At Hour
25, Harvard and the Center for Hellenic Studies' community-development project we are discussing Agamemnon's Refusal of Chryses' Ransom.
If you don’t know the story you
can read more about it in the Iliad.
Chryses, the priest of Apollo comes to the Achaean camp before the walls
of Troy to ransom his daughter. The
Greeks called her Chryseis; that is Miss Chryses. Agamemnon refused the ransom and sent the
priest way with dire threats. No too
smart! His decision and threats “brought countless woes upon the Achaeans,
and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes, and made them themselves
spoil for dogs” (Iliad 1.2) I would
like to suggest that for Agamemnon, Chryseis was not “a girl, just one girl”, but rather the latest
in a series of “daughters” he’d lost. He
simply couldn’t lose one more.
Loud rang the battle-cry they uttered in their rage,
just as eagles scream which, in lonely grief for their brood, rowing with the
oars of their wings, wheel high over their bed, because they have lost the toil
of guarding their nurslings' nest. Aeschylus (Agamemnon 47)
Helen
was barely of marrying age when she married Agamemnon’s younger brother. However, the most beautiful woman who ever
lived was kidnapped by a prince from Troy.
At the discovery of her disappearance, the poet compares Agamemnon to an
eagle that’d lost a fledgling, that is a father eagle that’d lost a child.
Not
long afterwards Agamemnon loses his own daughter Iphigenia at the Port of
Aulis. Regardless of the gory details,
Agamemnon the father lost another daughter.
In
the opening scene of the Iliad Agamemnon is faced with the loss of
Chryseis. She is replaced with golden-haired
Briseis, Miss Briseus. But later
Agamemnon makes a great “oath, that never
went he up into her bed, neither had dalliance with her” (Iliad 9.278) Is
it possible that he never touched Chryseis?
That for all his protestations of love it was actually fatherly love he
felt for Chryseis.
And
that when her father came for her Agamemnon could not face the loss of one more
daughter?
