Agamemnon. Son of Atreus, brother of Menelaus, and husband of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon was the king of Mycenae (or Argos) and commander-in-chief of the Greek forces against Troy. He had great valor, but lacked decisiveness. His quarrel with Achilles over the Trojan woman Briseis precipitated the so-called “wrath of Achilles” and much of the action in Homer’s Iliad. Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War with a captive concubine, Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy. In his absence his wife, Clytemnestra, had taken his cousin Aegisthus as her lover. Shortly after his arrival Agamemnon and Cassandra were murdered by Aegisthus, with the connivance or active participation of Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra’s motives for her part in the crime vary according to the sources; for example, Aeschylus cites Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia at the outset of the war as well as Agamemnon’s own infidelities as the causes of her wrath. The murders were later avenged by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes. The legend of Agamemnon was given new fife in the nineteenth century when Heinrich Schliemann, a dedicated amateur archaeologist, excavated the shaft graves and “palace” at Mycenae, one of the major late Helladic administrative centers. Among the objects he discovered was a carefully wrought gold funerary mask, regarding which he proclaimed, “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.” Modern scholars are more cautious about the identity of the tomb’s occupant, but the tomb and mask of “Agamemnon” have nonetheless become a subject for poets and painters. Classical Sources. Homer, Iliad passim; Odyssey 3.i93f., 303f.; 4.529ff.; n.404ff. Aeschylus, Agamemnon-, Eumenides 631ft. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis; Hecuba. Accius, Aegisthus; Agamemnonidae; Clytaemnestra; Erigona. Ovid, Metamorphoses 12.25-38. Seneca, Agamemnon. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 2.16.6, 9.40.11. Hyginus, Fabulas 98,117,122. See also Achilles; Cassandra; Chryseis; Iphigenia, at Aulis; Odysseus, in Hades; Orestes; Palamedes; Philoctetes; Trojan War.