Greece's supreme commander at Troy was undone by his own arrogance
Agamemnon led the Greek host to Troy, yet the Iliad's drama springs from his worst trait. Forced to return a captured priest's daughter to end a plague, he seized Achilles' prize instead, and his best warrior walked out. Ancient writers saw a king whose haughtiness kept dragging disaster onto his own side.
He was king of Mycenae, or Argos, which may be two names for the same realm, and brother of Menelaus, the husband of Helen. His family carried an old curse running back to his ancestors Tantalus and Pelops, and it played out as generations of murder, incest and betrayal. After his father Atreus was killed by his cousin Aegisthus, the brothers took refuge with King Tyndareus of Sparta and married his daughters, Clytemnestra and Helen. With Menelaus' help Agamemnon then won back Mycenae and grew into the most powerful prince in Greece.
Getting the fleet to Troy cost him dearly. Artemis, angered for reasons that differ by source, becalmed the ships at Aulis, and the seer Calchas declared that only the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia would appease her. Some versions have the girl lured with a false promise of marriage to Achilles; another has Artemis swap in a deer and spirit her to Tauris in Crimea, though that ending is widely thought to be a later insertion. Hesiod even says she became the goddess Hecate.
In the Iliad's final year of war, Agamemnon's quarrel with Achilles nearly costs the Greeks everything. They are driven back to their ships, and in Book Nine he sends envoys offering riches and a daughter's hand, but Achilles returns only after Hector kills his companion Patroclus. As commander, Agamemnon summoned councils and fought bravely, yet he was never Achilles' equal in courage.
His homecoming was fatal. In the Odyssey, Aegisthus, now Clytemnestra's lover, kills him at a welcoming feast; in Aeschylus' Oresteia, Clytemnestra kills him herself in the bath after trapping him in a net. Her motives vary with the teller, from grief over Iphigenia to jealousy of Cassandra, the Trojan prophetess he brought home. Aeschylus ends the family's cycle of vengeance only when their son Orestes faces a court of gods and humans.
Source: Agamemnon
