Clytemnestra: Villain or Heroine?

Villain or heroine? Clytemnestra, one of the most misunderstood characters in all of the Oresteia. By most she is looked at as a terrible monster of a woman who killed her husband to take another man as her lover and then banished her children, but if her story is actually looked back on she might have every justifiable reason to have kicked Agamemnon to the curb. Not only does Agamemnon kill her daughter just so he can go to war –talk about daddy problems-, but they begin much before that when Agamemnon kills her first husband and son and then takes her as property from the man he just defeated. Also Clytemnestra has been cursed since birth to be an adulterer which is a small part of the reason she decides to take Aegisthus as a lover; to finish everything off Agamemnon is gone for ten years in troy and after all that he comes back with a mistress Cassandra. -Clytemnestra just cannot win with this guy- Needless to say she is one very emotional and torn up woman which is never a good combination, but could give reason to her seemingly irrational actions. Although she is mostly looked at as a villain, Clytemnestra is merely acting out upon her long festering emotions against Agamemnon because she can no longer handle being treated like nothing more than the spoils of war to Agamemnon, Agamemnon murdered her daughter, she has been cursed since birth to become an adulterer, and Agamemnon’s poor decision to bring home a mistress who –if Clytemnestra wasn’t upset yet this certainly did the trick- enrages her even more. We’ll begin with a little back story behind Clytemnestra. She’s the daughter of Tyndareus and Leda and therefore was Helen's half-sister. (Helen queen of Sparta, wife to Menelaus, her kidnaping starts the whole Trojan War, yeah that Helen.) She is betrothed by her father to Tantalus while she was still a virgin, because Tantalus was the son of Thyestes who was the king of Mycenae, so Clytemnestra automatically became a queen –pretty nice perk-.