False Reports and Waiting Wives on the Home Front in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Trachiniae

Abstract

Nostos plays such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Trachiniae can be productively read within the context of the fifth-century Athenian home front. Focusing on wives’ receipt of false reports about their husbands in Agamemnon and Trachiniae, this article argues that Clytemnestra’s and Deianeira’s tense interactions with messengers both register Athenian wives’ anxieties about receiving untrustworthy information during their husbands’ absences and dramatize a double bind for wives on the home front, whose initiative in response to such reports is both demanded and condemned in the new circumstances presented by Athens’ fifth-century military revolution.