During the Trojan War ( prior to the actions described in Homer's Iliad ), Agamemnon took Chryses ' daughter Chryseis ( Astynome ) from Moesia as a war prize and when Chryses attempted to ransom her, refused to return her.

Chryses pleading with Agamemnon for his daughter ( 360 – 350 BC )

Chryses, a priest of Apollo and father of Chryseis, came to Agamemnon to ask for the return of his daughter.

In the Iliad, Calchas tells the Greeks that the captive Chryseis must be returned to her father Chryses in order to get Apollo to stop the plague he has sent as a punishment: this triggered the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, the main theme of the Iliad.

Chryses attempting to ransom his daughter Chryseis from Agamemnon, Apulia n red-figure Krater | crater by the Athens 1714 Painter, ca.

Chryses prayed to Apollo, and he, in order to defend the honor of his priest, sent a plague sweeping through the Greek armies, and Agamemnon was forced to give Chryseis back in order to end it.

He killed Thoas after finding out that the son of Chryseis, called " younger Chryses ", was also the son of Agamemnon.

There are several reasons throughout myth for such wrath: in Aeschylus ' play Agamemnon, Artemis is angry for the young men who will die at Troy, whereas in Sophocles ' Electra, Agamemnon has slain an animal sacred to Artemis, and subsequently boasted that he was Artemis ' equal in hunting.

The whole charge was sometimes said to have been an invention of Agamemnon, who wanted to have Cassandra for himself.

Notably he encountered the spirit of Agamemnon, of whose murder he now learned, and Achilles, who told him about the woes of the land of the dead ( for Odysseus ' encounter with the dead, see also Nekuia ).

Among the loot from these cities was Briseis, from Lyrnessus, who was awarded to him, and Chryseis, from Hypoplacian Thebes, who was awarded to Agamemnon.

According to Apollodorus, Agamemnon brought the Wine Growers, daughters of Anius, son of Apollo, who had the gift of producing by touch wine, wheat, and oil from the earth, in order to relieve the supply problem of the army.

His wife Clytemnestra ( Helen's sister ) was having an affair with Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, Agamemnon's cousin who had conquered Argos before Agamemnon himself retook it.

After the war, Agamemnon, returning, was greeted royally with a red carpet rolled out for him and then was slain in his bathtub by Clytemnestra, who hated him bitterly for having ordered the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia ( although the life of the latter had been saved ).

Clytemnestra was aided in her crime by Aegistheus, who reigned subsequently, but Orestes, son of Agamemnon, was smuggled out to Phocis.

He was slain by Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, who made Clytemnestra his wife.

The suitor who won was Menelaus ( Tyndareus, not to displease the powerful Agamemnon offered him another daughter Clytaemnestra ).

" Not all poets took Iphigenia and Iphianassa to be two names for the same heroine ," Kerenyi remarks, " though it is certain that to begin with they served indifferently to address the same divine being, who had not belonged from all time to the family of Agamemnon.

The deus ex machina salvation in some versions of Iphigeneia ( who was about to be sacrificed by her father Agamemnon ) and her replacement with a deer by the goddess Artemis, may be a vestigial memory of the abandonment and discrediting of the practice of human sacrifice among the Greeks in favour of animal sacrifice.

Their ancestry derives from Vorian Atreides who was the son ( via insemination ) of the leader of the cymeks who gave himself the pseudonym Agamemnon.

It was Calchas who prophesied that in order to gain a favourable wind to deploy the Greek ships mustered in Aulis on their way to Troy, Agamemnon would need to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigeneia, to appease Artemis, whom Agamemnon had offended ; the episode was related at length in the lost Cypria, of the Epic Cycle.

When he already entered adulthood, Thyestes was captured by Agamemnon and Menelaus at Delphi and brought to Atreus, who sent Aegisthus to kill him.

Helen's favourite was Menelaus who, according to some sources, did not come in person but was represented by his brother Agamemnon, who chose to support his brother's case, and himself married Helen's sister Clytemnestra instead.

Agamemnon compensates himself for this loss by taking Briseis from Achilles, an act that offends Achilles, who refuses to take further part in the Trojan War.

In the earliest testimony for this character in ancient Greek literature ( the account of Homer ), Cinyras was a ruler on Cyprus who gave a corselet to Agamemnon as a guest-gift when he heard that the Greeks were planning to sail to Troy.

He was cursed by Agamemnon and subsequently punished by Apollo, who beat him in a musical contest ( similar to that between Apollo and Marsyas, to see who was a better musician with a lyre ) and killed him, whereupon Cinyras ' fifty daughters threw themselves into the sea and were changed into sea birds.

When they cast lots to choose one among those warriors, the Achaeans prayed " Father Zeus, grant that the lot fall on Ajax, or on the son of Tydeus, or upon Agamemnon.

In Aeschylus ' Oresteia trilogy, Clytemnestra kills her husband, King Agamemnon because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to proceed forward with the Trojan war, and Cassandra, a prophetess of Apollo.

From Aeschylus ' Agamemnon, it appears that she has made a promise to Apollo to become his consort, but broke it, thus incurring his wrath: though she has retained the power of foresight, no one will believe her predictions.

According to Book 1 of the Iliad, when Agamemnon was compelled by Apollo to give up his own woman, Chryseis, he demanded Briseis as compensation.

In the first book of the Iliad, Agamemnon enslaves her, whom he admits is finer than his own wife, as a war prize and refuses to allow her father, a priest of Apollo, to ransom her.

An oracle of Apollo then sends a plague sweeping through the Greek armies, and Agamemnon is forced to give Chryseis back in order to end it, so Agamemnon sends Odysseus to return Chryseis to her father.

This was one of the sources of the curse that destroyed his family: two of his sons, Atreus and Thyestes, killed a third, Chrysippus, who was his favorite son and was meant to inherit the kingdom ; Atreus and Thyestes were banished by him together with Hippodamia, their mother, who then hanged herself ; each successive generation of descendants suffered greatly by atrocious crimes and compounded the curse by committing more crimes, as the curse weighed upon Pelops ' children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren including Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Menelaus, and finally Orestes, who was acquitted by a court of law convened by the gods Athena and Apollo.

The Agamemnon speeds towards the platform when at the last moment the Apollo emerges from hyperspace and destroys the platform.

Her weapons disabled, EAS Agamemnon was about to ram the last platform when Lefcourt's flagship, the EAS Apollo, arrived to engage and destroy the last platform.

In accordance with the advice of the god Apollo, Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge the death of his father Agamemnon at her hands.

When Achilles returns to the fighting to avenge Patroclus ' death and Agamemnon returns Briseis to him, Agamemnon swears to Achilles that he and Briseis never shared a bed.

Meanwhile, Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon with assistance from his friend Pylades.

** Orestes and Electra murdered their mother Clytemnestra to avenge her participation in the killing of their father, Agamemnon.

The play recounts the story of Orestes and his sister Electra in their quest to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, king of Argos, by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus, who had deposed and killed him.

Agamemnon, Creon, and Medea perform their tragic actions before the eyes of the polis.

We do not deny originality to the Agamemnon because Aeschylus found the tales of the house of Atreus among the folk lore of the Greeks.

In Greek mythology, Agamemnon (; Ancient Greek: ; modern Greek:, " very steadfast ") was the son of King Atreus and Queen Aerope of Mycenae, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the father of Electra and Orestes.

When Helen, the wife of Menelaus, was abducted by Paris of Troy, Agamemnon commanded the united Greek armed forces in the ensuing Trojan War.

This is a possible prototype of the Agamemnon of mythology.

During this period Agamemnon and his brother, Menelaus, took refuge with Tyndareus, King of Sparta.

Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had four children: one son, Orestes, and three daughters, Iphigenia, Electra and Chrysothemis.

Menelaus succeeded Tyndareus in Sparta, while Agamemnon, with his brother's assistance, drove out Aegisthus and Thyestes to recover his father's kingdom.

Agamemnon gathered the reluctant Greek forces to sail for Troy.

Classical dramatisations differ on how willing either father or daughter were to this fate, some include such trickery as claiming she was to be married to Achilles, but Agamemnon did eventually sacrifice Iphigenia.

Other sources, such as Iphigenia at Aulis, claim that Agamemnon was prepared to kill his daughter, but that Artemis accepted a deer in her place, and whisked her away to Taurus in Crimea.

Agamemnon was the commander-in-chief of the Greeks during the Trojan War.

During the fighting, Agamemnon killed Antiphus and 15 other Trojan soldiers.

The Iliad tells the story of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in the final year of the war.

Agamemnon took an attractive slave, Briseis, one of the spoils of war, from Achilles.

Although not the equal of Achilles in bravery, Agamemnon was a representative of kingly authority.

After a stormy voyage, Agamemnon and Cassandra either landed in Argolis, or were blown off course and landed in Aegisthus ' country.

When Agamemnon came home he was slain by either Aegisthus ( in the oldest versions of the story ) or Clytemnestra.

According to the accounts given by Pindar and the tragedians, Agamemnon was slain in a bath by his wife alone, a blanket of cloth or a net having first been thrown over him to prevent resistance.

Athenaeus tells a story of how Agamemnon mourned the loss of his friend Argynnus, when he drowned in the Cephisus river.

The fortunes of Agamemnon have formed the subject of numerous tragedies, ancient and modern, the most famous being the Oresteia of Aeschylus.

In the legends of the Peloponnesus, Agamemnon was regarded as the highest type of a powerful monarch, and in Sparta he was worshipped under the title of Zeus Agamemnon.