The other noun in the sentence, however, is me¯nis, ‘wrath’, ‘violent anger’. This is the first word of the Iliad and one of its key themes – the violent, destructive anger of the hero Achilles. In that work, it is used only of Achilles and the gods and stresses a particular force of rage. With these two nouns, however, we must note the difficulty of the syntax, and in two ways. First, it is quite unclear which of the two nouns is subject of the sentence, which in apposition. That is, does it mean ‘violent anger remains, a fearful rising back up again household manager’; or does it mean ‘the fearful rising back up again household manager remains, violent anger’?
Secondly, it is unclear which noun is qualified by the two adjectives, dolia and mnamo¯n, that come between the two nouns (or whether dolia is even a noun, ‘a deceptive woman’). Most editors take dolia with oikonomos and mnamo¯n with me¯nis, ‘deceptive household manager’, ‘remembering wrath’, but it remains strictly uncertain, and possibly both adjectives can qualify both nouns.
Fagles attempts to maintain the ambiguity by translating dolia as ‘the stealth’ and leaving it juxtaposed to the other words of the sentence; Lloyd-Jones by closely following the word order of the Greek. Dolia means ‘deceptive’ and when taken closely with oikonomos suggests both the specific deception of Clytemnestra, and the way in which the narrative of revenge in the house will repeatedly depend on deception. It is precisely dolia peitho¯, ‘deceptive persuasion’ that the chorus prays to help Orestes as he enters the palace. Oikonomos dolia, ‘deceptive household manager’, may also recall, however, by contrast Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who maintains her house by deception in the Odyssey. (We have seen the inevitable association between the two households in Greek literature since the Odyssey.) As much as Orestes is a model for Telemachus in the Odyssey, so Penelope and Clytemnestra are explicitly contrasted more than once in the epic. Oikonomos dolia,
‘deceptive household manager’, points thus to the different evaluations of deceptive women within the exemplary text of the patriarchal oikos. If dolia is taken closely with me¯nis, ‘deceptive wrath’, however, it indicates the way in which the violent anger which motivates revenge hides itself and uses deception to achieve its end.
Mnamo¯n denotes ‘remembering’ and strengthens the sense of mimnei, ‘remains’. What remains does not pass into obscurity or neglect over time (but ‘rises back up again’). If it is taken closely with oikonomos, it implies both the way that Clytemnestra has nurtured her hatred over the years, and the way in which Agamemnon’s ten-year absence from the house will not prevent the curse of the house recalling his transgression and demanding payment. If it is taken closely with me¯nis, it implies that the ‘violent anger’ does not pass into reconciliation (as, say, at the end of the Iliad) but harbours its rage.
The final adjective is teknopoinos and, like so many compound adjectives in Greek, it can have an active and a passive sense, both ‘avenging a child’ and ‘avenged by a child’. What I have translated as ‘avenging’/‘avenged’, namely poin-, is a term that repeatedly occurs in the trilogy and connotes both punishment and payment – central to the social language of exchange and justice. The word ‘child’, teknon, it need hardly be emphasized, is one of the commonest terms in the trilogy: we have already seen how it becomes invested with special force not merely in the discussions of the trial scene, but also in the language of childbirth and of parental characteristics that is used to express the connection between events in precisely the narrative of punishment and payment (poin-).
