The stemmata (“wool ribbons” of the priest’s garb, 14) indicate Chryses’ position as a suppliant (Griffin 1980:26). The staff of office ( skēptron, 28) sets Chryses apart as a priest of Apollo, just as Agamemnon’s staff sets him apart as the leading basileus (Naiden 2006:56–57). Yet, Agamemnon’s arrogant response stands in stark contrast to Chryses’ own powerless supplication and the army’s earlier call to support the priest’s request. Further, the use of “I” (ἐγώ, 26) is the result not just of metrical filling, but of the active oral delivery of the poet who searches for emphasis in the rhythm of the hexameter. The force of Agamemnon’s threatening reply is seen in the strength and number of negations he employs (1.26, 28, 29, 32). The vehemence of Agamemnon’s defiant reply is a “brutal rejoinder” (Rabel 1997:40) that forces Chryses to leave immediately and leads to Apollo’s plague. The priest, “a low-status person with special powers” (Redfield 1975:94), is no match for Agamemnon, whose authoritative speech act includes a firm warning (1.26–32): As Martin (1989:22) has demonstrated, the muth– stem marks “proposals and commands or threats and boasts.” It implies authority and implicit power for the speaker.
Agamemnon lays a “strong command” (κρατερὸν … μῦθον) upon the priest.
The language introducing Agamemnon’s reply to Chryses is no less telling than the response itself (24–25): “But not to Atreus’ son Agamemnon was it pleasing in spirit, / badly instead he sent away, and a strong command he laid upon ” (ἀλλ’ οὐκ Ἀτρεΐδῃ Ἀγαμέμνονι ἥνδανε θυμῷ, / ἀλλὰ κακῶς ἀφίει, κρατερὸν δ’ ἐπὶ μῦθον ἔτελλε). Agamemnon will not be swayed, but rather gives way to his anger. Despite the army’s supporting assent “to reverence the priest and to receive the splendid ransom” (αἰδεῖσθαί θ’ ἱερῆα καὶ ἀγλαὰ δέχθαι ἄποινα, 22), he is irreverently rebuffed (24–32). The priest Chryses had come supplicating the Atreidai and the “other well-greaved Achaians” for his daughter (1.12–21). Immediately following the prooimion, the Iliad begins with strife between Achilles and Agamemnon (1.9). He also appears as inept and unconvincing in his relations with others, certainly in his dealings with the basileis who have accompanied him on an expedition to regain Menelaos’ wife and honor. In the Iliad, we will encounter Agamemnon in many scenes as a leader with a penchant for arrogance, imperiousness, irreverence, and insult. Other traits less pronounced in the Odyssey also emerge from a close reading of the rest of the Iliad, where Agamemnon is still the living leader of the war against Troy. These traits will continue to resonate strongly with the picture the Iliad poet paints in the rest of his epic. Further, as we began to see in Chapter 2, Agamemnon’s traditional personality in Iliad 4 is shown to be one given to thoughtless, foolish, and rash words and actions. We have noted that Agamemnon is known within Homer’s tradition as a character who dies a shameful and pitiful death at his wife’s hands. A vivid picture of what Agamemnon’s character was like for the Odyssey poet and his core audience emerged from our discussion in the last chapter, and it joins the portrait we began to see develop already in Chapter 2.