Agamemnon

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led the greatest military coalition the ancient Greek world had ever seen to the shores of Troy. He commanded the Achaean forces in a war that would become the defining myth of Western civilization. Yet when he finally came home, his own wife killed him in his bath. The questions his story raises are not battlefield questions. They are questions about power, guilt, loyalty, and what happens to a dynasty when sin compounds across generations. What drove a king to sacrifice his daughter to win favorable winds? What did it mean to be the most powerful prince in all of Greece, and yet be brought down inside your own palace? And what curse was already running through his bloodline long before he ever sailed for Troy?

• 2. A Name Built to Last

  ›

  Scholars have proposed multiple competing etymologies for the name Agamemnon, and none has fully settled the debate. One reading breaks the name into the Greek elements meaning "very much" and "to stay, stand fast," yielding the overall sense of "very steadfast" or "resolute." A second reading traces the second element to a word meaning "to think on" or "to provide for," producing something closer to "very mindful." A third proposal connects the root to a verb meaning "to wish eagerly" or "to strive," giving the name a quality of fierce ambition rather than patience. Linguist Vaclav Blazek has gone further still, proposing a relationship between the name and the Vedic Sanskrit word Agni, finding both etymological and functional connections between Agamemnon and fire. That his name still prompts scholarly argument thousands of years after it was first spoken is itself a kind of testament to the king's lasting grip on the imagination.

• 3. The Cursed Dynasty

  ›

  Tantalus, Agamemnon's great-grandfather, was once in Zeus's favor. He squandered that standing by attempting to feed his own son Pelops to the gods, apparently to test their omniscience, and by stealing ambrosia and nectar. His punishment was eternal: banished to the underworld, forced to stand in water that evaporates whenever he bends to drink, reaching forever toward fruit that the wind blows just beyond his grasp. His descendants would face similar or worse fates.

  Pelops, after his resurrection, used his connection to Poseidon to obtain a divine chariot and beat Oenomaus, king of Pisa, in a race. The prize was Hippodamia, the king's daughter. A man named Myrtilus helped Pelops win, then tried to lie with the new bride. Pelops threw Myrtilus from a cliff. Before he fell, Myrtilus cursed Pelops and every generation to come. Pelops and Hippodamia's sons Atreus and Thyestes were said to have murdered their own half-brother Chrysippus; Pelops banished them both to Mycenae.

  Thyestes then seduced Atreus's wife Aerope, conspiring to steal the throne. Atreus responded by murdering Thyestes' children and cooking them into a feast that Thyestes unknowingly ate. Atreus then taunted his brother by showing him the hands and feet of the sons he had just consumed. Thyestes, following an oracle's instruction, fathered Aegisthus upon his own daughter Pelopia in an act intended to produce an avenger. That child, Aegisthus, was abandoned, discovered by a shepherd, and raised inside the house of Atreus without knowing his true parentage. When he reached adulthood, Thyestes revealed the truth. Aegisthus killed Atreus and handed the throne of Mycenae to his father. Agamemnon and Menelaus fled to Sparta.

• 4. The Price of Departure

  ›

  Agamemnon and Menelaus spent their years in Sparta under the protection of King Tyndareus, and each married one of his daughters. Agamemnon took Clytemnestra; Menelaus took Helen. In some versions, including the play Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, Clytemnestra had already been married to another man named Tantalus, and Agamemnon killed both him and their infant son before marrying her. With Menelaus's help, Agamemnon eventually drove Aegisthus and Thyestes out of Mycenae, reclaimed his father's kingdom, and extended his dominion through conquest until he was, by the reckoning of the myths, the most powerful prince in Greece.

  When Menelaus's wife Helen ran off with Paris of Troy, it fell to Agamemnon to summon the reluctant Achaean armies. To bring Odysseus, who was feigning madness to avoid the war, Agamemnon sent Palamedes, who threatened to kill Odysseus' infant son Telemachus. The threat worked; Odysseus joined.

  At Aulis, a port in Boeotia, the fleet could not sail. Plagues struck and the winds died. The prophet Calchas announced that the goddess Artemis was furious and could only be appeased by the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia. Classical sources disagree on the reason for Artemis's anger: in Aeschylus, she mourned the young men who would die at Troy; in Sophocles, Agamemnon had killed a sacred animal and boasted he was her equal as a hunter. In some accounts, Iphigenia was lured to Aulis with the false promise of a marriage to Achilles. Agamemnon ordered her killed. In other versions, among them Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, Artemis substituted a deer at the last moment and carried Iphigenia away to Tauris in the Crimean Peninsula. Hesiod wrote that she became the goddess Hecate. The winds came, and the fleet sailed.

• 5. Commander and Liability

  ›

  In the Iliad, Agamemnon's stature as king-of-kings made him commander-in-chief of the assembled Greeks, but his defining flaw operated just as visibly as his authority. After a raid, his forces took Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo. Chryses came to beg for her return. Agamemnon refused, bitterly. Apollo sent plague upon the Achaean camp. The prophet Calchas, who had already cost Agamemnon his daughter at Aulis, delivered the unwelcome diagnosis: return the girl. Agamemnon complied, but he seized Briseis, the war prize of Achilles, as compensation. Achilles withdrew from battle entirely. The Achaeans suffered.

  The Iliad treats Agamemnon's haughtiness as his chief fault: an over-exalted opinion of his own position that brought disaster onto the Greeks at the very moment when unity was most needed. In Book Nine, Agamemnon sent ambassadors to Achilles with an offer of riches and the hand of his daughter in marriage. Achilles refused. He only re-entered the war after his companion Patroclus was killed by Hector, the eldest son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba.

  By the time Achilles returned, the reconciliation scene in Book Nineteen required Agamemnon to hand over the promised rewards. The king was clearly capable of acknowledging error, even if the acknowledgment always arrived late. At the funeral games for Patroclus in Book Twenty-three, Agamemnon volunteered for the javelin-throwing contest. His skill with that weapon was so well established that Achilles awarded him the prize without the contest being run.

  The Iliad also credited Agamemnon with killing Antiphus and fifteen other named Trojan soldiers in one account, and with a full aristeia in Book Eleven, a "day of glory" the text compares to Achilles' own aristeia in Book Twenty-one. In Book Seven, when Hector challenges any Greek champion to single combat, Agamemnon was among the three warriors Hector most wished to fight from the nine who volunteered, alongside Diomedes and Ajax the Greater.

• 6. Return, Betrayal, and Revenge

  ›

  After the fall of Troy, Cassandra, the prophetic daughter of Priam, fell to Agamemnon as a prize of war. The return voyage was stormy. Agamemnon and Cassandra landed in Argolis, though one version says they were blown off course into Aegisthus's territory.

  Clytemnestra had taken Aegisthus as her lover during Agamemnon's decade away. Her motives, depending on which text you read, included grief and rage over Iphigenia's sacrifice, jealousy over Cassandra, and the accumulated resentment of a wife who had been treated as an instrument rather than a partner. In Homer's Odyssey, Aegisthus lured Agamemnon to a feast held ostensibly in his honor, and ambushed him there. Clytemnestra killed Cassandra at the same event. In the account given by Pindar and by Aeschylus in the Oresteia, Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon herself in a bath, first trapping him in a net or a blanket so he could not defend himself.

  Aegisthus then justified his own role by invoking Thyestes' old curse: "thus perish all the race of Pleisthenes." He and Clytemnestra ruled Mycenae together for a period. Agamemnon's son Orestes, grown to adulthood and pressured by his sister Electra, eventually returned and killed them both. That act of matricide provoked the Erinyes, the winged goddesses the Greeks called the Furies, who tracked wrongdoers with hounds' noses and drove them to madness. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, the cycle of intergenerational killing finally ended when Orestes was tried in a court held jointly by humans and gods, and acquitted. The miasma surrounding the house of Atreus dispersed.

  In Homer's Odyssey, Agamemnon appears in the kingdom of Hades after his death. He meets Odysseus and warns him about the dangers of trusting a woman, a bitter piece of hard-won advice from a king who did not survive his homecoming.

• 7. Legacy in Stone and Story

  ›

  The Mask of Agamemnon, a gold funerary mask discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876, was found at Mycenae and is now held at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Schliemann believed he had found the face of the king himself, though archaeologists have since disputed that identification. The object's popular name has stuck regardless, binding the king's myth to a physical relic that tourists and scholars still travel to see.

  In the legends of the Peloponnesus, Agamemnon was regarded as the ideal type of a powerful monarch. In Sparta, he was worshipped under the title of Zeus Agamemnon, and in works of art, representations of Zeus and of Agamemnon carry a notable resemblance to each other. Both figures are conventionally shown with a sceptre and diadem. His tomb was identified among the ruins of Mycenae and also at Amyclae.

  The ancient writer Athenaeus recorded that Agamemnon mourned the loss of a companion named Argynnus, who drowned in the Cephisus river. Agamemnon honored him with a tomb and a shrine to Aphrodite Argynnis. The episode appears also in Clement of Alexandria, in Stephen of Byzantium, and in Propertius, with minor variations across each telling.

  The Oresteia of Aeschylus remains the most celebrated dramatic treatment of the story. Agamemnon appears as a character in William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Frank Herbert carried the lineage forward into his science fiction series Dune, where the House of Atreides traces itself back to the House of Atreus; in Children of Dune, the character Alia Atreides hears Agamemnon's voice demanding audience from within her ancestral memories. Agamemnon's mare, named Aetha, is shared with Menelaus: she is one of the two horses Menelaus drives at the funeral games of Patroclus, a small detail in a vast mythology, but one that links the brothers one final time in an act of mourning.