Female characters in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon are affected by war either by losing their kin (Clytemnestra) or by becoming themselves victims of war violence (Iphigeneia, Cassandra). Their experience engenders trauma, originating in physical wounds, inflicted upon the female body, and conveyed through conceits and language that prompt an association between the hemorrhage, caused by their bodily injuries, and the typical flow of blood associated with the female reproductive cycle (menstruation and lochia [“postpartum bleeding”]). Their deaths are further associated with the ritual bloodshed of animal sacrifice.

The application of the sacrificial metaphor to the female bleeding body marks out the range within which the play unravels the traumatic effects of violence between the two warring communities, that of the Greeks and of the Trojans. It further locates the causality of trauma within the dialectic of hegemony, articulated in the form of resistance by female characters both divine (Artemis) and mortal (Clytemnestra).