Agamemnon

Lord of Mycenae and “king of men,” Agamemnon led the thousand ships to Troy, quarrelled with Achilles over a prize of war and nearly wrecked the expedition — the wrath that opens the Iliad. To sail at all he had sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia at Aulis, and the debt came home with him: netted in his bath by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus on the day of his return.

His shade in the Odyssey warns Odysseus to trust no wife too far — advice the poem quietly refutes in Penelope. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in this library, stages the homecoming hour by hour: the beacon, the tapestries, the cry from the house.