While Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was away at war, his wife, Klytaimnestra, alienated by her husband's sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia to obtain the favorable winds needed to sail to Troy, took Aegisthos as a lover. On the king's return home, the two plot to kill him in his bath. Here Agamemnon, diminished in stature and dripping wet, is trapped in a net, while Aegisthos stands over him, ready to strike with his sword. Behind Aegisthos, Klytaimnestra carries a double ax to lend a hand. Three other women are present-probably two of Agamemnon's daughters and Kassandra, his war prize from Troy-emphasizing that this scene takes place inside the palace at Mycenae; Ionic columns under the handles of the vase also frame the scene indoors. On the other side of this krater, Orestes, son of Agamemnon, avenges the death of his father by killing Aegisthos. The subject matter on the opposite sides of vases is not always thematically matched, but vessels that feature Trojan scenes often combine related episodes.

Although battle scenes were popular on vases, murders were markedly less common, and this rendering is particularly gory. Dated to just before 458 B.C., when Aeschylus's play Agamemnon was first performed, the krater demonstrates how integral these stories were to popular culture in fifth-century-B.C. Athens. Both the vase painter and the playwright were reinterpreting tales that had originated hundreds of years earlier. In Greek theater, killings occurred offstage, and the action was reported back to the audience by a messenger or the chorus, but the vase painter makes this act explicit. Abrupt diagonal lines in the composition, a technique used in architectural sculpture of the period, underscore the violence of the murder.

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