In Greek mythology, the kings of Mycenae and Sparta, Agamemnon and Menelaus, are both members of the House of Atreus. These Atreides, or sons of Atreus, were heroes of the Trojan War but also afflicted by a hereditary curse that saw each generation succumb to murder, cannibalism, and adultery.
While the family’s doom is known as the Curse of Atreus, this hereditary guilt and punishment began with Atreus’ grandfather, Tantalus. Only after several generations would Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, end the curse with the help of Athena and Apollo.
The Crimes of Tantalus
The Curse of Atreus that would afflict the House of Atreides began with the actions of Atreus’ grandfather, Tantalus. One story claims that the gods favored Tantalus, so they shared with him their nectar and ambrosia, divine food consumed by the gods to make him immortal. But Tantalus then stole the nectar and ambrosia to share with his friends.
An angry Zeus cast Tantalus into the underworld to spend eternity standing in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Whenever he reached up to grab a fruit, the branches would rise beyond his reach. When he bent down to drink the water, it would recede. According to Pindar’s 1st Olympian Ode, there was also a massive stone suspended above his head.
While there is no murder, adultery, or cannibalism in this version of the story, the act of stealing nectar and ambrosia to share with mortals deals with improper eating. These were the foods of the gods and were not meant to be eaten by humans.
In another story, Tantalus’s crime was that he sought to test the omniscience of the gods by killing his own son, Pelops, and feeding him to them. All but Demeter, who was distracted by the abduction of her daughter Persephone, knew what had happened and refused to eat. But Demeter ate a piece.
Whatever the nature of his crimes, it was the actions of Tantalus that cursed his future children, also known as the Tantalid line.
Pelops
According to this second story, after punishing Tantalus, Zeus took pity on the murdered Pelops and brought him back to life. Pelops then compounded the curse when he decided to compete for Hippodamia’s hand in marriage. To win her hand, he had to defeat her father, the king of Pisa, in a chariot race. But if Pelops lost, he would be killed.
Rather than risk his newly restored life, Pelops bribed the king’s charioteer, Myrtilus. According to Pausanias (Description of Greece, 8.14.11), Pelops promised the charioteer that he would let him spend one night with his new bride once he won. In a different version, Hyginus Fabulae 84 states that Pelops offered Myrtilus half of the kingdom.
Whatever the promise, Myrtilus agreed and sabotaged the chariot, either by replacing the axle pins with wax or by removing them altogether, resulting in the king’s death. When Myrtilus reminded Pelops of his promise, Pelops threw him into the sea. As Myrtilus fell to his death, he cursed Pelops and all his descendants.
Atreus and Thyestes
Pelops’ sons, Atreus and Thyestes, found themselves following a similar path. They were not Pelops’ only children, and at the incitement of their mother, Atreus and Thyestes murdered their half-brother, Chrysippus. Pelops was said to have exiled and cursed them for the murder.
Around this time, Mycenae had no king. The people of Mycenae received an oracle that they should ask one of the children of Pelops to be their king. They summoned Atreus and Thyestes and determined that they would choose the king based on who could produce a golden fleece (not to be confused with the fleece from Jason and the Argonauts). It so happened that Atreus was in possession of such a fleece, so he was confident of his victory.
Atreus had once made a vow that he would sacrifice to Artemis the finest lamb in his flock. But when a golden lamb was born, he kept it for himself and put the fleece in a chest, entrusting it to his wife, Aerope. However, he was unaware that his wife was having an affair with Thyestes. So, Thyestes was also confident that he could acquire the fleece.
Aerope gave the fleece to Thyestes, who showed it to the people and became the new king of Mycenae (Apollodorus, Epitome, E.2.11). With the aid of Zeus and Helios, Atreus was able to wrest the kingship from his brother and send him into exile, but Thyestes’ trick with the lamb revealed the affair between him and Aerope. As revenge, Atreus called his brother back from exile under the pretense of reconciliation. He then killed Thyestes’ sons, chopped them up, cooked them, and served them to their father. Only after he had his fill did Atreus reveal what he had done. He then sent his brother back into exile.
Thyestes then vowed revenge and sought out an oracle to ask how to kill Atreus. In one version, the oracle tells him that he must have a son by his own daughter, Pelopia, and that son will kill Atreus. In another version, the oracle tells him to be somewhere at a certain time under cover of darkness and to rape the girl he finds there. Therefore, unknowingly he would rape his daughter.
In both versions, Thyestes did as the oracle suggested, and Pelopia had a son named Aegisthus. But as soon as he was born, she abandoned him to die of exposure. A farmer found the infant and brought him to Atreus, who raised the boy as his own. When Aegisthus had grown into a man, he discovered that Thyestes was his real father. He then killed Atreus and restored the throne to his father (Apollodorus, Epitome, E.2.13-14).
Agamemnon
Thyestes took the throne, but the two sons of Atreus, Agamemnon and Menelaus, were secreted away by their nurse. When they had grown, they were recalled to Mycenae and drove Thyestes and Aegisthus out. Agamemnon was made king of Mycenae, and Menelaus became king of Sparta.
At the outbreak of the Trojan War, Agamemnon was made leader of the Greek forces. But, due to the anger of Artemis, the winds would not carry their ships. She was angry with him because he boasted that Artemis could not hunt a deer better than him and that his father Atreus did not sacrifice the promised golden lamb to her (Apollodorus, Epitome, E.3.21).
Agamemnon asked an oracle what he should do, and he was told that he had to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia like he would sacrifice a lamb. He was torn between his duty as a father and his duties as a general, but the king ultimately decided to take the oracle’s advice. He told his daughter that he had arranged for her to marry Achilles and that he was bringing her out to meet him. Naturally, the girl was excited at the prospect of marrying the best warrior among the Greeks, and so had no inclination of what was about to happen.
Most versions of the story claim that Artemis substituted a deer for the girl, sparing her. But the switch doesn’t seem to be known by anyone except Artemis and Iphigenia herself (Apollodorus, Epitome, E.3.22). Her father assumed she was dead.
After the war, it took another ten years for Agamemnon to return home, where his wife Clytemnestra had taken a lover, his cousin Aegisthus. Together they plotted Agamemnon’s murder. Aegisthus wanted the throne of Mycenae and Clytemnestra wanted revenge for the killing of their daughter. The great king of Mycenae, leader of the Greek armies, after 20 years away and on his first day home, was murdered while he was taking a bath (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1343-1346).
Orestes
Aeschylus’s play Oresteia follows the titular protagonist Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, as he grapples with the consequences of his father’s murder and the crushing weight of the curse. His duties as a son mean that he must avenge his father, but to do so would mean killing his mother. He asked Apollo what he should do. The god confirmed that he must kill Clytemnestra. So Orestes killed his own mother to avenge his father.
As a result, Orestes was tormented by the Furies, chthonic goddesses that punished people for crimes against blood relatives. He ended up in Athens, where Athena presided over the first court of murder to determine Orestes’ guilt. The goddess acquitted him, purifying him of his blood guilt and removing the curse from Orestes and his descendants.
Menelaus The Blessed
Notably, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus seems to have escaped the curse. This is possibly due to the fact that he wasn’t the firstborn son of Atreus, so the moral guilt only passed to his older brother. In other instances of the curse, the afflicted were either the eldest son or had been cursed themselves in their lifetime. Menelaus is the sole member of the Tantalid lineage that was neither.
After the Trojan War, Menelaus spent eight years wandering and ended up in Egypt, where he found his wife, Helen. Supposedly, the Helen that caused the Trojan War had been a copy, fashioned out of clouds by Zeus. The 5th-century BCE tragedian Euripides, in his work Helen, recounts the story of how Menelaus rescued his new Helen from the dangerous politics of the Egyptian court and took her back to Greece. He was later made immortal by Hera and allowed to live in the Elysian Fields with Helen (Apollodorus, Epitome, E.7.29). This is why Menelaus is known as the blessed.
