While an angry Achilles is considering killing Agamemnon for being so greedy, Athena comes down and subdues his rage.
In the Iliad, agency among the characters may seem to be nonexistent however no matter how much things are attributed to “fate” there is, on some occasions, human reasoning and deliberation involved.
First off, agency is “the capacity to act in ways that matter—insofar as they act autonomously, without the determining of outside forces such as gods, force, or fate.”(prompt). Take the scene in book 2 for example, where Agamemnon agrees to return Chryseis “to keep my people safe, not see them dying” (2.137). Agamemnon’s desire to help his people and prevent further destruction and deaths due to Apollo’s wrath demonstrates that he possessed agency to some extent because he gave up Chryseis of his own free will and he had deliberate to some degree to think about what course of action to take and whether or not Chryseis was reason enough to justify the deaths of his people.
If that wasn’t enough to display Agamemnon’ agency, then nothing could make his agency be more apparent then when he said to Achilles to fetch him “another prize, and straight off too.”(2. 138) It was at this moment that his intentions became clear and we could see that he was following his own agenda and wasn’t going to hand Chryseis over without being properly compensated. The interesting thing about the lack of agency is that the person who lacks it most, if not all, of the time also lacks free will and independence and thus is unable to perform or act upon his/her own personal desires so seeing Agamemnon demanding another prize supports the claim that he has agency because he wants something in return for Chryseis and in this case that’s Achilles’s prize, Briseis.
Overall Agamemnon is an agent in the Iliad as supported by the text itself and his actions and intentions also attest to that. To conclude, Agamemnon isn’t the only isolated case where the existence of agency can be argued, there are many numerous instances where other characters seem to possess agency and the only difference is that I didn’t write about them. Even then that doesn’t erase the fact that agency exists in the Iliad and that Agamemnon is one of the many characters that possesses it.
Image source: http://www.maicar.com/GML/Agamemnon.html
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