summons of Dionysos, they darted off with the speed of doves, and all the maenads after them. Through the torrent-filled valley and over the broken rocks they leapt, frenzied by the breath of the god.

When they saw my master seated high in the pine-tree, at first they climbed the cliff which towered opposite, and violently hurled rocks at him or flung fir branches like javelins. Others aimed with the thyrsos through the high air at Pentheus, their wretched target, but all to no avail, for the poor boy was out of reach of their striving, sitting there helpless.

At last they ripped down branches of oak, and using these as crowbars tried to tear up the tree’s roots. When all their struggles met with failure, Agaue cried out, “Come, Maenads, stand in a circle around the tree and take hold of it, so that we catch this climbing beast and stop him revealing the god’s secret dances.”

Countless hands gripped the pine and ripped it from the earth. Pentheus, torn from his lofty seat and hurled to the ground, came falling down from on high with one unceasing scream, for he knew what terrible end was near. His mother first, as priestess, led the rite of death and fell on him. He tore the headband from his hair, that wretched Agaue might recognize him and not kill him, and “Mother,” he cried, touching her cheek, “Look, it is I, your son Pentheus, whom you bore in the house of Echion. Have mercy, mother. I have been wrong, but do not kill your own son.”

But she was foaming at the mouth and rolling wild eyes, completely out of her mind and possessed by Dionysos, so his words had no effect. Grasping Pentheus’ left hand, she set her foot against his ribs and tore the poor boy’s arm out of his shoulder, not by her own strength, but because the god made it easy. Ino was working at his other side, rending his flesh, and now Autonoe and the whole horde of maenads went at it. They all cried out together, Pentheus shrieking as long as life was in him and the women howling in triumph. One of them carried off an arm, another a foot with its boot still on. His ribs were stripped clean, and each one of them with bloody hands was playing ball with Pentheus’ flesh.

His body lies scattered under harsh rocks or in the deep foliage of the woods, no easy task to find. His poor head has been taken by his mother and fixed to the end of her thyrsos, and she is carrying it over Kithairon, thinking it the head of a mountain lion.’

In due course Agaue comes on stage with her trophy, exulting in her triumph. ‘Where is my son Pentheus?’ she cries. ‘Let him set a strong ladder against the house and nail up this lion’s head which I have hunted and brought home.’

Her old father, Kadmos, who has lovingly gathered up the broken pieces of his grandson’s body scattered through the glens of Kithairon, now painfully sets about bringing her confused mind back to reality. He begins gently. ‘Look up at the sky,’ he says. ‘Does it seem the same to you, or has it changed?’
‘It’s brighter than before,’ she replies, ‘and more translucent.’
‘And this disturbance of your mind, is it still there?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, but somehow my mind is surer, and changed from what it was before.’
‘So will you listen and answer clearly?’ he asks.
‘Yes, father, for I have forgotten what we said before.’

Now he continues with questions that have simple answers. ‘To whose house did you go when you were married?’

‘You gave me to Echion, one of the Sown Men, they say.’
‘And who was the child born to your husband?’
‘Pentheus, from my union with his father.’

Finally Kadmos brings her close to the tragic truth. ‘Yes, and whose head are you holding in your arms?’
‘A lion’s,’ she replies with certainty. And then doubt creeps in: ‘At least, that is what the women who hunted it said.’
‘Look properly at it,’ says Kadmos. ‘Looking is no great task.’
And Agaue looks, and screams in horror. ‘What am I looking at? What am I carrying?’

‘Look again closely and see more clearly,’ says Kadmos.
She does so. ‘Surely it doesn’t look like a lion’s head?’ he says.

‘No,’ she cries out in grief. ‘I’m holding the head of Pentheus.’ But worse is to come. ‘Who killed him?’ she asks, and she has to hear the dreadful answer: ‘It was you who killed him, you and your sisters.’

A modern poet, Patrick Hunt, captures this most pitiful aspect of Pentheus’ death, that of a mother killing the child that she herself has borne (Kithairon):

Pruning wild limbs on Kithairon
is no impediment to a vine god,
dismemberment to him is temporary
like the faith of mortals.
Here on this mountain
some see his beard in the clouds
or his thigh knotted in a root.

But in the eyes of Pentheus
pruning was in troubled wood,
powerless to take root again
or stitch torn flax together,
since his sad mother has both
knit and unknit the cloth of him.
Is it wind you hear howling on Kithairon?

By Jenny March in "The Penguin Book of Classical Myths", Penguin Random House, UK, 2009, excerpts chapter 13. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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