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¯.

So, Athene continues to the Furies after the trial’s vote ‘For you have not given up the victory… all’ isopse¯phos dike¯’, ‘but the dike¯ has been of equal votes’. As Orestes arrives as the agent of dike¯, the sense of dike¯ as revenge, destruction or punishment is significantly qualified by the description of the conflict as the pursuit of nike¯.

Orestes enters: se kai mateuo¯, ‘You I track too.’ Grene and Lattimore leave out the verb, but mateuo¯, ‘I track’, is properly used of dogs on the scent, and thus Orestes represents himself as hunter (as he will become the hunted victim of the ‘dogs of his mother’). The ‘tricky hunter’ (dolois . . . mateuo¯) is a figure often associated in Greek culture with the hunt of the young male as he is being initiated into the world of the adult men (Vidal-Naquet). As Orestes approaches the killing of his mother, he is also depicted as approaching the status of manhood. The man-killing axe may prevent him reaching manhood.