Aegisthus

Aegisthus also features heavily in the action of Euripides's Electra (c. 420 BC), although his character remains offstage.

When she discovered that the sword belonged to her own father, she realised that her son was the product of incestuous rape.

[4] Aegisthus and Thyestes thereafter ruled over Mycenae jointly, exiling Atreus's sons Agamemnon and Menelaus to Sparta, where King Tyndareus gave the pair his daughters, Clytemnestra and Helen, to take as wives.

[5] After Helen's abduction to Troy, Agamemnon was forced to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia in order to appease the gods before setting off for Ilium.

In the eighth year of his reign Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, returned to Mycenae and avenged the death of his father by killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.

We learn from him only that, after the death of Thyestes, Aegisthus ruled as king at Mycenae and took no part in the Trojan expedition.

[9] While Agamemnon was absent on his expedition against Troy, Aegisthus seduced Clytemnestra, and was so wicked as to offer up thanks to the gods for the success with which his criminal exertions were crowned.

According to Johanna Leah Braff, he "takes the traditional female role, as one who devises but is passive and does not act.

"[13] Christopher Collard describes him as the foil to Clytemnestra, his brief speech in Agamemnon revealing him to be "cowardly, sly, weak, full of noisy threats - a typical 'tyrant figure' in embryo.

"[14] Aeschylus's portrayal of Aegisthus as a weak, implicitly feminised figure, influenced later writers and artists who often depict him as an effeminate or decadent individual, either manipulating or dominated by the more powerful Clytemnestra.

In the first production he was depicted as "an epicene...with long curly locks and rouged lips, half-cringing, half-posturing seductively.