Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the commander-in-chief of the Greek forces at Troy. He is figures in Homer’s Iliad, the man whose quarrel with Achilles over a captive woman is the central conflict of the poem. Agamemnon was a great warrior and a powerful king, but he was also arrogant, vain, and ultimately tragic, killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus when he returned home from Troy. His story is the subject of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the only complete tragic trilogy to survive from ancient Greece.
The Family of Agamemnon
Agamemnon was the son of King Atreus of Mycenae and Queen Aerope. He had a brother, Menelaus, who would later become the husband of Helen. His sister was Anaxibia, who married the king of Sparta. The family was the most powerful in Greece, and the curse that hung over the house of Atreus would shape the lives of all its members.
The curse of the house of Atreus began with Agamemnon’s grandfather, Tantalus, who was punished by the gods for serving his son Pelops as a meal to the gods. The curse continued with Atreus and his brother Thyestes, who feuded over the kingship, and it ended with Agamemnon and his family.
The Choice of Agamemnon
Agamemnon married Clytemnestra, the daughter of King Tyndareus of Sparta and Leda. According to one tradition, Agamemnon won Clytemnestra’s hand by killing the previous suitors. According to another, Tyndareus gave Clytemnestra to Agamemnon in gratitude for his help in securing the kingship of Mycenae.
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had several children, including Iphigenia, Electra, and Orestes. Iphigenia was the daughter who would be sacrificed by Agamemnon at Aulis, before the Greek fleet could sail to Troy. Electra would, in later myth, conspire with Orestes to avenge the death of Agamemnon.
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia
The sacrifice of Iphigenia is one of the most troubling myths of the Trojan War. According to the most familiar version, the Greek fleet was stuck at Aulis, with no wind to carry the ships to Troy. The seer Calchas revealed that the winds were sent by Artemis, angry because Agamemnon had killed a sacred deer and boasted that he was a better hunter than the goddess. The only way to appease the goddess was to sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia.
Agamemnon, faced with the choice between his daughter and the war, agreed to the sacrifice. He sent a message to Clytemnestra, asking her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis, ostensibly to be married to Achilles. When Iphigenia arrived, she was sacrificed on the altar of Artemis. In some versions of the myth, Artemis substituted a deer at the last moment and carried Iphigenia off to Tauris, where she became the goddess’s priestess. In other versions, Iphigenia was actually killed.
The sacrifice of Iphigenia is the subject of Euripides’s play Iphigenia in Aulis, one of the most powerful Greek tragedies. The sacrifice is also one of the main reasons for Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon on his return from Troy: she never forgave him for the death of their daughter.
The Quarrel with Achilles
The central conflict of the Iliad is the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. The quarrel began over a captive woman, Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo. When her father came to ransom her, Agamemnon refused, and Apollo sent a plague on the Greek camp. The seer Calchas revealed the cause, and Achilles demanded that Agamemnon return Chryseis to her father. In a rage, Agamemnotn agreed but took Achilles’s own captive, Briseis, as compensation.
Humiliated, Achilles withdrew from the fighting and prayed to his mother Thetis to ask Zeus to favor the Trojans, so that the Greeks would learn to honor him. Zeus agreed, and the war turned against the Greeks.
The quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles is the central conflict of the Iliad, and it has been the subject of countless works of literature, art, and film. The quarrel represents the tension between the leader and the hero, between political authority and individual prowess, and it is one of the foundational conflicts of Western literature.
The Return and Death of Agamemnon
After the fall of Troy, Agamemnon returned to Mycenae. He had taken as a concubine the prophetess Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam, and he brought her back to Greece. His wife Clytemnestra had taken a lover, Aegisthus, the cousin of Agamemnon, and they plotted to kill Agamemnon.
According to the most familiar version, Clytemnestra welcomed Agamemnon with a warm bath, and then, while he was washing, she threw a net over him and killed him with an axe. Cassandra was also killed. Aegisthus then took the throne of Mycenae, and he ruled for several years with Clytemnestra as his queen.
The murder of Agamemnon was the central event of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the only complete Greek tragic trilogy to survive. The first play, Agamemnon, tells the story of his return and murder. The second, The Libation Bearers, tells the story of his son Orestes’ return and his murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. The third, The Eumenides, tells the story of Orestes’ trial and his acquittal by the court of Athens.
The Cultural Legacy of Agamemnon
Agamemnon has been a major figure in Western culture for three thousand years. The mask of Agamemnon, discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 at Mycenae, is artifacts of the ancient world, although it is now thought to predate the legendary Agamemnon by three hundred years.
The figure of Agamemnon has been the subject of countless works of literature, art, and film, including Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Ajax, Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, the Agamemnon of Charles Butler, and the 2004 film Troy, in which he was played by Brian Cox.
The phrase “the king of men” is the standard English translation of the Homeric phrase anax andron, the title given to Agamemnon throughout the Iliad. The phrase has become a byword for the burdens of leadership, the difficulty of decision-making, and the price of power.
For more on the mythological context, see our guide to the Trojan War, and our profiles of Achilles, Clytemnestra, and Orestes. For more on the cultural legacy, see our guide to Greek mythology in modern culture.