If you read ancient Greek literature, you run across references to “the house of Atreus.” We’re mainly talking about Agamemnon and Menelaus, the brothers who led the Greeks against Troy.
Agamemnon and Menelaus were disasters as leaders. Homer and the tragedians who followed his lead said the brothers brought hardship and sorrow to the Greeks. The brothers’ hubris caused so much suffering you sometimes have to remind yourself that the Greeks won the war.
Less known is the story of their father Atreus, son of Pelops, who gave his name to the Peloponnese, i.e. the snappy but geographically incorrect “Isle of Pelops.”
Atreus had many siblings, but one brother, Thuestes, was such a rival that their poisonous relationship spread hardship and sorrow among the Greeks.
Atreus made a vow to the goddess Artemis to sacrifice the best of his flocks to her. The god Hermes, who had a grudge against Pelops and his brood, dropped a lamb with a golden fleece into the flock, just to make trouble.
The vow required Atreus to sacrifice the lamb to the goddess. He did, but he kept the fleece for himself.
Once trouble starts, it’s hard to stop. Atreus’s new wife, Aerope, known to some writers as Europe, fell in love with Thuestes. He agreed to be her lover — if she’d give him the fleece, which he said his brother had stolen from his pasture. She did.
The nobles of Mycenae were considering both brothers as candidates for the kingship, and Atreus argued that the golden fleece was evidence of divine approval.
Thuestes seemed shocked. “So you’re saying that the owner of the fleece should be king?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Well, we agree on something.”
Dramatists dragged out the story of how the nobles went to see who had the fleece.
Thuestes had it, but through divine intervention, Atreus became king. (The intervention was spectacular. It was, in myth, the sun set in the east.)
Once on the throne, Atreus took vengeance on his brother, serving him a dinner of his own children, cooked in a stew.
Thuestes wanted vengeance so badly that he consulted the oracle at Delphi. When he was told vengeance could come only through a son born to him and his daughter Pelopia, he committed rape.
Atreus thought that Pelopia’s son, Aegisthus, was his own. Aegisthus was just 7 when he killed Atreus, and Thuestes came to the throne.
There’s more, but you get the gist.
Homer’s Iliad is the story of an ill-fated expedition against Troy, led by two flawed characters. It’s bloody and gruesome, and I’m pretty sure I know a state legislator or two who would try to ban it from public libraries if they knew about it.
I’ve been thinking about the story in terms of a modest theory about Greek literature: If a mythical story strikes you as an awful example of human behavior, inquire into the backstory. If you look at the story behind a troubling character, you’ll often find that his dad was even worse, and you don’t want to know about grandpa.
• Robert Graves’s account is in The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 43-51.
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