The Iliad does not end in vengeance but in an extraordinary scene of shared grief. Guided by the gods and by Hermes through the night, old King Priam of Troy comes alone and unarmed into the very tent of the man who killed his son, and kneels, and does the thing no man has done before: he kisses the hands of Achilles, "the terrible, man-slaying hands that had killed so many of his sons" (Iliad 24.478–479), and begs for Hector's body, asking Achilles to remember his own father Peleus, an old man far away who longs for a son he will never see again. The appeal breaks through Achilles' rage at last. The two of them, the young killer and the bereaved old king, weep together — Priam for Hector, Achilles for Patroclus and for his own father and his own approaching death — and Achilles, gentled by a grief he now shares, gives the body back and grants a truce for the funeral. In this moment the wrath that opened the poem is finally spent, and the greatest of warriors becomes, for a night, simply a man who understands another's sorrow. It is the note on which the Iliad chooses to end.
Homer's Iliad closes before Achilles dies, but his death is foretold within it again and again, and the fuller story was told in the lost epics of the Trojan cycle and by many later authors. After Hector's fall Achilles goes on fighting and winning until, near the Scaean Gate of Troy, he is struck down — not by a great warrior but by Paris, Hector's brother and the unwarlike prince whose theft of Helen began the war. Paris shoots an arrow, and Apollo, who has favoured Troy throughout and whose priest Achilles' side had dishonoured, guides the shaft to its mark. In the later tradition of the vulnerable hero, the arrow finds the one mortal spot, the heel; and so the greatest of the Greeks is brought down by an arrow from the weakest of his enemies, god-guided, at the gate of the city he could not quite live to take. His body was fought over and rescued, mourned by the Greeks and by his mother and her sister Nereids rising from the sea, and his ashes were laid, the tradition held, together with those of Patroclus, so that the two who could not be parted in life lay mingled in death.
+The Odyssey gives us the most piercing epilogue to Achilles' story. When Odysseus journeys to the land of the dead (the Nekyia of Odyssey 11), among the shades he meets is Achilles, come forward with Patroclus and the other fallen. Odysseus tries to comfort him, saying that no man was ever more blessed, honoured in life like a god by the Greeks and now a great ruler among the dead — surely he need not grieve at dying. But Achilles cuts the consolation down with the bitterest words in Homer: "Do not speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I would rather be bound to the soil as another man's serf — a landless man with next to nothing to live on — than be king over all the perished dead" (Odyssey 11.488–491). It is a devastating reversal of the very heroic bargain the Iliad had celebrated: the man who chose a short bright life for undying fame now says, from beyond the grave, that any living breath would be worth more than all the glory of the dead. The one thing that lifts his gloom is news of the living: when Odysseus tells him how bravely his son Neoptolemus fought at Troy, Achilles' shade strides away across the field of asphodel "with great steps, rejoicing" that his boy had proved himself. This shadowed, sorrowing Achilles of the Odyssey stands in deliberate contrast to the blessed hero of the later Leuke tradition, who was carried off to a paradise island rather than down to Hades — two different answers, held side by side in the tradition, to the question of what became of the greatest of the Greeks after death.
Achilles was not a god of the Olympian kind but a hero in the technical Greek sense — a powerful dead mortal honoured with cult at his tomb, believed to remain present and potent in the place where his bones lay and able to help or harm the living. Yet of all the Greek heroes he was worshipped the most widely and the most fervently, and in some places his cult rose so high that he was addressed almost as a god. His worship spread far beyond his Thessalian homeland, carried especially by Ionian and Milesian settlers around the shores of the Black Sea, where he became one of the great protecting powers of the region.
Agamemnon rules Mycenae — and in some tellings Argos, the two great citadels of the Argive plain often standing for one realm in the poems — and he holds the sceptre of Pelops, made by Hephaestus and handed down through the family, the very emblem of his paramount kingship. When Menelaus's wife Helen is carried off to Troy by Paris, and the many suitors who had once sought Helen are bound by their old oath to defend her marriage, it is Agamemnon who gathers and leads the vast coalition — the "catalogue of ships" in Iliad 2 numbers the contingents of all Greece under his command. He is the commander-in-chief of the Achaean host, contributing the largest single force (a hundred ships) and holding supreme authority over kings who are, many of them, greater men than he. This is the paradox the poems keep returning to: Agamemnon's power is real and necessary — without a single overlord the expedition falls apart — yet he is temperamentally unfit for it, quick to anger, grasping over honour, and prone to the errors of a proud man who mistakes his rank for his worth.
Before the fleet can even sail, the curse exacts its first price from Agamemnon directly. Gathered at Aulis, the ships are held in harbour by a dead calm or by contrary winds sent by the goddess Artemis, angered — the tellings vary — by a boast of Agamemnon's, or by his killing of a sacred deer, or simply demanding a price for the passage. The seer Calchas declares that the winds will not turn until Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia. It is the most terrible choice in his story: to disband the army in disgrace, or to kill his child. He sends home for Iphigenia on the pretext that she is to be married to Achilles, and when she comes he has her led to the altar and her throat cut, so that the fleet may sail. (Content note: a father's ritual killing of his daughter.) Aeschylus makes this the deed that seals Agamemnon's own death — the wound in Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, that will never close, and the just cause she will claim for murdering him. A major variant to flag: in a widespread and gentler tradition, dramatised by Euripides in the Iphigenia at Aulis and the Iphigenia among the Taurians, Artemis snatches Iphigenia away at the last instant, substituting a deer on the altar, and carries her off to the land of the Taurians (the Crimea) to serve as her priestess — so that the girl does not die at all, but is spared and lost to her family for years. Both versions were current in antiquity; Homer, notably, does not mention the sacrifice at all. The story is at its darkest and most consequential in the tragic version, where Iphigenia truly dies and her blood is the first of the debts that bring Agamemnon down.
+Before the fleet can even sail, the curse exacts its first price from Agamemnon directly. Gathered at Aulis, the ships are held in harbour by a dead calm or by contrary winds sent by the goddess Artemis, angered — the tellings vary — by a boast of Agamemnon's, or by his killing of a sacred deer, or simply demanding a price for the passage. The seer Calchas declares that the winds will not turn until Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia. It is the most terrible choice in his story: to disband the army in disgrace, or to kill his child. He sends home for Iphigenia on the pretext that she is to be married to Achilles, and when she comes he has her led to the altar and her throat cut, so that the fleet may sail. (Content note: a father's ritual killing of his daughter.) Aeschylus makes this the deed that seals Agamemnon's own death — the wound in Clytemnestra, Iphigenia's mother, that will never close, and the just cause she will claim for murdering him. A major variant to flag: in a widespread and gentler tradition — already told in the early epic Cypria (part of the cycle around Homer, known now from Proclus's summary), long before it reached the tragic stage — Artemis snatches Iphigenia away at the last instant, substitutes a deer on the altar, and carries her off to the land of the Taurians (the Crimea), where she is made immortal (in the tragedians she lives on there as the goddess's priestess). Euripides dramatised this rescue in the Iphigenia among the Taurians (and left it hanging as a last-moment possibility at the close of the Iphigenia at Aulis): in it the girl does not die at all, but is spared and lost to her family for years. Both versions were current in antiquity — the rescue is in fact the older, epic account — and Homer, notably, does not mention the sacrifice at all. The story is at its darkest and most consequential in the tragic version, where Iphigenia truly dies and her blood is the first of the debts that bring Agamemnon down.
The Iliad does not tell the whole war but a few weeks of its tenth and final year, and it begins with Agamemnon's pride. A plague is destroying the Greek army, sent by Apollo because Agamemnon has taken and refused to ransom Chryseis, the daughter of the god's priest Chryses. When the prophet Calchas reveals the cause, Agamemnon is forced to give the girl back — but, unwilling to be the only chief without a prize of honour (a geras), he compensates himself by seizing Briseis, the war-prize of Achilles, the greatest fighter in the army. It is a naked assertion of rank over merit, and it is a catastrophic misjudgement. Achilles, publicly dishonoured, withdraws himself and his Myrmidons from the fighting and prays through his goddess-mother Thetis that Zeus grant the Trojans victory until the Greeks learn what they lost in slighting him. The prayer is granted; the Greeks are driven back to their ships with terrible slaughter, and the death-toll of the whole poem — including, at last, Achilles' beloved Patroclus, and through him Achilles' own doom — flows from Agamemnon's refusal to master his pride. He comes eventually to admit his fault (Iliad 9, 19), offering vast gifts and Briseis back to win Achilles' return, and calling his own action atē, the blind ruin the gods send on men — but the reconciliation comes only over Patroclus's corpse. The Iliad's whole moral architecture rests on Agamemnon's hubris and what it costs: the poem's first word is mēnis, the wrath — Achilles' wrath, kindled by Agamemnon.
Agamemnon's most famous modern afterlife is an accident of archaeology. When Heinrich Schliemann excavated the shaft graves of Mycenae in 1876 and lifted a magnificent golden funeral mask from a Bronze Age burial, he is said to have declared, "I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon" — and though the mask is in fact centuries too early to be his, the name has stuck: the "Mask of Agamemnon," now in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, is one of the most recognisable objects to survive from the ancient world. Through it, and through the Lion Gate and the great walls of Mycenae, Agamemnon has become the human face of the whole Mycenaean age — the legendary king standing for a lost civilisation that history has since recovered in fact.
Above all Agamemnon endures through the tragedians, and through the questions his story forces. Aeschylus's Oresteia remains one of the foundational works of Western drama, staged and re-staged and rewritten across every generation, precisely because Agamemnon's murder is where the Greeks confronted the deepest problem of justice: how a cycle of vengeance, each killing "just" in the eyes of the killer, can ever be brought to an end. His death, and the trial of his avenger-son, mark the mythic birth of the law-court out of the blood-feud — a theme that has never lost its force. To read Agamemnon now is to meet the archetype of the great and flawed leader, magnificent and ruinous at once, and to weigh, as the Athenians did, what such greatness costs the people who follow it and the family that must live and die with it.
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