Clytemnestra.... and other Greek women ....... courtesy of Natalie Haynes .... on the wireless

 Despite a lifelong fascination for all things Roman and Greek I missed out on classical mythology.

Clytemnestra

It was not top of the list of things to be taught at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern, and by the time I got to Crown Woods I was pretty much locked into a variety of A level courses which did not admit time for the stories of ancient Rome or Greece.

I have tried to rectify this, but alas what I know is patchy and pretty much comes from comics, and those Sword-and-Sandal films, which were a genre of largely Italian-made historical and biblical epics that dominated the Italian film industry from 1957 to 1965. 

And in them there are plenty of togas, swords, and semi naked classical statues and the odd Greek hero. 

All of which draws me to  Natalie Haynes who the BBC describes as  'Rock star classicist' and reformed stand-up is obsessed with the ancient world”. 

And she is back with another series "in which she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. 

They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

Aegisthus Discovers the Body of Clytemnestra Killed by Orestes

Today Natalie stands up for Clytemnestra, who has been characterised as the worst wife in Greek mythology. 

This is open to debate: she's certainly a good mother, if a little bit murderous of her husband. But it turns out that Agamemnon probably deserves it. 

After all he sacrifices one of their daughters to Artemis without a second thought and then turns up at home years later with Cassandra, the future-seeing woman he has 'won' as a prize (also read: trafficked and enslaved) at the Battle of Troy. 

These actions demonstrate a certain lack of respect for his wife, as well as cruelty of the highest order. Cassandra reads the room, obviously, but nobody listens to her. Clytemnestra has a good legal brain and states her case convincingly. But it's unlikely to end well.

With Professor Edith Hall.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery”.*

Pictures; Clytemnestra by John Collier, 1882, John Collier, Clytemnestra, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clytemnestra,courtesy of Wikipedia, and  Aegisthus Discovers the Body of Clytemnestra Killed by Orestes - Charles-Auguste Van den Berghe (1798-1853), 2014,this file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

*Clytemnestra, The Long View, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wrk4