It is from this standpoint that we must look at Clytemnestra and judge of her action. She was the instrument of a power beyond herself, the dread fate which had marked Agamemnon the king, her husband, as another victim of the hereditary curse. But she was not merely an instrument. She had fallen prey to her own unlawful passion, and when she struck the blow which fate ordained, it was not impelled by the single motive of revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, but a confusion of passionate anger and conscious guilt. The _Agamemnon_ opens with the joyful announcement of the fall of Troy. The scene is laid in the wealthy city of Mycenæ, in the palace of Agamemnon the king, where a watch had been kept for many months for the return of the Greek fleet. Ten years before, when the fleet had sailed for Troy to avenge the carrying-off of Helen, there had been left behind in the royal home a mother stricken by an awful grief. For the King Agamemnon, delayed at Aulis by adverse winds, and in brutal haste to be gone, had offered up to the gods a human sacrifice—the sacrifice of his own young daughter Iphigenia. The prayers of Clytemnestra the queen, and the tears of the beautiful girl herself, could not prevail upon him. Iphigenia’s life was forfeited to a hideous superstition, and the host sailed away, leaving Clytemnestra overwhelmed with sorrow and wrath. Here then are the two contributing elements to the tragedy—the wrong done and the wrong suffered. Agamemnon, driven on by the curse which lay over his house, blinded by his own pride and headstrong impatience to the true nature of the crime that he was committing, was forging the weapon of his own destruction. And here too we have the deed which accounts for and explains Clytemnestra—making of her not the mere savage murderess of tradition, without a touch of humanity, but an outraged mother, the avenger of her child. It is necessary to emphasize this point a little because we have been used to regard Clytemnestra as a mere monster of cruelty. It is therefore a shock of surprise, when we come to Æschylus for her story, to find that he has made her quite human. He is not concerned in her case, any more than with the other persons of his Drama, to expose intricate motive, or to paint delicate shades of character. In his task of hewing out dramatic form—of virtually creating Drama—he left subtlety and ingenuity and stagecraft to be perfected by his successors. Hence he is not exercised very much about making his plot a plausible one, or to explain how its incidents are effected. He has a great religious purpose; and this, with the ritual form in which he had to work, subordinates the purely dramatic elements. But he does clearly let us see—and this is all the more important from his usual reticence—that the whole course of Clytemnestra’s action was determined by Agamemnon’s inconceivable cruelty.