Mortal queen of Mycenae; daughter of Tyndareus and Leda, the mortal-fathered half-sister of Helen. Wife and killer of Agamemnon: maddened by his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia at Aulis, she takes Aegisthus as lover and, on the king's return, snares him in a robe-net in the bath and cuts him down with the axe, killing Cassandra beside him — the deed at the centre of Aeschylus's Oresteia. Mother of Iphigenia, Electra, Chrysothemis, and Orestes; slain at last by Orestes, the matricide that looses the Erinyes. The mortal line through which her children descend.