Agamemnon

But Agamemnon did not forget the threat that he had made Achilles, and called his trusty messengers and squires [ therapontes] Talthybios and Eurybates.

since Phoebus Apollo is taking Chryseis from me, I shall send her with my ship and my followers, but I shall come to your tent and take your own prize Briseis, that you may learn how much more prestigious I am than you are, and that another may fear to set himself up as equal or comparable with me.

Then Agamemnon said, "Achilles, valiant though you be, you shall not thus get the better of me in matters of the mind [ noos].

" Upon this Philip asked, "But you, Alexander—would you choose to have been Agamemnon, or Achilles, or one of those heroes, rather than Homer?

So that Agamemnon prayed for ten such old men to be his counselors, rather than young warriors like Ajax and Achilles, since thus Troy would the sooner be taken.

'As a bull is far the most conspicuous of all in the herd, for he stands out among the gathered cattle, such did Zeus make the son of Atreus on that day, preeminent among many and conspicuous among heroes.

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;

but we were over there, fighting hard [ athlos] at Troy, and Aigisthos who was taking his ease quietly in the heart of Argos, cajoled Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra with incessant flattery.

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.

Do you know the first lines if the in which the poet says that Chryses implored Agamemnon to release his daughter, and that the king was angry and that Chryses, failing of his request, imprecated curses on the Achaeans in his prayers to the god?

he snatched your letter violently from my grasp, Agamemnon, and will not heed the claims of right.

A dreadful venture yours, king Agamemnon, you that, by promise of your daughter’s hand to the son of the goddess, were bringing the maid here to be sacrificed for the Danaids.

Then why are you outside your tent, why so restless, my lord Agamemnon?

O father, Agamemnon, you lie in Hades, by the butchery of your wife and Aegisthus.

O ancient plain of land, the streams of Inachus, from which king Agamemnon once mounted war on a thousand ships and sailed to the land of Troy.

A wail, a song of death, of death, for you, father, under the earth, I speak the laments in which I am always engaged, day by day, tearing my skin with my nails, and striking my cropped head with my hand, for your death.

Then the people shouted their applause, and king Agamemnon told the young men to let go the maid.

There was Agamemnon, all eagerness in your interest, because of his love for the frenzied prophetess;

Hecuba, I feel compassion for you and your son and your ill-fortune, as well as for your suppliant gesture, and I would gladly see that impious host pay you this forfeit for the sake of heaven and justice, if I could only find some way to help you without appearing to the army to have plotted the death of the Thracian king for Cassandra’s sake.

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

For there lord Agamemnon mustered his expedition of a thousand ships of Hellas, wanting to take the crown of Troy in glorious victory and avenge the outrage to Helen’s marriage, doing this favor for Menelaus.

but while you are killing me, my mother and the Argive women are singing wedding hymns, and the whole house is filled with the music of flutes;

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;

When I arrived at Nauplia, my wife already on the point of starting here, I was expecting to give a fond embrace to Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, and his mother, thinking that they were doing well, when I heard from a sailor the unholy murder of Tyndareus’ child.

while lord Agamemnon married Clytemnestra, notorious in Hellas;

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!

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.

For he conceived of his mission in terms so lofty that he was not satisfied with making up his army from all the men in private station whom he desired to have from each of the cities of Hellas, but even persuaded men of the rank of kings, who were accustomed to do in their own states whatsoever they pleased and to give orders to the world at large, to place themselves under his command, to follow …

nay, so far was he from injuring any one of them that, although he took command of the Hellenes when they were in a state of mutual warfare and confusion and great misfortune, he delivered them from this condition, and, having established concord among them, indifferent to all exploits which are extravagant and spectacular and of no benefit to others, he collected the Hellenes into an army and led …

Long ago from here, away from the murder of your father, I carried you for her whose blood is yours, your sister, and saved you and reared you up to manhood to be the avenger of your murdered father.

My accursed bed in that house of suffering there knows well already how I observe my night-long rites—how often I bewail my miserable father, whom bloody Ares did not welcome with deadly gifts in a foreign land, but my mother and her bedfellow Aegisthus split his head with murderous axe, just as woodmen chop an oak.

Angered by this, Leto’s daughter detained the Greeks so that in requital for the beast’s life my father should sacrifice his own daughter.

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 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.

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

’Gainst the great King now keeps him from the fight.

Toward Agamemnon’s tent the whole

Or Agamemnon’s head and plume

for if Loxias is indeed a prophet, Agamemnon, that famous king of the Achaeans, will find in me a bride more vexatious than Helen.

Cassandra, whom the lord Apollo left to be a virgin, frenzied maid, has been forced by Agamemnon, in contempt of the god’s ordinance and of piety, to a dishonored wedlock.

For that mighty king of all Hellas, dear son of Atreus, has yielded to a passion for this mad maiden of all others;

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.

With Agamemnon's daughter, foully slain.

'Twas she who gave the king a father's name.

Making his child a sacrificial beast