Clytemnestra

Clytemnestra (also Clytaemnestra) was the wife of Agamemnon, king of the Greek kingdom of Mycenae.

Agamemnon followed his brother Menelaus after Menelaus' wife Helen was stolen by Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy, thus igniting the Trojan War. At the end of the war Agamemnon returned to Mycenae where his kinsman, Aegisthus, who in the interval had seduced his wife Clytemnestra, invited him to a banquet at which he was treacherously slain. Princess Cassandra of Troy, who had been taken by Agamemnon as a war trophy, was also put to death by Clytemnestra. According to the account given by Pindar and the tragedians, Agamemnon was slain by his wife alone in a bath, a piece of cloth or a net having first been thrown over him to prevent resistance. Her wrath at the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia, and her jealousy of Cassandra, are said to have been the motives of her crime. The murder of Agamemnon was avenged by his son Orestes.

The story of Orestes is told in a tragedy by Euripides of the same name and a famous trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus, known as the Orestiae.