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 existing literary evidence. Greek mythology has changed over time to accommodate the evolution of their culture, of which mythology, both overtly and in its unspoken assumptions, is an index of the changes. In Greek mythology's surviving literary forms, as found mostly at the end of the progressive changes, it is inherently political, as Gilbert Cuthbertson has argued. The earlier inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula were an agricultural people who, using Animism, assigned a spirit to every aspect of nature. Eventually, these vague spirits assumed human forms and entered the local mythology as gods. When tribes from the north of the