The Return of Agamemnon
In brief
- Agamemnon had cut his daughter’s throat at Aulis to get a wind for Troy, and his wife had ten years to think about it.
- Clytemnestra took Aegisthus as her partner and prepared a homecoming: a red carpet, a bath, and a robe with no opening for the head.
- It is the story Homer sets against Odysseus’s return, the same voyage home with the opposite ending.
Agamemnon sailed for Troy over the body of his own daughter. The fleet had been stuck at Aulis with no wind, and the price the seer named for one was Iphigenia, and he paid it. His wife Clytemnestra was left at Mycenae with the other children and ten years in which nothing happened except that she thought about it.
Aegisthus arrived in the meantime. He was Agamemnon's cousin and had his own account to settle, one going back a generation to a dinner his uncle had been served, and he stayed. When the watchman's fire came across the islands announcing that Troy had fallen, the two of them had the household ready.
Agamemnon came up from the harbour with Cassandra, the Trojan princess who had been given the gift of true prophecy and the curse of never being believed, and Clytemnestra met him at the gate with every courtesy. She had crimson cloth laid down from the chariot to the door and asked him to walk on it. He objected that it was the sort of honour paid to gods and would look like arrogance. She pressed, and he gave in, and walked into his own house over the dyed cloth.
He went to bathe. Accounts differ on the details and agree on the shape: a robe or a net was put over him with no opening for his head or his arms, and while he was tangled in it he was cut down, and Cassandra was killed in the courtyard having told anyone who would listen exactly what was about to happen. Apollodorus records it in two flat sentences.
Homer puts the story in the Odyssey deliberately. Agamemnon's ghost tells it to Odysseus in the underworld and warns him not to sail into his own harbour announcing himself, and the whole of the second half of that poem, the beggar's rags, the years of caution, the slow test of who could be trusted, is Odysseus taking the advice. Two kings sailed home from the same war. One walked in through the front door.
