Guerrier en armure serrant ses grèves et se préparant au combat

Agamemnon king of men put on his armour. First he bound his goodly greaves about his legs with ankle clasps of silver; and about his chest he set the cuirass which Cinyras had once given him as a guest-gift. Tidings had reached Cyprus that the Achaeans were about to sail for Troy, and therefore he gave it to the king. There were ten courses of dark cyanus upon it, twelve of gold, and twenty of tin. Serpents of cyanus reached towards the neck on either side, three upon either side, like the rainbow which the son of Saturn has set in heaven as a sign to mortal men. About his shoulders he threw his sword, studded with bosses of gold; and the silver scabbard hung by straps of gold. Then he took up the richly-dight shield that covered his whole body when he was in battle—fair to see—with ten circles of bronze running all round it. On the body of the shield there were twenty bosses of white tin, with another of dark cyanus in the middle: this last was made to show a Gorgon grim and awful to behold, with Rout and Panic on either side. The band for the arm to go through was of silver, on which there was a writhing snake of cyanus with three heads that sprang from a single neck. On his head Agamemnon set a helmet with two horns and four plumes, so that the horse-hair crest nodded fiercely above it; and he grasped two redoubtable bronze-shod spears.