Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Agamemnon.
The gallery
The Anger of Achilles
Jacques-Louis David, 1819
David's late neoclassical canvas stages the crisis at Aulis: Agamemnon has summoned Iphigenia under the pretext of marriage to Achilles, and the hero's fury explodes when he learns the girl is for the altar. The high king of the Achaeans stands at the moral centre — command, sacrifice and the wind that will open the road to Troy. Oil on canvas, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.
Mask of Agamemnon
Unknown (Mycenaean goldsmith), c. 1550–1500 BC
The gold funerary mask Heinrich Schliemann found in Grave Circle A at Mycenae and famously named for Homer's king — though modern archaeology dates it centuries before the Trojan War. Whether or not it ever covered Agamemnon's face, it remains the West's most iconic image of the Mycenaean warlord who led the fleet to Troy. National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
Clytemnestra and Agamemnon
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, 1817
Guérin's Louvre night-scene shows the returning king asleep as Clytemnestra hesitates with the dagger and Aegisthus urges the blow. Agamemnon is the still centre of Aeschylus's murder — the conqueror of Troy undone in his own bath by the wife who waited ten years. Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Relief from Samothrace: Agamemnon, Talthybios and Epeios
Unknown (Archaic Greek), c. 560 BC
An Archaic marble relief from Samothrace, now in the Louvre (Ma 697), names Agamemnon in archaic Ionic letters at the head of three advancing figures — the high king, the herald Talthybios, and Epeios. Often read as Agamemnon's initiation into the Samothracian mysteries, it is among the earliest securely labelled images of the Mycenaean warlord who will lead the fleet to Troy.
On screen
Troy
Wolfgang Petersen
Brian Cox's Agamemnon is the warlord of the Greek camp — greedy for Troy's gold, quarrelsome with Achilles, and the king whose pride opens the Iliad.
Iphigenia
Michalis Cacoyannis
Cacoyannis' Euripides film centres the father who must kill his daughter for a wind: Agamemnon at Aulis, torn between command and the child Iphigenia.
Electra
Michalis Cacoyannis
The murder of Agamemnon hangs over Cacoyannis' Electra — the king already dead, his blood the debt his children will collect from Clytemnestra.
Troy: Fall of a City
Owen Harris
The BBC/Netflix retelling keeps Agamemnon as high king of the host — the brother who sails for Helen and stays for empire.
In music & on stage
Iphigénie en Aulide
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Gluck's reform opera stages the Aulis crisis: Agamemnon, the stalled fleet, and the daughter whose sacrifice the goddess demands before Troy.
Oresteia
Sergei Taneyev
Taneyev's only opera is Aeschylus in three parts — Agamemnon's homecoming and murder as the opening movement of the house of Atreus.
Agamemnon
Felix Werder
Werder's twelve-tone one-act sets Gilbert Murray's Aeschylus — the high king as bass, walking into Clytemnestra's net.
Elektra
Richard Strauss
Strauss and Hofmannsthal open on the aftermath of Agamemnon's murder — the dead king as the blood-debt that drives Elektra's scream.
In play
House of Names
Colm Tóibín
Tóibín retells the Oresteia without the gods — Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia and his murder as cold family politics.
Agamemnon (play)
Aeschylus
The opening play of the Oresteia still defines the king on the modern stage — the conqueror who walks on purple into his wife's trap.
The Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker
Barker's Iliad from Briseis' side keeps Agamemnon as the king who seizes the prize — the quarrel that opens Homer retold through the captive women.
A Thousand Ships
Natalie Haynes
Haynes' women's Trojan War keeps Clytemnestra and Iphigenia in view — Agamemnon as the husband and father whose choices wreck the house.