Thinking about Agamemnon today.
Saw a comment about how stupid and heartless he must have been to not realize that Clytemnestra would harbor resentment against him for killing their daughter.
And I just want to push back against that a little.
Was Agamemnon stupid or heartless? Or he thought that, like him, Clytemnestra had grieved but would come to understand why he did what he did? 10 years is a long time after all.
The specifics vary some by source (it's not mentioned at all in the homeric poems, though maybe implied by Agamemnons anger with his soothsayer, and various other poets and authors handled the details differently. Im largely drawing on Euripides here.)
But the choice Agamemnon had to make was between sacrificing one of his daughters to Artemis (as many men had given him their sons to take to war), uphold his political power, and obtain eternal legacy- OR invite political upheaval, look like a massive hypocrite, and, arguably most importantly, break a sacred vow that had itself been sealed with sacrificial blood.
That's not to say that Clytemnestra wasn't fully justified in my opinion, but I don't think it's fair to make Agamemnon a simple villain. If he had refused to do the sacrifice, what would have happened? even if the Furies spared him for breaking his oath, who is going to celebrate him for *not* killing his daughter; meanwhile he will have wasted the time and gold of *every other ruler* he has contact with, and denied them the chance for both loot and eternal glory, a chance to have their names sung forever by bards. He'd look like a coward and a liar, *especially* after all the effort it had taken to muster those 1000 ships to Aulis.
One of the reasons that I think the Trojan war has persisted so long in the cultural imagination is that it resists having simple good guys and bad guys- writers and philosophers for the last 3,000 years each have their go looking at these complex characters in complex situations and get to argue for themselves what it all means- what anyone should have done, what morals and ethics are overlaid can wildly change perspective. How any audience feels about war and violence and glory and loyalty and faith and politics will reflect back in their read of the characters.
The Trojan War characters have been many things to many people, but they will never be simple.
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