b. But others say, with greater authority, that Eurystheus’s father Sthenelus, having banished Amphitryon, and seized the throne of Mycenae, sent for Atreus and Thyestes, his brothers-in-law, and installed them at near-by Midea. A few years later, when Sthenelus and Eurystheus were both dead, an oracle advised the Mycenaeans to choose a prince of the Pelopid house to rule over them. They thereupon summoned Atreus and Thyestes from Midea and debated which of these two (who were fated to be always at odds) should be crowned king.
c. Now, Atreus had once vowed to sacrifice the finest of his flocks to Artemis; and Hermes, anxious to avenge the death of Myrtilus on the Pelopids, consulted his old friend Goat-Pan, who made a horned lamb with a golden fleece appear among the Acarnanian flock which Pelops had left to his sons Atreus and Thyestes. He foresaw that Atreus would claim it as his own and, from his reluctance to give Artemis the honour due to her, would become involved in fratricidal war with Thyestes. Some, however, say that it was Artemis herself who sent the lamb, to try him. Atreus kept his vow, in part at least, by sacrificing the lamb’s flesh; but he stuffed and mounted the fleece and locked it in a chest. He grew so proud of his life- like treasure that he could not refrain from boasting about it in the market place, and the jealous Thyestes, for whom Atreus’s newly-married wife Aerope had conceived a passion agreed to be her lover if she gave him the lamb, which, he said, has been stolen by Atreus’s shepherds from his own half of the flock. For Artemis had laid a curse upon it, and this was her doing.
d. In a debate at the Council Hall, Atreus claimed the throne of Mycenae by right of primogeniture, and also as possessor of the lamb Thyestes asked him: ‘Do you then publicly declare that its owner should be king?’ ‘I do,’ Atreus replied. ‘And I concur,’ said Thyestes smiling grimly. A herald then summoned the people of Mycenae to acclaim their new king; the temples were hung with gold, and their doors thrown open; fixes blazed on every altar throughout the city and songs were sung in praise of the horned lamb with the golden fleece. But Thyestes unexpectedly rose to upbraid Atreus as a vain-glorious boaster, and led the magistrates to his home, where he displayed the lamb, justified his claim to its ownership, and was pronounced the rightful king of Mycenae.
e. Zeus, however, favoured Atreus, and sent Hermes to him, saying: ‘Call Thyestes, and ask him whether, if the sun goes backward on the dial, he will resign his claim to the throne in your favour?’ Atreus did as he was told, and Thyestes agreed to abdicate should such a portent occur. Thereupon Zeus, aided by Eris, reversed the laws of Nature, which hitherto had been immutable. Helius, already in mid-career, wrested his chariot about and turned his horses’ heads towards the clam. The seven Pleiades, and all the other stars, retraced their courses in sympathy; and that evening, for the first and last time, the sun set in the east. Thyestes’s deceit and greed being thus plainly attested, Atreus succeeded to the throne of Mycenae, and banished him. When, later, Atreus discovered that Thyestes had committed adultery with Aerope, he could hardly contain his rage. Nevertheless, for awhile he feigned forgiveness.
f. Now, this Aerope, whom some call Europe, was a Cretan, the daughter of King Catreus. One day, she had been surprised by Catreus while entertaining a lover in the palace, and was on the point of being thrown to the fishes when, countermanding his sentence at the plea of Nauplius, he sold her, and his other daughter Clymene as well, whom he suspected of plotting against his life, as slaves to Nauplius for a nominal price; only stipulating that neither of them should ever return to Crete. Nauplius then married Clymene, who bore him Oeax and Palamedes the inventor. But Atreus, whose wife Cleola had died after giving birth to a weakly son, Pleisthenes-this was Artemis’s revenge on him for his failure to keep the vow-married Aerope, and begot on her Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Anaxibia. Pleisthenes had also died: the cut-throats whom Atreus sent to murder his namesake, Thyestes’s bastard son by Aerope, murdered him in error-Thyestes saw it.
g. Atreus now sent a herald to lure Thyestes back to Mycenae, with the offer of an amnesty and a half-share in the kingdom; but, as soon as Thyestes accepted this, slaughtered Aglaus, Orchomenus, and Callileon, Thyestes’s three sons by one of the Naiads, on the very altar of Zeus where they had taken refuge; and then sought out and killed the infant Pleisthenes the Second, and Tantalus the Second, his twin. He hacked them all limb from limb, and set chosen morsels of their meet to a dish boiled in a cauldron, before Thyestes, to welcome him on his rerun When Thyestes had eaten heartily, Atreus sent in their bloody heads and feet and hands, laid out on another dish, to show him what was now inside his belly. Thyestes fell back, vomiting, and laid an inevitable curse upon the seed of Atreus.
h. Exiled once more, Thyestes fled first to King Thesprotus in Sicyon, where his own daughter Pelopia, or Pelopeia, was a priestess. For, desiring revenge at whatever cost, he had consulted the Delphic Oracle and been advised to beget a son on his own daughter. Thyestes found Pelopia sacrificing by night to Athene Colocasia and, being loth to profane the rites, concealed himself in a near-by grove. Presently Pelopia, who was leading the solemn dance, slipped in a pool of blood that had flowed from the throat of a black ewe, the victim, and stained her tunic. She ran at once to the temple fish-pond, removed her tunic and was washing out the stain, when Thyestes sprang from the grove and ravished her. Pelopia did not recognize him, because he was wearing a mask, but contrived to steal his sword and carry it back to the temple, where she hid it under the pedestal of Athene’s image; and Thyestes, finding the scabbard empty and fearing detection, escaped to Lydia, the land of his fathers.
i. Meanwhile, fearing the consequences of his crime, Atreus consulted the Delphic Oracle, and was told: ‘Recall Thyestes from Sicyon.’ He reached Sicyon too late to meet Thyestes and, falling in love with Pelopia, whom he assumed to be King Thesprotus’s daughter, asked leave to make her his third wife; having by this time executed Aerope. Eager for an alliance with so powerful a king, and wishing at the same time to do Pelopia a service, Thesprotus did not undeceive Atreus, and the wedding took place at once. In due course she bore the son begotten on her by Thyestes, whom she exposed on a mountain; but goatherds rescued him and gave him to a she-goat for suckling-hence his name Aegisthus, or ‘goat- strength’. Atreus believed that Thyestes had fled from Sicyon at news of his approach; that the child was his own; and that Pelopia had been affected by the temporary madness which some times overtakes women after childbirth. He therefore recovered Aegisthus from the goatherds and reared him as his heir.
j. A succession of bad harvests then plagued Mycenae, and Atreus sent Agamemnon and Menelaus to Delphi for news of Thyestes, whom they met by chance on his return from a further visit to the Oracle. They haled him back to Mycenae, where Atreus, having thrown him into prison, ordered Aegisthus, then seven years of age, to kill him as he dept.
k. Thyestes awoke suddenly to find Aegisthus standing over him, sword in hand; he quickly rolled sideways and escaped death. Then he rose, disarmed the boy with a shrewd kick at his wrist, and sprang to recover the sword. But it was his own, lost years before in Sicyon! He seized Aegisthus by the shoulder and cried: Tell me instantly how this came into your possession?’ Aegisthus stammered: ‘Alas, my mother Pelopia gave it me.’ ‘I will spare your life, boy,’ said Thyestes, ‘if you carry out the three orders I now give you.’ ‘I am your servant in all things,’ wept Aegisthus, who had expected no mercy. ‘My first order is to bring your mother here,’ Thyestes told him.
l. Aegisthus thereupon brought Pelopia to the dungeon and, recognizing Thyestes, she wept on his neck, called him her dearest father, and commiserated with his sufferings. ‘How did you come by this sword, daughter?’ Thyestes asked. ‘I took it from the scabbard of an unknown stranger who ravished me one night at Sicyon,’ she replied. ‘It is mine,’ said Thyestes. Pelopia, stricken with horror, seized the sword, and plunged it into her breast. Aegisthus stood aghast, not understanding what had been said. ‘Now take this sword to Atreus,’ was Thyestes’s second order, ‘and tell him that you have carried out your commission. Then return!’ Dumbly Aegisthus took the bloody thing to Atreus, who went joyfully down to the seashore, where he offered a sacrifice of thanksgiving to Zeus, convinced that he was rid of Thyestes at last.
m. When Aegisthus returned to the dungeon, Thyestes revealed himself as his father, and issued his third order: ‘Kill Atreus, my son Aegisthus, and this time do not falter!’ Aegisthus did as he was told, and. Thyestes reigned once more in Mycenae.
n. Another golden-fleeced horned lamb then appeared among Thyestes’s flocks and grew to be a ram and, afterwards, every new Pelopid king was thus divinely confirmed in possession of his golden sceptre; these rams grazed at ease in a paddock enclosed by unscaleable walls. But some say that the token of royalty was not a living creature, but a silver bowl, on the bottom of which a golden lamb had been inlaid; and others, that it cannot have been Aegisthus who killed Atreus, because he was only an infant in swaddling clothes when Agamemnon drove his father Thyestes from Mycenae, wresting the sceptre from him.
o. Thyestes lies buried beside the road that leads from Mycenae to Argos, near the shrine of Perseus. Above his tomb stands the stone figure of a ram. The tomb of Atreus, and his underground treasury, are still shown among the ruins of Mycenae.
p. Thyestes was not the last hero to have his own child served up to him on a dish. This happened some years later to Clymenus, the Arcadian son of Schoenus, who conceived an incestuous passion for Harpalyce, his daughter by Epicaste. Having debauched Harpalyce, he married her to Alastor, but afterwards took her away again. Harpalyce, to revenge herself, murdered the son she bore him-who was also her brother-cooked the corpse and laid it before Clymenus. She was transformed into a bird of prey, and Clymenus hanged himself.
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1. The Atreus-Thyestes myth, which survives only in highly theatrical versions, seems to be based on the rivalry between Argive co-kings for supreme power, as in the myth of Acrisius and Proetus. It is a good deal older than the story of Heracles’s Sons-the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese, about the year 1050 BC-with which Thucydides associates it. Atreus’s golden lamb, withheld from sacrifice, recalls Poseidon’s white bull, similarly withheld by Minos; but is of the same breed as the golden-fleeced rams sacred to Zeus on Mount Laphystium, and to Poseidon on the island of Crumissa. To possess this fleece was a token of royalty, because the king used it in an annual rain-making ceremony. The lamb is metaphorically golden: in Greece ‘water is gold,’ and the fleece magically produced rain. This metaphor may, however, have been reinforced by the use of fleeces to collect gold dust from the rivers of Asia Minor; and the occasional appearance, in the Eastern Mediterranean, of lambs with gilded teeth, supposedly descendants of those that the youthful Zeus tended on Mount Ida. (In the eighteenth century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu investigated this persistent anomaly, but could not discover its origin.) It may also be that the Argive royal sceptre was topped by a golden ram. Apollodorus is vague about the legal background of the dispute, but Thyestes’s claim was probably the same as that made by Maeve for the disputed bull in the fratricidal Irish War of the Bulls: that the lamb had been stolen from his own flocks at birth.2. Euripides has introduced Eris at a wrong point in the story: she will have provoked the quarrel between the brothers, rather than helped Zeus to reverse the course of the sun-a phenomenon which she was not empowered to produce. Classical grammarians and philosophers have explained this incident in various ingenious ways which anticipate the attempts made by twentieth-century Protestants to account scientifically for the retrograde movement of the Sun’s shadow on ‘the dial of Ahaz’ (Kings). Lucian and Polybius write that when Atreus and Thyestes quarrelled over the succession, the Argives were already habitual star-gazers and agreed that the best astronomer should be elected king. In the ensuing contest, Thyestes pointed out that the sun always rose in the Ram at the Spring Festival- hence the story of the golden lamb-but the soothsayer Atreus did better: he proved that the sun and the earth travel in different directions, and that what appear to be sunsets are, in fact, settings of the earth. Whereupon the Argives made him king. Hyginus and Servius both agree that Atreus was an astronomer, but make him the first to predict an eclipse of the sun mathematically; and say that, when the calculation proved correct, his jealous brother Thyestes left the city in chagrin (Hyginus: Fabula; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid). Socrates took the myth more literally: regarding it as evidence of his theory that the universe winds and unwinds itself in alternate cycles of vast duration, the reversal of motion at the close of each cycle being accompanied by great destruction of animal life (Plato: The Statesman).
3. To understand the story, however, one must think not allegorically, nor philosophically, but mythologically; namely in terms of the archaic conflict between the sacred king and his tanist. The king reigned until the summer solstice, when the sun reached its most northerly point and stood still; then the tanist killed him and took his place, while the sun daily retreated southward towards the winter solstice. This mutual hatred, sharpened by sexual jealousy, because the tanist married his rival’s widow, was renewed between Argive co-kings, whose combined reigns extended for a Great Year; and they quarrelled over Aerope, as Acrisius and Proetus had done over Danaë. The myth of Hezekiah, who was on the point of death when, as a sign of Jehovah’s favour, the prophet Isaiah added ten years to his reign by turning back the sun ten degrees on the dial of Ahaz (Kings and Isaiah), suggests a Hebrew, or perhaps a Philistine, tradition of how the king, after the calendar reform caused by adoption of the metonic cycle, was allowed to prolong his reign to the nineteenth year, instead of dying in the ninth. Atheus, at Mycenae, may have been granted a similar dispensation.
4. The cannibalistic feast in honour of Zeus, which appears in the myth of Tantalus, has here been confused with the annual sacrifice of child surrogates, and with Cronus’s vomiting up of his children by Rhea. Thyestes’s rape of Pelopia recalls the myth of Cinyras and Smyrna, and is best explained as the king’s attempt to prolong his reign beyond the customary limit by marriage with his step-daughter, the heiress. Aerope’s rescue from the Cretan fishes identifies her with Dictynna-Britomartis, whom her grandfather Minos had chased into the sea. Aegisthus, suckled by a she-goat, is the familiar New Year child of the Mysteries.
5. The story of Clymenus and Harpalyce-there was another Thracian character of the same name, a sort of Atalanta-combines the myth of Cinyras and Smyrna with that of Tereus and Procne. Unless this is an artificial composition for the theatre, as Clymenus’s unmythical suicide by hanging suggests, he will have tried to regain a title to the throne when his reign ended, by marrying the heiress, technically his daughter, to an interrex and then killing him and taking her himself. Alastor means ‘avenger’, but his vengeance does not appear in the myth; perhaps the original version made Alastor the victim of the human sacrifice.
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