The characterisation of female avengers in ancient Greek tragedy has received a substantial amount of attention in classical scholarship. However, a consensus has not been reached on how the fifth-century Athenian audience would have reacted to the tragic representation of female acts of vengeance. Whilst Burnett has hypothesised that revenge in tragic plays would have been perceived as unproblematic, because ‘among early Greeks revenge was not a problem, but a solution’, others have argued that it would have recalled archaic tyranny rather than classical democracy, and therefore would have been viewed negatively. The question remains unsolved mainly due to the complicated way in which tragic heroines are gendered in revenge plots. Depicted committing vengeance within and against their own family, female characters do not play the natural and social role that the democratic polis would have expected. Their transgressive behaviour has been generally interpreted as either an inversion or a perversion of gender roles in tragic characterisation, typical of and suitable for the festival of Dionysus at which the tragedies were originally performed. Given that the ritual context of dramatic festivals encouraged the representation of female acts of vengeance, it is necessary to clarify how and why this could trigger a tragic effect on the ancient audience.

I propose a new methodological approach to the reading and interpretation of the contradictory gendered identity of female avengers in ancient Greek tragedy. Through the application of a posthumanist perspective as suggested by Braidotti, I explore the dramatic significance of lioness imagery in the depiction of tragic heroines who are empowered in intra-familial vengeful conflicts. My textual analysis of the specific tragic passages from the Agamemnon and the Medea where the lioness metaphorically occurs reveals the human contradictions of the agency of the two most transgressive female avengers performing on the Attic stage. When the Aeschylean Clytemnestra and the Euripidean Medea are compared to vengeful lionesses, they are attributed what Braidotti calls the ‘protean quality’ of being ‘complicitous with genocides and crimes on the one hand, and supportive of enormous hopes and aspiration to freedom on the other’. Building on this idea, I demonstrate that the metamorphic identity of the tragic heroines could provoke an effect of pathos on the ancient audience.