Clytemnestra asks what the noise in the house is and the servant replies with a riddling utterance which not only avoids the names of Aegisthus and Orestes, but also syntactically could be translated either ‘the dead are killing the living’ or ‘the living are killing the dead’ – an ambiguity inevitably lost in English. (In each case, ‘the dead’, tous tethne¯kotas, is a plural term, ‘the living’, ton zo¯nta, singular.)
The first interpretation is that which is to be privileged; it implies both that Orestes, believed dead, is killing Aegisthus; and, further, that Agamemnon, whose help from the tomb was invoked and conjured in the kommos, is being avenged; and even that the whole history of death in the house is claiming another victim. Clytemnestra solves the riddle and perceives immediately the logic of revenge and reversal: dolois oloumeth’ ho¯sper oun ekteinamen, ‘we are being destroyed by deception [dolois] as we killed’, or as Grene and Lattimore put it, ‘we have been won with treachery by which we slew’. As we have seen, communication is a central theme of the Oresteia, and as Clytemnestra’s verbal dexterity led Agamemnon to his doom, and as a verbal trick has allowed Orestes safe access to the palace, and a changed message has tricked Aegisthus to return unguarded to his death, so a riddle – a deceptive utterance that reveals the truth – is the means by which Clytemnestra learns of her impending fate. Throughout the Oresteia, there are riddles and solutions, riddles that remain riddles – all these are scenes of sign-reading. This dialogue, apparently unnecessarily framed as a riddle and solution, directs attention to a link in the narrative chain, a thematic continuity.
The destruction by deception, dolois, not only recalls the deceptive (dolia) element of the curse I discussed in the previous passage, but also specifically Orestes’ own description of Apollo’s command (Cho. 556–7), where he says ‘as they killed an honoured man by deception [dolo¯i], so they are to be taken by a deception [dolo¯i]’. Clytemnestra’s words unwittingly also fulfil the terms of Apollo’s oracle. Human language is more telling than the speaker can know.
Clytemnestra calls for someone to bring her as quickly as possible an androkme¯ta pelekun, ‘an axe to kill a man’, as Grene and Lattimore translate. The adjective androkme¯ta, ‘man-killing’, ‘man-wearying’, points towards the gender struggle in two ways.
First, it recalls her killing of her ‘man’, her husband (andro- means both ‘man’ and ‘husband’); secondly, the axe is to be a defence against Orestes, who is trying to achieve the status of ‘man’ – the full status of adult male in charge of his own house. She expresses this conflict with her son as ‘Let us see if we have the victory [niko¯men] or the victory is over us [niko¯metha]’ (the repetition of the same verb is unfortunately lost in Grene and Lattimore’s version).
This idea of nike¯, ‘victory’, is extremely important in the Oresteia, primarily for the way it is repeatedly used to express the sense of struggle for dominance in conflict. ‘Victory’ is the aim of each agon – until Athene and the Furies, where Athene says (Eum. 795), ‘For you have not given up the victory, ou gar nenikesth.’ Here, Clytemnestra captures perfectly the sense of mutually exclusive possibilities of the polarized gender conflict: either absolute victory or absolute defeat. Nike¯, ‘victory’, however, also constantly resonates with that other key term of the narrative of conflict, dike¯.
