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Memory is a strange thing, vicious. The more one wants to forget, the more one can’t help but remember.
“Pray to the gods,” everyone kept telling her after Tantalus and her son were murdered. But you don’t get rid of a rat by praying to the gods. You must kill it, poison it. And the gods can’t help you with that.
They might not know how to wield a weapon, but it doesn’t matter. Words can cut deeper than swords.
Maybe he is luckier in that way, she thinks. Maybe it is good for him never to have what he desires. Then others can’t come and take it from him.
“That is the problem with your brother,” Clytemnestra says. “He thinks only of what he wants. He forgets that there is a world around him, filled with people whose wishes he is not considering.”
to achieve what you want from the men around you, you must allow them to believe that they are in charge.” “If that is what a woman must do, I don’t want to be one.”
How is someone not killed by such sorrow?
in truth, we must suffer. In lies, we can prosper.
Is there any feeling more painful than regret? It spreads like a fever, invisible, and you can do nothing to fight it.
This is my chance, Clytemnestra thought, my chance of a new life.
that is left of those dark moments are questions: How did she get back to Mycenae? How did she tell her children?
A woman can’t afford to close her eyes for long. Now she moves around the palace, her heart as dry as a desert, her tongue poisoned with lies. No one will ever come again and take what she loves.
For a long time, she has known there are two different kinds of war. There are the battles where heroes dance and fight, with their glistening armor and precious swords, and there are those fought between walls, which are made of stabs and whispers.
When he had finished, he put down the cloth and started sobbing.
As he moved inside her, she cried, thinking of his half-dead body in Odysseus’s tent, one of the last things she had seen before her world had fallen apart.
you chose to protect me, not understanding that my life without her is nothing.
You are like the sun. If one looks too long, he’ll be blinded.”
“You’re not cruel and yet you hold a kingdom together. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“How many mistakes does it take to make a decent man?”
“I want a man who can get what he wants. One who understands me and at the same time frightens others with his brilliant mind.”
He is good at avoiding the answers he doesn’t want to give, she considers. His words feel like smoke through her fingers.
They are two knives slicing each other, cutting at the bone and thus giving each other pleasure.
She is like a lioness, she stands high on her hind legs, she mates with the wolf, when her noble lion is missing. —Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1258–9
He brushes his lips against her forehead and says, “She must have been a fool for thinking she could take something from you.”
Because your king took a virgin priestess to his bed and refused to give her back to her father. And when he finally relented, he took another, the slave of the hero Achilles, causing him to abandon the army and lose battle after battle.
“Agamemnon sleeps with young girls with no regard to the consequences that his choices have on his army and his war. Still, you bear him no ill will. You don’t even speak of it.”
“I, on the other hand, take one man to my bed for reasons you don’t know and shouldn’t care to know, and we have to gather here t...
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“I wonder,” she says, “what a right ruler would do with traitors?” “Imprison them,” Lycomedes says. “Kill them.”
“I would love to discuss types of treason with you, Polydamas,”
“But unfortunately, a crowd is gathering by the Lion Gate to watch your execution.”
Every choice one makes has consequences, like a rock that falls from the top of the mountain.
Am I nothing more than a tool thrown aside now that you have another?”
“I did desire him, but I would never have gone with him, because I understand that some things must not be touched. Some people must not be taken.”
When she couldn’t bear the sound and wanted to hurt herself, Leon would find her and stay with her until dawn.”
“He might not have been her father, but she loved him.”
“Even when you are pretending,” Aileen says, “you are still better than most people.”
Beauty can be a curse sometimes. It blinds men, makes them do horrible things.
He didn’t kill her for vengeance, ambition, or greed. He killed her for a puff of wind.
An easier time, when friends and enemies were stark and clear and she thought she always knew what was right.
“I will always be loyal to you, my queen.”
It is men you must fear. It is men who will be angry with you if you rise too high, if you are too much loved. The stronger you are, the more they will try to take you down.”
“It doesn’t matter what he feels,”
“It doesn’t matter what he thinks. I love you both, as I loved your sister, more than anything in the world.”
When vengeance calls and the gods stop watching, what happens to those who have touched the people I love?
She expected to feel pain or anger at the sight, but there is nothing inside her. This is how vengeance transforms you: it makes you pale and cool, like a sea goddess.
“They had their reputation in life maybe, but not in death. Only a few survive the passing of time.”
“That is good to hear.”
You are going to die tonight, she thinks. Enjoy your feast while you can.
“Do you know what was unwise? To keep me alive once you slaughtered my daughter.
Clytemnestra doesn’t care: she knows that kings tend to become heroes to future generations. Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Theseus…songs about them are sung, and their cruel deeds are turned into sunlight.
