There were no lawyers in ancient Athens; people prosecuting crimes or defending themselves in court would do so by the means of speeches, which were often heavy on rhetoric and light on what a modern audience would consider to be evidence. These speeches, called ‘forensic’ speeches, were about persuading the jury that the speaker’s version of events was the correct one, an outcome that was sought using a variety of rhetorical devices. Often, speakers would rely on arguments from probability, eikos, suggesting reasons why it was practically impossible for them to have committed the crime, or otherwise practically certain that the defendant did so. Of course, not everyone was a great speechwriter, and so, where they could afford to, speakers would often hire professional speechwriters, or logographers, to craft high-quality persuasive speeches for them.
Amongst the forensic speeches that have survived to the present day, we have a relatively small proportion that deal with acts of violence and killing. Amongst these, we have only one example of a female defendant. The first speech by the logographer Antiphon was written for a young man who had accused his stepmother of killing her husband, his father, by arranging for him to drink poison. The young man’s narrative of the crime asserts that his father had a friend, Philoneos, who had a concubine to whom he had begun to show less favour, intending to place her in a brothel. The stepmother allegedly provided the poison to the concubine, telling her that it was a love potion and that she should give it to both men, in order to increase their love for the two women. Thinking to improve her lover’s affection especially, the concubine gave more of the potion to Philoneos. Philoneos died almost instantly; the father died after several days of illness. By the time of the stepmother’s trial, the concubine had already been tortured and executed.
During the speech, Antiphon makes a particularly interesting allusion. The speaker says:
The woman [the concubine] considered how to give the potion, whether before or after dinner. And deliberating, it seemed best to her to give it after dinner, at once acting on the instructions of this Clytemnestra. [Antiphon 1.17] (my translation)
It is clear from the linguistic context that Clytemnestra is not the name of the stepmother, but rather a reference to the mythological wife of Agamemnon who killed him upon his return from the Trojan War. Thus he invokes an archetype of a murderous wife who would have been well-known to the jury listening to his speech. Here, I want to explore how this comparison works in the speech, and what it might tell us about perceptions of murderous women in classical Athens.
Firstly, it is important to note that this allusion appears to be not just mythic, but specifically tragic. As Wohl argues:
tragic diction[…] peppers the speech. The father’s death, for instance, is staged in a tragic idiom, as he and Philoneus sacrifice to Zeus of the Household, and drink the fatal [draught] in the libation they offer to the gods with a prayer “that was to remain unfulfilled” (18-19). So he dies “an impious and inglorious death[…] before his fated time, leaving life by the hand he least should have” (21). This is language an Athenian would recognize from the Theater of Dionysus.[1]
Allusions to tragedy are not unheard-of in forensic oratory. In Andocides 1, the defendant Andocides tries to find a tragic comparison for the unusual family situation of his enemy Callias:
A man marries a wife, and then marries the mother as well as the daughter. The mother turns the daughter out. Then, while living with the mother, he wants to marry the daughter of Epilycus, so that the granddaughter can turn the grandmother out. Why, what ought his child [Callias] to be called? Personally, I do not believe that there is anyone ingenious enough to find the right name for him. There are three women with whom his father will have lived: and he is the alleged son of one of them, the brother of another, and the uncle of the third. What ought a son like that to be called? Oedipus, Aegisthus, or what? [Andocides 1.128-9] (tr. Maidment)
It is interesting that both this use of tragedy and that in Antiphon are related to ‘unnatural’ familial interactions. In both instances, the actions of the speaker’s opponents are so out of the ordinary that comparisons can only be found in myth, making them seem even further removed from proper, everyday Athenian behaviour. Attendance at dramatic festivals was an important part of Athenian civic life, and it is very likely that the citizen men who sat on the juries in the Athenian courts would also have sat in the audiences of tragedies and comedies at the City Dionysia, the yearly theatrical festival to Dionysus. Tragedies very often told stories from mythology, and so mythological characters and archetypes became embedded in the popular Athenian citizen consciousness. Tragic archetypes were cleverly embedded in speeches, and tragic methods could be employed in the delivery of speeches too, particularly if one had experience in the theatre, as the logographer Aeschines did.[2] His great rival, Demosthenes, seemed threatened by Aeschines’ dramatic and powerful performances when speaking, and often attacked him for his style:
On that famous voice of his, however, I really must offer some observations. For I am informed that he sets great store thereby, and that he hopes to overawe you by an exhibition of histrionic talent. When he tried to represent the woes of the House of Thyestes, or of the men who fought at Troy, you drove him from the stage with hisses and cat-calls, and came near to pelting him with stones, insomuch that in the end he gave up his profession of actor of small parts; and I think you would be behaving very strangely if now, when he has wrought measurable mischief, not on the stage, but in his dealings with the most momentous affairs of state, you should be favorably impressed by his beautiful voice. [Demosthenes 19.337] (tr. Vince)
As in many societies, the stories told in Greek myth often reflect the anxieties of that culture. Thus, Clytemnestra can be perceived as representing the fear from a male perspective that danger lurks in his own home, and that his wife, who should be subservient, compliant, and devoted to preserving the household, could in fact be his downfall. The fact that Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegisthus, in Agamemnon’s absence, compounds this threat to the oikos (‘household’). We might compare the speaker’s attitude in Lysias 1, a case where the speaker, Euphiletus, admits killing a man, Eratosthenes, whom he discovered in bed with his wife; his defence is that such a killing is permitted under Athenian law. He argues (falsely) that it is not only a man’s right to kill an adulterer, but his duty, because of the havoc such a usurper could wreak on the legitimacy of his oikos, and on the polis (‘city-state’) as a macrocosm of the oikos. The effect is compounded by laws in Athens that prescribed nowhere near such harsh punishments for rapists, apparently on the rationale that rapists would be hated by their victims, whereas adulterers corrupted women’s minds and turned them against their husbands.[3]
It is clear, then, that the Athenians were anxious about corruption in the home, and particularly so when the woman was complicit in it. The most extreme version of this was, of course, the wife who killed her husband, and it is this fear that the speaker of Antiphon 1 wishes to compound with his comparison of the stepmother to Clytemnestra. Of course, there are notable differences between the two women. Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon with an axe or knife while he bathes, having first caught him in a net; the stepmother has her unknowing accomplice administer poison to her victim. Clytemnestra’s actions are, at least in part, a response to Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia at the beginning of the Trojan War in order to call up favourable winds. In Antiphon 1, no motive is provided for the murder, though the speaker states that the stepmother has been caught plotting her husband’s death ‘many times before’, suggesting an ongoing rift between them.[4] There is no evidence in the speech that any Aegisthus figure was present to assist the stepmother with her crime; rather, she seems to have acted alone, albeit while tricking the concubine into helping her.
As Wohl notes, the comparison with Clytemnestra is at least in part a means of cementing the stepmother’s intent in committing the crime.[5] It seems possible that the defence will argue that the stepmother did in fact believe the poison was a love potion, and that therefore she did not mean to kill her husband.[6] By drawing a clear analogy between her and Clytemnestra, who was known to have plotted against Agamemnon’s life prior to actually carrying out the murder, the stepmother’s plot seems more likely. These women are not committing acts out of fits of passion, but cold, calculating plots against their husbands.
The difference in method, though, is particularly interesting. Poison is often said to be a woman’s weapon: it does not require physical strength, or for the killer to be near to the victim at the time of death. It is particularly associated with plotting, as it can be administered in secret or by another person apart from the primary plotter. By contrast, Clytemnestra’s bloody killing of Agamemnon with a blade is more ‘masculine’: she must overpower him physically and witness his gruesome death. This suggests something ‘unnatural’ in Clytemnestra: she has not only broken the bonds of marriage and what it means to be a wife, but has transgressed, or transcended, her role as a woman in committing such a crime. Although the same inferences cannot be made of the stepmother’s alleged killing, the association with Clytemnestra heightens her actions and equates them not only with another murder, but with a brutal act of physical violence. Her crime becomes even more shocking and distant from the everyday, acceptable behaviour of women.
Of course, one of the most potent effects of the association of the stepmother with Clytemnestra is to cast the speaker in the role of Orestes.[7] Orestes did not prosecute his mother in court; on the contrary, he judged her guilty himself and executed her for her crime. In Aeschylus’ version, probably well-known in Athens at the time of the trial, Orestes’ killing was found to be just in the first trial at the Athenian Areopagus court for homicide. It is possible that this trial, too, took place at the Areopagus, although this depends on the specific charge.[8] If it was, this mythic resonance may have been all the more potent. In any case, the tragic allusion makes the speaker’s case seem perfectly justified, while once again increasing the horror of the stepmother’s alleged crime.
Wohl, though, highlights a more accurate, and pitiable, tragic parallel for the stepmother: Deianira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae.[9] Deianira fears that her husband Heracles no longer loves her and will bring Iole home to be his new wife, and administers to him a supposed love potion given to her many years previously by the centaur Nessus. The potion, of course, is poison; Heracles dies, and Deianira kills herself out of grief and shame. The concept appears elsewhere, too, in Aristotle’s description of an accidental homicide.[10] If the defence’s position that the stepmother did not know the potion was poison was convincing, it is possible that the jury would have drawn this parallel instead. Perhaps, then, Antiphon’s use of Clytemnestra here is calculated to recast the stepmother not as a tragic heroine who makes a fatal mistake in her attempt to redeem her relationship with her husband, but as a conniving, violent woman plotting her husband’s downfall.
What can all of this tell us about perceptions of women who kill in classical Athens? Certainly they posed a crisis for the oikos, and in a wider sense, for the polis itself. If women were destructive instead of reproductive, the number of citizens would decrease and Athens would risk losing power. But perhaps more crucially, violent women were women no longer under the control of their kyrios (‘head of household’). Whether they had been corrupted by an adulterer or acted alone, they had taken on an agency which was believed to be unnatural and inappropriate for them. This was an extreme state of affairs, best recalled not through references to real events, but to the dramatic happenings of the tragic theatre. The tragic archetype of Clytemnestra was a woman no Athenian man wanted for a wife, and thus, if the speaker of Antiphon 5 could make his stepmother appear to be a new Clytemnestra, it is likely that the male citizen jury would have little trouble sentencing her to death for her crime, reminding Athenian women that their place was under the control of their men.
Next month on SPARAGMOS: Emily Chow-Kambitsch on Dionysus, Charles Manson, and women’s ‘liberation’ in cults.
Christine Plastow (@chrissieplastow) holds a PhD in Classics from University College London, and is By Jove Theatre Company’s research and education co-ordinator. She teaches ancient Greek and academic writing skills at UCL, and conducts research on ancient Athenian law and oratory.
[1] Wohl, 2010b, 45.
[2] See Hall, 2006, 353-92.
[3] See Carey, 1995.
[4] As the speech is from the prosecution, it is of course unlikely that the speaker would go into depth about possible motives and risk mitigating or even justifying his stepmother’s actions.
[5] Wohl, 2010b, 46-50.
[6] Wohl, 2010b, 43-4.
[7] Wohl, 2010a, 90.
[8] Plotting and killing in person may have been tried in the same court, the Areopagus, or plotting may have been a separate charge tried in the Palladion court, another Athenian court dealing with homicide cases.
[9] Wohl, 2010b, 51-65.
[10] Aristotle, Ethika Megala 1188b 29-38.
Bibliography
Carey, Chris. 1995. ‘Rape and Adultery in Athenian Law.’ Classical Quarterly 45:2. 407-417.
Hall, Edith. 2006. The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek Drama and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loomis, W. T. 1972. ‘The Nature of Premeditation in Athenian Homicide Law.’ The Journal of Hellenic Studies 92. 86-95.
Wohl, Victoria. 2010a. Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wohl, Victoria. 2010b. ‘A Tragic Case of Poisoning: Intention Between Tragedy and the Law.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 140:1. 33-70.