en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agamemnon
2 corrections found
In Aeschylus' play Agamemnon, Artemis is angry for she predicts that so many young men will die at Troy
This misstates Aeschylus. In Agamemnon, Artemis is angered by the omen of the eagles devouring a pregnant hare, not because she predicts many young men will die at Troy.
Full reasoning
In Aeschylus' Agamemnon, the chorus explains Artemis's anger during Calchas's interpretation of the omen at Aulis. The surviving text says Artemis is angry at the "winged hounds" (the eagles) because they devoured a pregnant hare and her unborn young. That is the reason given in Aeschylus for her wrath and for the demand that leads toward Iphigenia's sacrifice.
So the article's wording is not just a simplification; it gives a different cause than the play does. Aeschylus presents Artemis as reacting to the hare omen and the violence done to the unborn animals, not as becoming angry because she foresaw that many young men would die at Troy.
2 sources
- AESCHYLUS, AGAMEMNON - Theoi Classical Texts Library
Calchas says Artemis is angry at the 'winged hounds' because they devour 'a hare with offspring unborn'.
- The Internet Classics Archive | Agamemnon by Aeschylus
The chorus says 'virgin Artemis bears jealous hate' for the eagle-pair that 'rend the unborn brood' and 'the quivering hare'.
In the Iliad itself, he is shown to slaughter hundreds more in Book Eleven during his aristeia
This is a major exaggeration. Book 11 gives Agamemnon a short run of named kills before he is wounded and withdraws; it does not depict him killing 'hundreds more.'
Full reasoning
The surviving text of Iliad Book 11 does show Agamemnon having an aristeia, but not on the scale claimed here.
In the Book 11 narrative, Agamemnon kills a specific sequence of Trojan fighters before Coön wounds him and he leaves the battlefield. Public-domain kill lists based on the poem count eight named Trojan deaths by Agamemnon in that book: Bienor, Oileus, Isus, Antiphus, Peisander, Hippolochus, Iphidamas, and Coön.
The broader scale also makes the article's wording untenable. An open-access Cambridge study of casualties in the Iliad counts 251 Trojan casualties in the entire poem, including both named and unnamed deaths. So saying Agamemnon is "shown to slaughter hundreds more" in Book 11 alone greatly overstates what the text reports.
3 sources
- HOMER, ILIAD BOOK 11 - Theoi Classical Texts Library
Book 11 narrates Agamemnon's kills, then Coön wounds him and Agamemnon returns to the ships in pain.
- Iliad: List of the Dead
The Book 11 entries list Agamemnon killing Bienor, Oileus, Isus, Antiphus, Peisander, Hippolochus, Iphidamas, and Coön.
- THE CASUALTIES OF THE LATIN ILIAD | The Classical Quarterly | Cambridge Core
The article states that the Iliad has 305 total casualties, of which 251 are Trojans, named and unnamed combined.