Agamemnon's Dream Deception -or- The Trojan Horse
Since Homer's The Iliad, the instrumental spectacle of politics and war has been glorified. The Iliad has a one clear moral message among others... beware of those bearing false political gifts, deceit may be at work. We can find Agamemnon's dream reported in chapter 2 of the Iliad about winning the war with Troy. We are told the dream was an Olympian deception, for his slight of Achilles. The psychoanalyst Stephen Read's The Iliad: The Dream of Agamemnon, interpretation of the dream does not view the dream as sent by Zeus, instead the dream represented an inspirational war strategy that Agamenmnon would use to rally the troops. History informs us that Alexander the Great many centuries later would have a dream that caused him and his troops to rally and capture the city of Tyre (now in modern Lebanon). Aristander is reputed to have helped Alexander (and his father Phillip) with the interpretation of his dreams and in maintaining the morale of the troops.
Another reading of Agamemnon's dream can be envisioned, did his dream actually point out and politically plot a military course of action, a deceptive tactical trick, the killing two birds with one stone, namely the building of the "gift" of the Trojan horse that would cause the downfall of Troy and the sacrifice of his rival Achilles? Was Agamemnon just one more "confidence man" in a long line of men, whose confidence trick finally worked. History is repleat with such political agonistic rivalries, fallacies, deception and philosophical "bullshit" to use a term the philosopher Harry Frankfurt has popularized. Just think of the burning of the German Reichstag, and Hitler blaming his political rivals. Seeing the fire as a divine sign and a political opportunity, Hitler used it as grounds for taking complete political control of Germany and thereby install his Third Reich.