Agamemnon Compare And Contrast

The story of Agamemnon has been told three times throughout our readings, twice in the Odyssey and in the play Agamemnon. Each recounting of the tale differs slightly from the last and while the outcome is always the same, the characters are portrayed in vastly different lights between the poem and the play. Where the Odyssey portrays Agamemnon as a hero murdered by his lecherous wife Clytemnestra and his cowardly cousin Aegisthus, Agamemnon portrays him as cold and arrogant while his wife is a more sympathetic character and is reasonably justified in her actions.
Agamemnon is the son of Atreus, nephew of Thyestes, brother of Menelaus and king of Mycenae. Prior to the tale in question, Agamemnon travels to Troy to rescue his brother’s wife
This happens when Odysseus sails to the realm of the dead to speak with a prophet as he searches for a way home and Agamemnon is one of the many shades of the dead that he speaks with. The story is nearly identical to Nestor’s, however, instead of a parallel being drawn between Orestes and Telemachus, one is drawn between Odysseus’s wife Penelope and Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. While Agamemnon claims that Clytemnestra has brought shame to all women and that women are untrustworthy, he claims that Penelope is an exception and that his death will not be brought about by
This change in character is frequent in Greek work, where characters can appear in several stories spanning long periods of time written by different authors. These authors will typically change character’s traits to better fit the message they are trying to convey with their