Agamemnon

The order that split the Greek army

Agamemnon is king of Mycenae and commander of the Achaeans, the name Homer gives to the Greek army at Troy. Homer calls him again and again “king of men”.

The Iliad opens with a quarrel. A god, Apollo, has sent a plague on the army, and Agamemnon must give back Chryseis, a captive woman he holds, to end it. He refuses to be the only king left without a prize. So he sends two heralds, his messengers, to the shelter of Achilles with an order: take Briseis, the captive woman awarded to Achilles, and bring her away.

The heralds arrive frightened and silent. Achilles lets Briseis go rather than attack them. But he names the commander who has forced this on him, and he warns that the army will need him later.

By taking Briseis, Agamemnon means to prove that his rank is greater. Briseis pays for that, and so does the army when Achilles leaves the fighting. Agamemnon’s command gathered the expedition, but it cannot make Achilles fight. He can enforce the order. He cannot control what follows from it.

The homecoming at Argos

The Greek playwright Aeschylus tells what happens when Agamemnon returns after Troy has fallen. In his play, Agamemnon comes home to Argos. He steps down from his chariot and speaks as a victor. He greets the local gods and describes the city he destroyed. He says he will enter the palace to honour the powers that sent him out and brought him home.

The audience has already seen a beacon, a signal fire, carry the news of Troy’s fall to his wife, Clytemnestra. The signal that announces his success has given her time to prepare his welcome.

Cassandra, a captive from Troy, arrives in his chariot. She knows that both of them will die inside the house. But the god Apollo has punished her, and so nobody believes her warnings.

Victory brings Agamemnon back to his own doors, but not back into control. At Troy he commanded kings, took captives and decided whose honour counted. At home, Clytemnestra controls the welcome, the palace and the story of what is about to happen.

Who kills Agamemnon?

The ancient accounts do not agree on who kills him. In the Odyssey, Homer’s other epic poem, the killer is Aegisthus. He prepares a feast for the returning king. In Aeschylus’s play, the killer is Clytemnestra herself, and she describes the act standing over the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra.

In the play, she throws a robe or net around Agamemnon that he cannot escape, so he cannot defend himself. She strikes him twice as he stands, then a third time after he falls. She leaves no doubt. Standing beside the dead, she says the long-planned deed is hers.

The two versions shift the centre of the story. In Homer, Agamemnon is destroyed by a rival man inside a corrupted household. In Aeschylus, the wife he left behind does the killing herself. In both, the commander who demanded that Achilles submit in public dies trapped and unable to move in his own palace.

The tomb and the mask at Mycenae

Pausanias, a Greek travel writer of the second century AD, visited the ruins of Mycenae. He recorded graves said to belong to Agamemnon, to his charioteer Eurymedon, and to the men killed with him after the return from Troy. By his time, the ground of the city carried a physical map of the homecoming story.

Archaeology makes a different kind of link. In 1876 excavation at Mycenae uncovered Grave Circle A, a burial ground. The man leading the dig linked one gold face covering from Tomb V with Homer’s king, and the name Mask of Agamemnon stayed with it.

The burials in Grave Circle A date to the 16th century BC. That is at least four centuries before the conflict that archaeologists usually link with the Trojan War. The mask, now in the National Archaeological Museum, carries Agamemnon’s name, but it covered the face of a ruler who lived long before him.