AGAMEMNON, in the Iliad, is the Greek °great Icing° or °king of kings,)) the overlord of Greece both north and south of the Gulf of Corinth; the royal scat is at Mycenx in the Peloponnesus. He is represented as a rather weak man, presiding over a turbulent assembly of practically independent feudal chiefs, who will not openly defy him because he is conse crated to his position by Zeus, but who are entirely independent as regards their individual districts, though bound to follow him to war when ordered: His character is of course pure ly the invention of the poet, and its relation to that of Achilles and other chiefs is curiously like that of Charlemagne to Roland and the peers in the chansons; the dashing noble being the real hero, and the monarch slurred as rather petty, unjust and capricious, king by grace rather than special merit. But the posi tion is not fictitious. Archmology has proved that Mycenie was really the scat of a wealthy and powerful monarchy, probably about 1500 B.C. and somewhat after, as well as that sev eral Troys flourished and perished; and these proofs that the basis of the story was tradi• tional and not mythical naturally tempt the sanguine to hope for further points of truth, which research tends steadily to justify. As to the character of the monarchy, later theorists take the reverse view from the earlier. Grote held that the account in Homer showed the germ of a developing constitutionalism, the criticising commons who were becoming a thorn in the monarch's flesh being satirized and caricatured in Thersites, and the king only an Aryan chief elected by his equals; Mahaffy thinks it the decay of a monarchy of the Orien tal type, the feudal anarchy indicating break down instead of growth. In the legend he is
the son of Atreus (q.v.), and brother of Mene laus, King of Sparta, whose wrong in the se duction and carrying away of his wife Helen by Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy, he avenges by a levy of all the Greeks to make war on Troy, when its King, Priam, will not up Paris or make him give up Helen. (See ELEN; ILIAD; TROY). The sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia (q.v.),. to secure a passage from Aulis, is a later fiction and recalls Jeph thah and his daughter curiously. His quarrel with Achilles is the theme of the Iliad. When Troy was sacked he received Priam's proph etess-daughter Cassandra (q.v.) among his share of the spoils. Returning home after 10 years' absence, he was murdered by his cousin /Egisthus, son of Thyestes (see ATREUS), aided by Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra (q.v.) with whom he had been living in adultery for a short time previously; and his son Orestes on growing up avenges him by killing his mother, his sister Electra abetting. In Homer the mo tive for Agamemnon's murder is simply that of any adulterous pair in ridding themselves of an inconvenient husband; in /Eschylus' (Agamemnon,' Clytemnestra slays him with her own hand, professedly in revenge for his sac rifice of Iphigenia, obviously sharpened 17 jealousy of Cassandra, and throwing the ulti mate responsibility on Nemesis, who is pursu ing the house of Atreus.