Clytemnestra Lydia, according to Plutarch's The Greek Questions, 45, having succeeded Omphale who had received from Herakles Hippolyte's (the queen of the Amazons') axe, carried this axe (called labrys by Lydians) as one of their sacred insignia of office. In the tradition following the Sicilian lyric poet Stesichorus's "Oresteia" Clytemnestra used such a double-edged ax to assist her lover Aegisthus in the killing of Agamemnon (and later, to attempt to kill her son Orestes, as he arrived to avenge his father's death), as depicted on the mixing bowl (calyx krater) with the killing of Agamemnon (Early Classical Period – about 460
Greek mythology was their sexual companion, to every important god except Ares and to many legendary figures. Previously existing myths, such as those of Achilles and Patroclus, also then were cast in a pederastic light. Alexandrian poets at first, then more generally literary mythographers in the early Roman Empire, often re-adapted stories of Greek mythological characters in this fashion. The achievement of epic poetry was to create story-cycles and, as a result, to develop a new sense of mythological chronology. Thus Greek mythology unfolds as a phase in the development of the world and of humans. While self-contradictions in these stories make