Clytemnestra

In Homer she is the great anti-Penelope. While Penelope wove and unwove and held the suitors at arm’s length for twenty years, Clytemnestra took her husband’s enemy as a lover and waited for him to come home so they could kill him together. [SPOILER: She holds the bath cloth. Aegisthus does the cutting. In some tellings she does the cutting herself.] In the retelling she is referenced obliquely, never named, surfacing only as “his wife” in Nestor’s warning and Agamemnon’s lament. The craft choice is to keep the focus on the shape of the betrayal, not on a competing female character. Penelope’s faithfulness is the pole the whole story turns on. Adding a named treacherous wife next to her would split the audience’s attention. Let her stay a shadow.