"Aegisthus hatched my doom and my destruction,
he killed me, he with my own accursed wife…
he invited me to his palace, sat me down to feast
then cut me down as a man cuts down some ox at the trough!
So I died – a wretched, ignominious death – and round me
all my comrades killed, no mercy, one after another,
just like white-tusked boars
butchered in some rich lord of power’s halls
for a wedding, banquet or groaning public feast."
– Homer
The Odyssey, Book 11, lines 462-470. Odysseus meets many people in the underworld. One of his most poignant encounters is with Agamemnon’s ghost. When Odysseus asks the great general how he met his end, Agamemnon tells how his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus invited him to a feast, then killed him. He describes it as an ignoble death, comparing it in a simile to a man cutting down an ox at a trough of food. The story of Clytemnestra’s cheating and treachery stand in contrast to Penelope’s loyalty and fidelity to her husband during his twenty year absence.