Foil

Character Role Analysis

Clytemnestra, Orestes

Clytemnestra doesn't appear onstage in The Eumenides except for briefly at the beginning, as a ghost. In calling her a foil, we're referring less to this Ghost than we are to the way Clytemnestra is depicted, in flashback, through the testimony offered in Orestes's trial.

In the testimony of Orestes and Apollo, Clytemnestra emerges as a foil for Orestes because she, too, committed murder in the name of revenge (when she killed her husband, Agamemnon, in revenge for his killing of their daughter, Iphigenia)—but did so unjustly.