... Does any heart but mine
Know the long burden of the life I bore
While he was under Troy?“[[14]]
The time has indeed come to put aside fear, but for a reason that these senators cannot see yet, any more than they can conceive the real nature of the burden that she had borne so long. To say that Clytemnestra’s speech is not really that of a faithful wife, that it is too loud in its protestations of joy, too insistent and eager in its avowal of fidelity, is beside the mark. For not only is Agamemnon in all probability aware of Clytemnestra’s sin, but she realizes that he may be aware of it. Hence the deep irony of the situation; and hence too the fact that these protestations, begun calmly and deliberately with the object of deceiving the crowd, gradually take on a different tone. The king’s manner to her from the moment of arrival had been cold, even repellent. The conviction grows that he has been forewarned, and with that conviction, the sense of danger to herself is heightened. As her speech proceeds we seem to feel her quickening pulse and tingling nerve, we seem to share the rush of fear that sweeps away restraint and carries her along a torrent of language that is wild, vehement, and almost frenzied.
“Now with heart at peace
I hail my King, my watchdog of the fold,
My ship’s one cable of hope, my pillar firm
Where all else reels, my father’s one-born heir,
My land scarce seen at sea when hope was dead,
My happy sunrise after nights of storm,