House of Atreus

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ummary: Chapter I —The House of Atreus The dynastic dramas of the House of Atreus and the Royal House of Thebes are taken from the works the Greek tragedians Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. Euripides wrote of the House of Atreus, which includes Atreus’s son, Agamemnon, his family (Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Orestes, and Electra), and his brother, Menelaus. The family is cursed because an ancestor, Tantalus, a son of Zeus who often visited Olympus, mysteriously decided to kill, cook, and serve his son Pelops to the Olympians. Discerning his heinous crime, the gods send Tantalus to be tormented in Hades, where he stands in a pool of water with fruit dangling above his head. The water sinks away when he bends to drink it, and the fruit rises up when he reaches to eat it. He is eternally tantalized—a term we use today. Tantalus’s crime initiates generations of violence and tragedy, each crime begetting further bloodshed. Pelops, restored to life by the gods, seeks to marry the princess Hippodamia. She can only be won by the suitor who beats her father in a chariot race; if the suitor loses, he is killed. In one version, Hippodamia and her father’s charioteer, Myrtilus, conspire to give Pelops the victory, but Pelops later kills Myrtilus, bringing further bad luck on his family. Tantalus’s daughter Niobe decides she is the equal of the gods and demands that the people of Thebes worship her. As punishment, Apollo, and Artemis kill her seven sons and seven daughters. Weeping continually, she turns into a rock always wet with tears. Next, Pelops’s son Thyestes seduces the wife of his brother, Atreus, who then kills Thyestes’s two children and serves them to their father for dinner. In the newest generation, Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to placate Artemis and procure favorable sailing winds during the Trojan War. Agamemnon’s wife,

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