Clytemnestra was the daughter of Tyndareus and Leda, the King and Queen of Sparta.

According to the myth, Zeus appeared to Leda in the form of a swan, seducing and
impregnating her. Leda produced four offspring from two eggs: Castor and Clytemnestra from
one egg, and Helen and Polydeuces (Pollux) from the other. Therefore, Castor and
Clytemnestra were fathered by Tyndareus, whereas Helen and Polydeuces were fathered
by Zeus.
Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus were in exile at the home of Tyndareus; in due time
Agamemnon married Clytemnestra and Menelaus married Helen. In a late variation,
Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, Clytemnestra's first husband was Tantalus, King of Pisa;
Agamemnon kills him and his infant son, then made Clytemnestra his wife. In another version,
her first husband was King of Lydia. The kings of Lydia, according to Plutarch's The Greek
Questions, 45,[4] having succeeded Omphale who had received from HeraklesHippolyte'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[5] Clytemnestra used such double-edged ax to assist her lover Aegisthos
in the killing of Agamemnon (and later, 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 B.C.) by the Dokimasia Painter.[6]