Atreus

• 1. Introduction

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  Atreus was a king of Mycenae in the Peloponnese, the son of Pelops and Hippodamia, and the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. His two sons are the ones remembered for sailing against Troy. Yet the legends told about their father are far darker than any battlefield. They describe a crown won by a trick, a dinner that no guest should ever have eaten, and a family that seemed marked from its earliest generation. How does a man claim a kingdom that others have already taken? What is the curse that hangs over his house, and where did it begin? Who finally had the power to end it? And was there ever a real man behind the name?

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• 2. The Inherited Curse

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  Tantalus, a son of Zeus and the maiden Pluto, once enjoyed friendly relations with the gods. Then he decided to test how much they truly knew. He killed his own son Pelops and served the boy to them as a meal.

  Most of the gods took one look at the dinner table and understood. They knew exactly what the meat was, and they refused to touch it. Demeter was the exception. Her daughter Persephone had just been abducted by Hades, and her distracted mind let her eat Pelops's shoulder without a thought.

  The gods punished Tantalus by sending him to the underworld. There he stands in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. When he reaches for the fruit, the branches lift it away. When he bends to drink, the water drains from his reach. English took the word "tantalizing" from his torment. The gods brought Pelops back to life, and Hephaestus helped replace the missing shoulder bone with a piece of ivory. That mark stayed on the family ever afterwards.

  Pelops grew up and won the hand of Hippodamia in a chariot race against her father, King Oenomaus. He did it by arranging for the king's chariot to be sabotaged, and the king died. The sabotage was carried out by Myrtilus, a servant of Oenomaus. After that, the story splits into versions. In one, Pelops had promised Myrtilus the right to take Hippodamia's virginity and then went back on his word. In another, Myrtilus tried to rape her. In a third, Pelops simply did not want to share the credit for the victory. In every telling, Pelops killed Myrtilus. As the servant died, he cursed Pelops and all of his line.

  Pelops and Hippodamia went on to have many sons, and two of them, Atreus and Thyestes, would carry that curse into a fresh round of crimes.

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• 3. Brothers in Mycenae

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  Chrysippus, a half-brother of Atreus and Thyestes, was murdered, and according to several versions of the myth the two brothers did it. The older sources say they wanted the throne of Olympia. Their father exiled them for the crime. Hippodamia was banished as well, and she is said to have hanged herself after reaching Mycenae.

  The city gave them an unexpected opening. King Eurystheus was away fighting the Heracleidae, and Atreus and Thyestes rose to power in his absence. Eurystheus had meant their stewardship to be temporary. But he died in battle, and the arrangement became permanent. His death ended the rule of the Perseid dynasty in Mycenae.

  The brothers did not share power peacefully. Atreus once vowed to sacrifice the best lamb of his flock to Artemis. When he searched the flock, he found a golden lamb. Instead of offering it, he gave it to his wife, Aerope, to hide from the goddess. Aerope was secretly the lover of Thyestes, and she handed the lamb to him. Thyestes then persuaded Atreus to agree that whoever held the golden lamb should be king. He produced it and took the throne.

  Atreus took the crown back with help from above. Zeus sent Hermes to advise him. Atreus was to make Thyestes agree that if the sun ever rose in the west and set in the east, the kingdom would return to Atreus. Thyestes accepted, thinking the condition impossible. Then Helios did exactly that, unable to bear the injustice of the usurpation. The people bowed to the man who had managed to turn the sun around.

  Plato kept a version of this tale alive. In his dialogue The Statesman, he calls it a "famous tale" in which "the sun and the stars once rose in the west, and set in the east, and that the god reversed their motion, and gave them that which they now have as a testimony to the right of Atreus."

  Atreus now held the throne, and he soon learned what Thyestes and Aerope had been doing behind his back.

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• 4. The Banquet

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  The affair between Thyestes and Aerope was the wound Atreus could not leave alone, and his revenge became one of the most shocking scenes in Greek myth. He killed the sons of Thyestes and cooked them. Only their hands and feet were kept back. He then tricked Thyestes into eating the flesh of his own children. When the meal was over, Atreus showed him the hands and feet. For eating human flesh, Thyestes was driven into exile.

  Thyestes asked an oracle how to answer the horror. The reply was that he should have a son with his own daughter, Pelopia, and that this son would kill Atreus. The child, Aegisthus, was abandoned at birth by his mother, who was ashamed of the incest. A shepherd found the infant and handed him to Atreus, who raised the boy as his own son.

  The truth came out only when Aegisthus reached adulthood. Thyestes told him that he was both father and grandfather to the boy. Aegisthus then killed Atreus, just as the oracle had foretold.

  By then Atreus and Aerope had children of their own. They had two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, and a daughter named Anaxibia.

  Aegisthus, the foundling raised in the house of his father's enemy, was not finished with the family.

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• 5. The Price of Sailing

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  Agamemnon married Clytemnestra, while Menelaus married her sister Helen, who was famously attractive. Helen later left Sparta with Paris of Troy. Menelaus called on all her former suitors to help him get her back.

  Before the fleet could sail, Agamemnon had a problem of his own making. He had killed a sacred deer in a sacred grove and then boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis. The goddess answered by stilling the winds, so his ships could not leave. The prophet Calchas explained the price. Agamemnon must sacrifice the most precious thing that had come into his possession in the year he killed the deer. That was his first-born daughter, Iphigenia.

  Agamemnon sent word home for her to come. In some versions, he told the family she was to be married to Achilles. Iphigenia accepted her father's choice and was honored to be part of the war. Clytemnestra tried to stop it, but she was sent away. After the deed was done, the fleet finally got under way.

  Clytemnestra spent the war years in rage over her daughter's death, and she began an affair with Aegisthus. When Agamemnon came home, he brought a new concubine with him, the doomed prophetess Cassandra. That evening Clytemnestra had prepared a great banquet. She drew a bath for her husband. When he stepped out, she dressed him in a royal purple robe that had no opening for his head. Confused and tangled in the cloth, he could not defend himself. Clytemnestra stabbed him to death.

  Agamemnon left behind one son, who was still very young on the night his father died.

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• 6. Orestes and the Last Debt

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  Orestes, the only son of Agamemnon, was sent into exile while he was quite young. The sources disagree on who sent him. In some versions Clytemnestra sent him away so he would not be in the house during the murder. In others his sister Electra rescued the infant and sent him off to protect him from their mother. Either way, he was the rightful heir, and a danger to the usurper who now held the throne.

  Electra goaded him toward revenge. One retelling captures his dilemma this way: "It was a son's duty to kill his father's murderers, a duty that came before all others. But a son who killed his mother was abhorrent to gods and to men."

  He prayed to Apollo, and the god told him to kill his mother. Orestes understood that to settle the curse on his house he would have to take vengeance and pay with his own ruin. He killed Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Afterwards he wandered the land with guilt in his heart.

  Many years passed before Orestes pleaded his case to Athena, with Apollo at his side. In the account the source follows, no descendant of Atreus had ever done so noble an act. Neither he nor any descendant of his would ever again be driven into evil by "the irresistible power of the past." With that, the curse on the House of Atreus ended.

  This story is the major plot line of The Oresteia, the trilogy by Aeschylus, one of the main ways the family reached later readers.

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• 7. Echoes of a Name

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  In book IV of the Aeneid, Virgil refers to the House of Atreus, and to Orestes in particular, while describing the death of Dido. Roman poetry thus treated the family as a shorthand that readers would recognize.

  The name itself carries a small grammar of its own. "Atreides" is a patronymic form of Atreus that points to one of his sons, either Agamemnon or Menelaus. The plural, from the Latin Atreidae and the Ancient Greek Atreidai, covers both sons together. English usually translates both forms as "Atreides." The term can also stretch to more distant descendants, which is where the phrases House of Atreus and Atreid dynasty come from.

  Even the father's own identity wobbles in places. Most ancient sources say Atreus fathered a man named Pleisthenes. Some lyric poets, including Ibycus and Bacchylides, use the name Pleisthenides, meaning son of Pleisthenes, as another name for Atreus himself.

  The most unusual echo comes from a Hittite text called the Indictment of Madduwatta. It describes several army clashes between Greeks and Hittites around the late 15th or early 14th century BC. The Greek leader was a man named Attarsiya, and some scholars have speculated that this is the Hittite way of writing Atreus. He is described as Ahhiyawan, and the Ahhiyawan king of 1400 BC has been linked to the name. Other scholars agree the name is probably Greek and related to Atreus. But they argue that the man who carried it is not necessarily the famous Atreus of the legends.

  Whether the warrior in the Hittite record and the king of Mycenae are one person remains an open question.

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