icing their daughter to obtain favorable winds for the expedition. They would also know that when Agamemnon arrivedhome victorious after the war with Troy, concubine (Cassandra, not Chryseis) in tow, Clytemnestra would murder him.Agamemnon is already being characterized here as a person whose arrogant, insensitive and cavalier treatment of the women inhis life brings him grief and destruction.C ontrast also Agamemnon's callousness, and what results from it, with the more gentle attitude of Hektor toward his motherand wife in Book VI, and it's easy to see that the poet is capable of imagining a very different sort of attitude toward women.Noti ce also the care that the poet takes in giving us a sensitive portrayal of Andromache, a portrayal that makes it hard to thinkof any of the women in the story as mere objects that men can accumulate like gold cups or fat heifers. Here is a part of Andromache's address to Hektor that makes us realize how little separates this princess from the girls that Agamemnon and Achillesconsider to be their prizes (p. 164) And they who were my seven brothers in the great house all went up on a single day down into the house of the death god, for swift-footed Achilleus slaughtered all of them as they were tending their white sheep and their lumbering oxen; and when he had led my mother, who was queen under wooded Plako s, here, along with all his other possessions, Achilleus released her again, accepting ransom beyond count, but Artemis of the showering arrows struck her down in the halls of her father. Hektor, thus you are father to me, and my honoured mother, you are my brother, and you it is who are my young husband. Please take pity on me then, stay here on the rampartAnd here is another passage (one that is NOT in your packet) where the poet brutally drives home the impact of the war on thewomen, in this ca...
