Agamemnon

The order that broke the Achaean army

Agamemnon sends two heralds to Achilles’s shelter with an order: take Briseis and bring her away. The men arrive frightened and silent. Achilles releases the captive woman rather than attack them, but names the commander who has forced the act and warns that the army will need him later.

The seizure is not a private quarrel between two warriors. Agamemnon has returned Chryseis to end Apollo’s plague and refuses to be the only king left without a prize. By taking the woman awarded to Achilles, he means to prove that his rank is greater. Briseis pays for that demonstration, and the Achaean army pays when Achilles withdraws.

Homer repeatedly calls Agamemnon king of men, yet command does not make him the best fighter or the surest judge. The authority that gathered the expedition cannot compel Achilles to fight. Agamemnon can enforce the order, but he cannot control what follows from it.

What kind of victory did he bring home?

Aeschylus brings Agamemnon back to Argos after Troy has fallen. He steps from his chariot speaking as a victor. He greets the local gods, describes the city he destroyed and says that he will enter the palace to honour the powers who sent him out and brought him home.

The audience has already watched a beacon announce Troy’s fall to Clytemnestra. The same signal that proclaims Agamemnon’s success gives her time to receive him. Cassandra arrives in his chariot, another captive carried out of the war. She understands that both of them will die inside the house, but Apollo’s punishment ensures that nobody believes her warnings.

Victory has restored Agamemnon to his own doors without restoring his control. At Troy he could command kings, take captives and decide whose honour counted. At home, Clytemnestra controls the welcome, the palace and the account of what is about to happen.

Who kills Agamemnon?

The surviving accounts do not assign the murder in the same way. Homer’s Odyssey makes Aegisthus the killer who prepares a feast for the returning king. Aeschylus puts the act in Clytemnestra’s hands and lets her describe it before the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra.

In the play, Clytemnestra throws an impassable robe or net around Agamemnon so that he cannot escape or defend himself. She strikes twice as he stands, then gives a third blow after he falls. There is no uncertainty in her claim. She stands beside the dead and says that the long-planned deed is hers.

The difference changes the centre of the homecoming. Homer’s Agamemnon is destroyed by a rival man inside a corrupted household. Aeschylus makes the wife he left behind carry out the killing herself. Either way, the commander who demanded visible submission from Achilles dies after being deprived of movement in his own palace.

What belongs to Agamemnon at Mycenae?

Pausanias visited ruined Mycenae and recorded graves assigned to Agamemnon, his charioteer Eurymedon and the men killed after returning from Troy. His account shows that the city’s ground had acquired a physical map of the homecoming story by the second century AD.

Archaeology provides a different kind of connection. Heinrich Schliemann excavated Grave Circle A in 1876 under the supervision of the Greek archaeologist Panayotis Stamatakis. Schliemann identified one gold face covering from Tomb V with the Homeric king, and the name Mask of Agamemnon remained attached to it.

The National Archaeological Museum now dates the burials in Grave Circle A to the 16th century BC. Its account places them at least four centuries before the conflict usually linked archaeologically with the Trojan War. The museum holds a mask named for Agamemnon, not the face of Agamemnon.