b. It is said that Zeus gave power to the House of Aeacus, wisdom to the House of Amythaon, but wealth to the House of Atreus. Wealthy indeed it was: the kings of Mycenae, Corinth, Cleonae, Orneiae, Arathyrea, Sicyon, Hyperesia, Gonoessa, Pellene, Aegium, Aegialus, and Helice, all paid tribute to Agamemnon, both on land and sea.
c. Agamemnon first made war against Tantalus, King of Pisa, the son of his ugly uncle Broteas, killed him in battle and forcibly married his widow Clytaenmestra, whom Leda had borne to King Tyndareus of Sparta. The Dioscuri, Clytaenmestra’s brothers, thereupon marched on Mycenae; but Agamemnon had already gone as a suppliant to his benefactor Tyndareus, who forgave him and let him keep Clytaemnestra. After the death of the Dioscuri, Menelaus married their sister Helen, and Tyndareus abdicated in his favour.
d. Clytaenmestra bore Agamemnon one son, Orestes, and three daughters: Electra, or Laodice; Iphigeneia, or Iphianassa; and Chrysothemis; though some say that Iphigeneia was Clytaemnestra’s niece, the daughter of Theseus and Helen, whom she took pity upon and adopted.
e. When Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy, abducted Helen and thus provoked the Trojan War, both Agamemnon and Menelaus were absent from home for ten years; but Aegisthus did not join their expedition, preferring to stay behind at Argos and seek revenge on the House of Atreus.
f. Now, Nauplius, the husband of Clymene, having failed to obtain requital from Agamemnon and the other Greek leaders for the stoning of his son Palamedes, had sailed away from Troy and coasted around Attica and the Peloponnese, inciting the lonely wives of his enemies to adultery. Aegisthus, therefore, when he heard that Clytaemnestra was among those most eager to be convinced by Nauplius, planned not only to become her lover, but to kill Agamemnon, with her assistance, as soon as the Trojan War ended.
g. Hermes, sent to Aegisthus by Omniscient Zeus, warned him to abandon this project, on the ground that when Orestes had grown to manhood, he would be bound to avenge his father. For all his eloquence, however, Hermes failed to deter Aegisthus, who went to Mycenae with rich gifts in his hands, but hatred in his heart. At first, Clytaemnestra rejected his advances, because Agamemnon, apprised of Nauplius’s visit to Mycenae, had instructed his court bard to keep close watch on her and report to him, in writing, the least sign of infidelity. But Aegisthus seized the old minstrel and marooned him without food on a lonely island, where birds of prey were soon picking his bones. Clytaemnestra then yielded to Aegisthus’s embraces, and he celebrated his unhoped for success with burnt offerings to Aphrodite, and gifts of tapestries and gold to Artemis, who was nursing a grudge against the House of Atreus.
h. Clytaemnestra had small cause to love Agamemnon: after killing her former husband Tantalus, and the new-born child at her breast, he had married her by force, and then gone away to a war which promised never to end; he had also sanctioned the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis-and, this she found even harder to bear-was said to be bringing back Priam’s daughter Cassandra, the prophetess, as his wife in all but name. It is true that Cassandra had borne Agamemnon twin sons: Teledamus and Pelops, but he does not seem to have intended any insult to Clytaemnestra. Her informant had been Nauplius’s surviving son Oeax who, in vengeance for his brother’s death, was maliciously provoking her to do murder.
i. Clytaemnestra therefore conspired with Aegisthus to kill both Agamemnon and Cassandra. Fearing, however, that they might arrive unexpectedly, she wrote Agamemnon a letter asking him to light a beacon on Mount Ida when Troy fell; and herself arranged for a chain of fires to relay his signal to Argolis by way of Cape Hermaeum on Lemnos, and the mountains of Athos, Macisms, Messapius, Cithaeron, Aegiplanctus, and Arachne. A watchman was also stationed on the roof of the palace at Mycenae: a faithful servant of Agamemnon’s, who spent one whole year, crouched on his elbows like a dog, gazing towards Mount Arachne and filled with gloomy forebodings. At last, one dark night, he saw the distant beacon blaze and ran to wake Clytaemnestra. She celebrated the news with sacrifices of thanksgiving; though, indeed, she would now have liked the siege of Troy to last forever. Aegisthus thereupon posted one of his own men in a watchtower near the sea, promising him two gold talents for the first news of Agamemnon’s landing.
j. Hera had rescued Agamemnon from the fierce storm which destroyed many of the returning Greek ships and drove Menelaus to Egypt; and, at last, a fair wind carried him to Nauplia. No sooner had he disembarked, than he bent down to kiss the soil, weeping for joy. Meanwhile the watchman hurried to Mycenae to collect his fee, and Aegisthus chose twenty of the boldest warriors, posted them in ambush inside the palace, ordered a great banquet and then, mounting his chariot, rode down to welcome Agamemnon.
k. Clytaemnestra greeted her travel-worn husband with every appearance of delight, unrolled a purple carpet for him, and led him to the bath-house, where slave-girls had prepared a warm bath; but Cassandra remained outside the palace, caught in a prophetic trance, refusing to enter, and crying that she smelt blood, and that the curse of Thyestes was heavy upon the dining-hall. When Agamemnon had washed himself and set one foot out of the bath, eager to partake of the rich banquet now already set on the tables, Clytaemnestra came forward, as if to wrap a towel about him, but instead threw over his head a garment of net, woven by herself, without either neck or sleeve-holes. Entangled in this, like a fish, Agamemnon perished at the hands of Aegisthus, who struck him twice with a two-edged sword. He fell hard, into the silver-sided bath, where Clytaemnestra avenged her wrongs by beheading him with an axe. She then ran out to kill Cassandra with the same weapon, not troubling first to close her husband’s eyelids or mouth; but wiped off on his hair the blood which had splashed her, to signify that he had brought about his own death.
n. The Spartans claim that Agamemnon is buried at Amyclae, no more than a small village, where are shown the tomb and statue of Clytaemnestra, also the sanctuary and statue of Cassandra; the inhabitants even believe that he was killed there. But the truth is that Agamemnon’s tomb stands among the ruins of Mycenae, close to those of his charioteer, of his comrades murdered with him by Aegisthus, and of Cassandra’s twins.
o. Menelaus was later informed of the crime by Proteus, the prophet of Pharos and, having offered hecatombs to his brother’s ghost, built a cenotaph in his honour beside the River of Egypt. Returning to Sparta, eight years later, he raised a temple to Zeus Agamemnon; there are other such temples at Lapersae in Attica and at Clazomene in Ionia, although Agamemnon never reigned in either of these places.
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1. The myth of Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Clytaemnestra, and Orestes has survived in so stylized a dramatic form that its origins are almost obliterated. In tragedy of this sort, the clue is usually provided by the manner of the king’s death: whether he is flung over a cliff like Theseus, burned alive like Heracles, wrecked in a chariot like Oenomaus, devoured by wild horses like Diomedes, drowned in a pool like Tantalus, or killed by lightning like Capaneus. Agamemnon dies in a peculiar manner: with a net thrown over his head, with one foot still in the bath, but the other on the floor, and in the bath-house annex-that is to say, ‘neither clothed nor unclothed, neither in water nor on dry land, neither in his palace nor outside’-a situation recalling the midsummer death, in the Mabinogion, of the sacred king Llew Llaw, at the hands of his treacherous wife Blodeuwedd and her lover Gronw. A similar story told by Saxo Grammaticus in his late twelfth-century History of Denmark suggests that Clytaemnestra may also have given Agamemnon an apple to eat, and killed him as he set it to his lips: so that he was ‘neither fasting, nor feasting’ (White Goddess). Basically, then, this is the familiar myth of the sacred king who dies at midsummer, the goddess who betrays him, the tanist who succeeds him, the son who avenges him. Clytaemnestra’s axe was the Cretan symbol of sovereignty, and the myth has affinities with the murder of Minos, which also took place in a bath. Aegisthus’s mountain beacons, one of which Aeschylus records to have been built of heather, are the bonfires of the midsummer sacrifice. The goddess in whose honour Agamemnon was sacrificed appear in triad as his ‘daughters’: Electra (‘amber’), Iphigeneia (‘mothering strong race’), and Chrysothemis (‘golden order’).2. This ancient story has been combined with the legend of a dispute between rival dynasties in the Peloponnese. Clytaemnestra was a Sparta royal heiress; and the Spartans’ claim, that their ancestor Tyndareus raise Agamemnon to the throne of Mycenae, suggests that they were victorious in a war against the Mycenaeans for the possession of Amyclae, where Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra were both honoured.
3. ‘ Zeus Agamemnon’, ‘very resolute Zeus’, will have been a divine title borne not only by the Mycenaean kings, but by those of Lapersae and Clazomene; and, presumably, also by the kings of a Danaan or Achaean settlement beside the River of Egypt-not to be confused wit the Nile. The River of Egypt is mentioned in Joshua as marking the boundary between Palestine and Egypt; farther from the coast, at Ascalon and near Tyre, there were other Danaan or Achaean settlements.
4. The thirteenth day, also observed as a festal day in Rome, where it was called the Ides, had corresponded with the full moon at a time when the calendar month was a simple lunation. It seems that the sacrifice of the king always took place at the full moon. According to the legend, the Greek fleet, returning late in the year from Troy, ran into winter storm- Agamemnon therefore died in January, not in June.
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