The language (ētīmēsen arētēra) here specifies that Agamemnon slighted the tīmē of Chryses in his role as arētēr 'one who prays/curses'.
The notion of slighted tīmē evokes the system of reciprocal exchange between individuals and groups that is the basis of the social system in the epic for mortals and immortals. How this system works and the significance of offenses to it will be tracked in this commentary as part of the treatment of the mēnis theme in the poem, to which they are vitally related. As G. Nagy has shown in Best of the Achaeans, in Epic there is both a divine and a human sense of the word tïmē: in the divine world, tīmē means the 'sphere' in which a divinity operates. For example one part of the sphere of Apollo is both the causing and the healing of loimos 'plague'. By contrast, in the warrior domain, tīmē means an individual's social prestige within the group. This differentiation in meaning is because of the division of labor that obtains among the divinities and of the absence of the division of labor among the heroes — or, to put it another way, to the fact that all members of the warrior class in theory at least compete for excellence in the same set of spheres, which are the ones that are divided up into specializations among the gods. So the same term, timē, can mean general prestige for humans and specific prerogatives for gods. The gods do not conflict with one another except when the boundaries between their prerogatives are not respected, whereas the heroes conflict with each when their prestige as warriors is not respected.
On the other hand, the old man Chryses, unlike the warriors, is a human being with a sphere or prerogative that is specified along with the fact that he has been slighted. In other words, what Agamemnon has done is to slight his prerogative as a person who prays/curses, not his general prestige in the specialized domain of warriors.