Thyestes

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The phrase "Thyestean feast" describes a meal at which human flesh is served. It comes from Thyestes, a king of Olympia in Greek mythology, and from the worst dinner of his life.

  His family tree reads like a chain of crimes, each one answering the last. Why was a royal household so haunted by violence? How did two brothers become mortal enemies? And why did dramatists keep returning to this one story across the centuries?

  12

• 2. A Servant's Curse

  ›

  King Oenomaus had a daughter named Hippodamia, and a servant named Myrtilus who was promised a reward connected to her. The promise covered the right to her virginity and half of the kingdom of Pelops. Pelops refused to honor either part. Instead he killed Myrtilus by throwing him into the sea.

  With his dying gasp, Myrtilus cursed the line of Pelops and Hippodamia. Thyestes was their son, and so was his brother Atreus. The curse was still in force when Thyestes and Atreus set their sights on a throne.

  14

• 3. Exile and Mycenae

  ›

  Chrysippus, a half-brother of Thyestes and Atreus, stood between them and the throne of Olympia. The two brothers murdered him for it. Their father, Pelops, answered by sending both sons into exile.

  They took refuge in Mycenae. King Eurystheus was away at the time, fighting the Heracleidae, and the brothers ascended the throne in his absence. Eurystheus had meant their rule to be temporary. His death in that conflict made it permanent. The throne that was meant to be borrowed had become theirs for good, and one of them would soon claim it alone.

  1

• 4. The Golden Lamb

  ›

  Atreus, by now king of Mycenae, vowed to sacrifice the best lamb of his flock to the goddess Artemis. When he searched the flock, he found a golden lamb. He did not offer it. He gave it to his wife, Aerope, to hide from the goddess.

  Aerope passed the lamb to her lover, Thyestes. He persuaded Atreus to agree that whoever held the lamb should be king, then produced it and claimed the throne.

  Zeus sent Hermes to advise Atreus. Atreus should get Thyestes to agree that if the sun ever rose in the west and set in the east, the throne would return to Atreus. Thyestes agreed. Helios, angry at what Thyestes had done, reversed his usual course, and Atreus took back the crown.

  Atreus now had his throne again. He had also learned the truth about his wife and his brother, and he was not finished.

  14

• 5. The Thyestean Feast

  ›

  Aglaus, Orchomenus and Calaeus were the three sons Thyestes had by a naiad, and Atreus killed all three. He cooked the boys, keeping back only their hands and heads. Then he served the meal to their father.

  Only after Thyestes had eaten did Atreus taunt him, showing him the hands and heads of his sons. When the meal was done, Thyestes let out a loud belch. In the myth that belch stands for a satisfied appetite and for a man who has lost control of himself.

  An oracle would soon offer Thyestes a way to answer what had been done to him.

  134

• 6. The Oracle's Advice

  ›

  The advice given to Thyestes by an oracle was specific and terrible. If he had a son with his own daughter Pelopia, that son would kill Atreus. Thyestes carried this out by assaulting Pelopia, and he hid his identity from her.

  The child was a boy named Aegisthus. Pelopia, ashamed of how he was conceived, abandoned the infant. A shepherd found him and brought him to Atreus, who raised the boy as his own son.

  When Aegisthus reached adulthood, Thyestes told him the truth. Thyestes was both his father and his grandfather, and Atreus was his uncle. Aegisthus then killed Atreus.

  Atreus's two sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, would soon return to the story.

  14

• 7. Echoes of the Curse

  ›

  While Thyestes ruled Mycenae, Agamemnon and Menelaus were living in exile in Sparta. King Tyndareus accepted them there as the royalty they were. Shortly after, he helped them return to Mycenae and overthrow Thyestes. Forced out, Thyestes lived on Kythira, where he died.

  As a token of goodwill and allegiance, Tyndareus offered his daughters as wives. Clytemnestra went to Agamemnon, and Helen went to Menelaus.

  When Agamemnon left Mycenae for the Trojan War, Aegisthus seduced Clytemnestra. The pair plotted to kill her husband on his return, and they succeeded. They also killed Cassandra, his new concubine. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus had three children: Aletes, Erigone, and a Helen who died as an infant.

  Seven or eight years after the death of Agamemnon, his son Orestes returned to Mycenae. With the help of his cousin Pylades and his sister Electra, he killed both his mother and Aegisthus. In Aeschylus's play The Eumenides, the gods were tired of bloodshed. They exonerated Orestes and declared the curse on the house of Atreus over.

  Other stories refuse that ending. In them, Aletes and Erigone grew up to rule at Mycenae, and Orestes came back with an army. He killed his half-brother and assaulted his half-sister. Her son, Penthilus, is the last descendant the old accounts name.

  14

• 8. Thyestes on Stage

  ›

  In 62 AD, Seneca the Younger wrote a tragedy called Thyestes, and it remains the most popular representation of the myth. The play is counted among the originals of the revenge tragedy genre. Though it was inspired by Greek mythology and legend, Seneca's version differs from the older stories.

  In 1560, Jasper Heywood, then a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, published a verse translation. Shakespeare's tragedy Titus Andronicus draws some of its plot elements from the same tale. In 1681, John Crowne wrote Thyestes, A Tragedy, which follows Seneca closely. He added a love story, an addition the source calls incongruous.

  Prosper Jolyot Crebillon, who lived from 1674 to 1762, wrote the tragedy Atree et Thyeste in 1707. It is prominent in two tales of ratiocination by Edgar Allan Poe, and The Purloined Letter is among the works cited. In 1796, Ugo Foscolo wrote a tragedy called Tieste, first presented in Venice a year later.

  Caryl Churchill, a British dramatist, wrote her own rendition. Her translation was performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London on the 7th of June 1994. In 2004, Jan van Vlijmen completed his opera Thyeste. Its French libretto was by Hugo Claus, based on his own 20th-century play of the same title, written in Dutch. Thyestes also appears in Ford Ainsworth's one-act play Persephone.

  Milton's Paradise Lost, book 10, lines 687-691, is among the literary references listed for the myth. Seneca's reach extends further still. One critic hears an echo of Atreus's speech in Seneca's Thyestes within Cleopatra's passionate, stretched rhetoric about Antony, a long way from Mycenae.

  256