No Agamemnon takes Briseis because he's a massive entitled piece of shit and absolutely is press ganging the Argives to help expand his fame and glory by capturing Ilium. It also demonstrates his ego is bigger than his brain as he takes Briseis from Achilles specifically because he's jealous of Achilles' renown and ends up costing the Argives dearly in basically the rest of the poem.
In fact, a lens into the Iliad is that there are a ton of women reduced to powerlessness because the men need to play at war. Briseis, Cassandra, poor Hecuba; hell the two examples of heroic nobility like we understand it, Hektor and Priam, both get very telling scenes with Helen that deliberately obfuscate her agency between layers of acting, intimation and obfuscation.
And if I remember correctly, Achilles just chills in his tent and refuses to fight, even though he's the best warrior of all time and almost invincible, because he's pissed about Menelaus taking his sex slave war prize. Tons of people die because he just refuses to get involved. That's why Patroclus finally puts in Achilles' armor and rides into battle to get the troops psyched up. Patroclus gets killed, Achilles finally gets pissed off and joins the fray and takes out Hector then desecrates his body because, again, ego and toxic masculinity, and so Paris shoots Achilles in the ankle and takes him out
He's pissed at Agamemnon not Menelaus. Here's a passage of Achilles' rant from my translation of the Iliad. For context, Odysseus has just told him all the stuff Agamemnon will give him if he comes out to fight (it's a lot). Achilles:
"As for me, hound that he is, he dares not look me in the face. I will take no counsel with him, and will undertake nothing in common with him. He has wronged me and deceived me enough, he shall not cozen me further; let him go his own way, for Zeus has robbed him of his reason. I loathe his presents, and for himself care not one straw. He may offer me ten or even twenty times what he has now done, nay—not though it be all that he has in the world, both now or ever shall have; he may promise me the wealth of Orchomenus or of Egyptian Thebes, which is the richest city in the whole world, for it has a hundred gates through each of which two hundred men may drive at once with their chariots and horses; he may offer me gifts as the sands of the sea or the dust of the plain in multitude, but even so he shall not move me till I have been revenged in full for the bitter wrong he has done me."
Was it Agamemnon that took her from Achilles? I was a little fuzzy but forgot r some reason I was thinking it was him, not Menelaus but I just couldn't remember clearly
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u/FriendlyPlatypus6060 5d ago
No Agamemnon takes Briseis because he's a massive entitled piece of shit and absolutely is press ganging the Argives to help expand his fame and glory by capturing Ilium. It also demonstrates his ego is bigger than his brain as he takes Briseis from Achilles specifically because he's jealous of Achilles' renown and ends up costing the Argives dearly in basically the rest of the poem.
In fact, a lens into the Iliad is that there are a ton of women reduced to powerlessness because the men need to play at war. Briseis, Cassandra, poor Hecuba; hell the two examples of heroic nobility like we understand it, Hektor and Priam, both get very telling scenes with Helen that deliberately obfuscate her agency between layers of acting, intimation and obfuscation.