Toni Badnall’s Blog

One of the bloodiest chapters in Greek mythology, this myth cycle seems to be all about taboos and what happens when you violate them: cannibalism, incest, violence, sexual transgression. Parallels can be drawn with the House of Labdacus in the Theban Cycle – no wonder Froma Zeitlin though Argos and Thebes functioned as ‘other’ places set against Athens on the tragic stage.

Oe thing that comes out is the building cycle of transgressions as the myth progresses through its generations – you have Tantalus’ serving of Pelops at the banquet of the gods, and any retaliation of Pelops against his father instead seems displaced onto his father-in-law, Oenomaus, in his fatal chariot race. It’s in the next generation, though, that things get really interesting – and really grisly. Pelops’ own sons, Atreus and Thyestes, turn first on their brother Chrysippus, then on each other. Agamemnon and Menelaus, the heroes of the Trojan War, and Aegisthus, the cousin who brings Agamemnon down, are begotten amidst treachery (the golden lamb), adultery, infanticide and cannibalism of Atreus against Thyestes’ sons, and incest in the pursuit of vengeance.

If this is the background against which the Trojan War is set, is it any wonder that Helen ran off with Paris? That Clytemnestra took up with Aegisthus when Agamemnon, who she claims in Euripides (IA) killed her husband and child and raped her, sacrificed their daughter at Aulis?

Nobody seems right or wrong in this myth – even Orestes, who is told to avenge his father on his mother, doesn’t exactly come up smelling of roses (epsecially in later, Euripidean versions). Eloping with his cousin Hermione after killing her husband, he is eventually killed by a snakebite and the line wiped out by the Heraclids. As in the Theban Cycle, the ancestral curse on the household eventually expunges itself in the destruction of the House.