At the center of Agamemnon (Aeschylus, 458 BC), the first tragedy of the Oresteia, the king returns from Troy in his chariot with the Trojan princess Cassandra as his captive, and Clytemnestra orders her women to strew the path to the palace with purple cloth so that his foot will not touch the ground. Agamemnon resists: such honor belongs to the gods. She argues with him until he gives in, has his sandals loosened and walks into the house over the fabric. The audience knows what the king has forgotten. Ten years earlier, with the Greek fleet held at Aulis by contrary winds, Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia because a seer said the goddess Artemis demanded it. Inside the palace, Clytemnestra prepares his bath, wraps him in a robe as in a net and strikes him dead; she kills Cassandra too. Then she comes out and tells it all, hiding nothing. She goes on to rule with her lover Aegisthus. In the second tragedy, her son Orestes returns and kills her to avenge his father; in the third, pursued by the Furies, he is tried by a court of Athenian citizens that acquits him.
// The theoryThe loss that turns into anger
Robert Agnew’s general strain theory (1992) broadens Merton’s: crime can grow out of any negative relationship with others. Agnew distinguishes three sources of strain: failing to achieve valued goals, losing something or someone that matters, and suffering hostile treatment. Strain produces negative emotions, and anger is the most criminogenic because it pushes people to correct the injustice and to return the harm. In 2001 Agnew specified which strains are most likely to lead to crime: those perceived as unjust, those of great magnitude and those that create incentives for criminal coping.
Ten years of accumulated strain
Clytemnestra’s strain meets all of Agnew’s conditions. It is a loss of the greatest magnitude: the death of a daughter. She experiences it as deeply unjust, because Agamemnon sacrificed her for a war and for his prestige, not out of necessity. And she has the time and the means to respond: ten years of ruling alone, an ally in Aegisthus and the certainty that her husband will return. Her crime is not an outburst but the organized response to a loss that was never repaired. Agamemnon also returns with another woman as a trophy, one more humiliation on top of the wound.
// The subjectA queen who did not forget
Aeschylus makes Clytemnestra one of the most powerful characters in Greek theatre: she speaks with authority, deceives with eloquence and claims her act in public, without hiding. After the murder she does not present herself as a victim or as mad, but as the executor of a justice nobody else was going to carry out. The watchman in the opening scene speaks of her woman’s breast with the heart of a man, a way of saying she does not fit what was expected of her. But the play does not absolve her: her crime is also a way of seizing power alongside Aegisthus, and the motive of the daughter coexists with ambition.
Aeschylus shows her planning before he shows her killing. The watchman who opens the play has spent a year lying on the palace roof, on her orders, waiting for the beacon that will announce the fall of Troy; when the signal comes, she describes to the chorus, mountain by mountain, the chain of fires that has carried the news from Ida, and the elders, who had doubted a woman’s credulity, have to yield. In her welcome to Agamemnon she feigns years of weeping and sleepless nights, and explains that Orestes is absent because she has entrusted him to Strophius in Phocis. Over the corpse there is no frenzy, only an inventory: two blows, then a third, his blood spattering her and her joy at it like the earth’s joy at spring rain. For Agnew, the most criminogenic strain is the one experienced as unjust and severe; Clytemnestra has had ten years to feed hers. The most revealing moment comes at the end, when she declares herself willing to strike a sworn compact with the fiend of the house so that the madness of killing kin will go to some other family: she wants her revenge to be the last.
Clytemnestra
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// The crackStrain explains the anger, not how to break the chain
Agnew’s theory explains well why Clytemnestra kills, and it also explains why Orestes kills her afterwards: it is another loss, that of a father, experienced as unjust. That is the structure of revenge, and the theory describes it without proposing how to stop it. Each response to a strain creates a new strain on the other side.
The Oresteia gives the answer criminology would take centuries to formulate: the chain is only broken when an impartial third party replaces private revenge. In the third tragedy, Athena founds a court of citizens to try Orestes. It is, in mythical terms, the birth of public justice. Strain explains the impulse; the institution channels it.
From revenge to the court
Societies without effective public justice live trapped in cycles of revenge, and research on cultures of honor and feuds between families confirms it: where the state does not respond, victims do. The lesson of the Oresteia still holds: for a loss not to turn into a chain of crimes, those who suffer it need a response they perceive as just. That is why attention to victims matters, and a justice that does not take ten years to arrive.
Three key ideas
- General strain theory (Agnew, 1992 and 2001) holds that the loss of something valued, experienced as unjust and of great magnitude, produces anger, and crime is one way of coping with it.
- Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon ten years after he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia: a strain that meets all of Agnew’s conditions, combined with the ambition to rule with Aegisthus.
- The crack: the theory explains revenge, but not how to break the chain; the Oresteia breaks it with a court, the mythical birth of public justice.
Sources · further reading
- Agnew, R. (1992). “Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency”. Criminology, 30(1), 47-88.
- Agnew, R. (2001). “Building on the Foundation of General Strain Theory”. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 38(4), 319-361.
- Nisbett, R. E. and Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Westview Press.
- Aeschylus (458 BC). Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Clitemnestra?
Clitemnestra is a villain from Greek tragedy, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. She prepared his bath, threw a robe over him like a net and did not let him out.
Why does Clytemnestra become a villain?
General strain theory measures the anger an unjust loss leaves behind. Clytemnestra nursed hers for ten years, from Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and turned it into a plan: purple cloth, a bath and a net.
Which criminological theory explains Clitemnestra?
Clitemnestra's case is analysed through General strain. General strain theory (Robert Agnew, 1992) holds that crime can grow out of experiences felt as unjust or painful, above all the loss of something valued, because they produce anger, and crime is one way of coping with it. Clytemnestra, in Agamemnon (Aeschylus, 458 BC), the first tragedy of the Oresteia, kills her husband on the day he returns from Troy. Ten years earlier, Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, so that the gods would give the fleet a wind. Her revenge sets off another: her son Orestes will kill her. The trilogy ends with the invention of a court to break the chain.
