Agamemnon goes on from Aulis to Troy, where he becomes mired down in a violent ten-year war to recover his sister-in-law Helen.

Aeschylus: Worlds of War and Peace

Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, as the story of a warlord’s homecoming, is preoccupied with the challenges of reconciling the martial and domestic spheres of life. War, the Chorus laments, has transformed warriors into ashes and touched those left behind: Each knows whom he sent forth. But to the home of each come urns and ashes, not living men (433-6).

Unlike his unfortunate companions, Agamemnon comes home not as ashes, but as a living man attempting to reinstate himself in his kingdom, starting with a program of political evaluation and reform (845-851). Yet the foreign war has torn warriors from non-warriors, male from female, husband from wife - both physically and emotionally. Ten years ago, in order to cross over to Troy, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter, trading domestic sentimentality for martial utilitarianism. Fittingly, it is this action and its consequences that now prevent him from crossing back into the domestic sphere. Enraged at their child's death, Agamemnon's wife kills her husband in an episode that mimics the ritualized sacrifice of their child. The violence of war thus spills into the domestic sphere, despite the conclusion of the siege of Troy.

Euripides: The Follies of War

As in Aeschylus, the sacrifice of Iphigenia plays a role in Euripides’ exploration of war and its consequences. Iphigenia at Aulis depicts - and critiques - Agamemnon’s fateful decision to enable the siege of Troy through the death of his child. Iphigenia’s sacrifice, with its power to release the stranded armies, is the one death that facilitates the many the other deaths of the Trojan War. At one point in the play, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus articulates the folly of trading Iphigenia for the chance to recover Helen:

Was I to lose a brother - the last I should have lost - to win a Helen, getting bad for good? I was mad, impetuous as a youth, till I perceived, on closer view, what slaying children really meant. Moreover I am filled with compassion for the hapless maiden, doomed to bleed that I may wed, when I reflect that we are kin. What has your daughter to do with Helen? (487-494)

Recovering one woman, Menelaus suggests, is not worth rupturing families and causing innocent death. The audience is free to extend his critique beyond the life of Iphigenia, to the countless other ruptured families and innocent deaths of the Trojan War. Yet despite Menelaus’s moment of lucidity and humanity, the pressures of the army ultimately push Agamemnon - and Iphigenia herself - to support the sacrifice. Humanity gives way to political pressure, and the gates to violence are opened.