A fleet bound for Troy is held in port by a contrary wind. Agamemnon, the notes say, takes the wind as a goddess’s anger, and, using a marriage to Achilles as the pretext, offers his daughter Iphigenia — the notes also write Iphigeneia — as a sacrifice. Aegisthus, whose father and brothers were killed by Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, waits for revenge. While Agamemnon is at the war, Clytemnestra — the notes spell her name more than one way — plots with Aegisthus, whom they call her lover, and when the long war ends in victory she kills the husband who comes home.

From the bare plot, Clytemnestra looks like a villain who deserves blame. But because Agamemnon killed their daughter before sailing, the notes refuse to call only her wicked. Still, they feel the work paints Agamemnon as a man unfairly slain, and Clytemnestra as the darker figure. When he kills Iphigenia he claims necessity — the small sacrificed for the great — and says he himself is in pain. The play, they write, grants his act a justification. Her revenge is ignored by the people on stage, who say they will make an enemy of her if she succeeds.

Those same voices speak of revenge when Paris takes the wife of the brother Menelaus, yet they will not grant Clytemnestra her revenge for a child. People on stage say she speaks like a wise man and do not treat her as an ordinary woman. She persuades Agamemnon, who had not wanted to walk the purple carpet, and the strong husband weakens in front of her, a portrait the notes read as making her masculinity larger. Aegisthus is drawn as a base man hungry for power, which makes her look like a wife who has abandoned her husband. She welcomes him warmly while already meaning to kill him. The notes set Euripides’s Medea beside her: both plays, they say, paint a woman who will not submit as if she were unnatural, a view that belongs to a male-centered world. They stop there, and do not name the goddess of the wind.