Agamemnon

I have no quarrel with them.

" Achilles in turn said to him:

" Achilles scowled at him and answered, "You are steeped in insolence and lust of gain.

Agamemnon, however, he did not count blessed, for he hoped himself to rule over far more peoples than that king ruled.

"Agamemnon, at least, king of all and the wealthiest, he says always sacrificed an ox, and to it invited the best men.

"And many other lessons and teachings one might cite from Homer, courageous and kingly, to go through which now would perhaps take too long.

At that moment he was thinking of Aigisthos, who had been killed by Agamemnon's son Orestes;

he must needs make love to Agamemnon's wife unrighteously and then kill Agamemnon, though he knew it would be the death of him;

moreover there was a singer with her, to whom Agamemnon had given strict orders on setting out for Troy, that he was to keep guard over his wife;

For he who has sufficiently seen — what is clearer than the light — that, soul and body consumed and the whole living being destroyed and a universal perishing wrought, that living thing which once was has become nothing, will plainly perceive that there is no difference between the Hippocentaur, who never existed, and King Agamemnon, and that Marcus Camillus now cares no more about this civil war …

I should test, too, the wisdom of the highest king who led the great hosts to Troy, and of Ulysses and Sisyphus;

(For if anyone grieve at the prosperity of one by whom he himself is hurt, he would not rightly be said to envy, as if Agamemnon at Hector;

Then, though there are many other things that we praise in Homer, this we will not applaud, the sending of the dream by Zeus to Agamemnon, nor shall we approve of Aeschylus when his Thetis avers that Apollo singing at her wedding, foretold the happy fortunes of her issue — Their days prolonged, from pain and sickness free, And rounding out the tale of heaven’s blessings, Raised the proud paean, making glad my heart.

nor shall we think it proper nor admit that Achilles himself was so greedy as to accept gifts from Agamemnon and again to give up a dead body after receiving payment but otherwise to refuse.

and when he had thus spoken the others were of reverent mind and approved, but Agamemnon was angry and bade him depart and not come again lest the scepter and the fillets of the god should not avail him.

Menelaus:

Menelaus:

Menelaus:

Electra:

Electra:

Electra:

Hecuba:

Hecuba:

Hecuba:

Yes, for he was dreadfully murdered by a woman.

There was said to be a certain lord, Agamemnon, son of Atreus.

Lord and general of Hellas, Agamemnon, you will not set free your ships from land until Artemis has your daughter Iphigenia as a victim.

My father begot me;

while lord Agamemnon married Clytemnestra, notorious in Hellas;

For I learned Agamemnon’s fate and the death he died at his wife’s hands, as I was trying to put in at Malea;

Be that as it may, the anger of Talthybius, Agamemnon 's herald, fell upon the Lacedaemonians.

“In truth,” he cried, “loudly would Agamemnon son of Pelops lament, when hearing that the Spartans had been bereft of their command by Gelon and his Syracusans!

For he is the only man who was ever deemed worthy to be the leader of the armies of all Hellas.

and Argos, Agamemnon, who was possessed, not of one or two of the virtues merely, but of all which anyone can name— and these, not in moderate, but in surpassing degree.

And no one will be found, among those who rose to fame in his time or in later generations, to have accomplished an expedition more honorable than this or more advantageous to the Hellenes.

Electra:

Electra:

Dear sister, let none of these offerings in your hands touch the tomb.

while as for himself, he desired to go and offer sacrifice at Aulis, the place where Agamemnon had sacrificed before he sailed to Troy.

For he was able to say that his people were the only ones among the Greeks who had fought on the side of the King at Plataea, that they had never afterwards undertaken a campaign against the King, and that the Lacedaemonians had made war upon them for precisely the reason that they had declined to go with Agesilaus against him and had refused to permit Agesilaus to sacrifice to Artemis at Aulis, t …

hence Homer called Agamemnon shepherd of the people.

And the portion I desired was that in which, when the Greeks had fared ill, the man whom Agamemnon had insulted he sought to win back with gifts.

nor was the fact that I went down to the Campus the cause of my playing at ball, nor was Hecuba the cause of the Trojans’ destruction because she bore Alexander, nor Tyndareus the cause to Agamemnon because he begot Clytaemnestra.

This reasoning impelled the poets, and most of all Homer, to attach to the chief of the heroes — Ulysses, Diomedes, Agamemnon, Achilles — certain gods as companions of their crises and dangers.

And in the eighteenth year of the kingdom of Agamemnon Ilium was taken, in the first year of the reign at Athens of Demophon, son of Theseus, on the twelfth of the month Thargelion, as Dionysius the Argive says;

The son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, by name Orestes, on my way to the oracle of Zeus at Dodona.

The son of Atreus is no more, slain by the hand of his wife, and she herself hath paid the debt of blood by death, and from her children’s hands received her doom.

HECTOR.

Or Agamemnon’s head and plume

To Helen bear at dawn of day!

Talthybius:

Talthybius:

King Agamemnon has chosen her out for himself.

and the Greeks under their leader Agamemnon waged war against the king of Mysia on the ground that, as Baldus has said, high roads were free by nature.

Making his child a sacrificial beast

As once at Aulis, the elected chiefs,

With a dumb terror and a sinking knee