bctrogues:

Greek mythology meme: [½] families

↳ The House of Atreus

The story of the House of Atreus begins with Tantalus. He was a demigod, the son of Zeus, beloved by the gods. He was often invited to dine with the gods on ambrosia and nectar, and one of his crimes was to offer those divine foods to his mortal friends. His severest crime, however, was that he killed his son Pelops and tried to serve his flesh to the gods at a banquet. The gods, of course, immediately realized what Tantalus had done, and sentenced him to an eternity in Tartarus, to stand famished and thirsty in a pool that disappeared each time he bent down to drink and a bough of fruits that he couldn’t ever reach.

Tantalus’s daughter Niobe had six sons and six daughters, each more beautiful than the last. In her pride she dared to insinuate that she was better than Leto, the mother of Artemis and Apollon, who only had two children. As revenge, the divine twins hunted her children down and slaughtered them all; Niobe herself was transformed into a weeping statue by Zeus.

Tantalus’s son Pelops was revived by the gods and soon married Hippodamia. Pelops went on to conquer the area which is today known as the Peloponnesus. Although the marriage wasn’t unhappy, Hippodamia became worried her own children would lose the throne as Pelops’s favourite was a bastard Chrysippus. Hippodamia murdered the boy and her sons Atreus and Thyestes fled to Mycenae. Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife Aerope and she had a son by him, as well as two sons named Agamemnon and Menelaus by her husband. When Atreus found out about Thyestes’s betrayal, he butchered and served Thyestes’s own sons as a meal at a banquet in his brother’s honor. When Thyestes realized what he had eaten, he laid a curse upon Atreus and his lineage before fleeing.

He went to the oracle of Delphi to ask for guidance, and the oracle told him he had to sire a child with his daughter Pelopia. Thyestes raped his own daughter, but left his sword behind. Having disposed of his wife Aerope, Atreus was looking for a new wife and found Pelopia. When she gave birth to a son, Atreus thought it was his own and named the child Aegisthus.

After years of seeking for Thyestes, Atreus sent his now-grown sons Agamemnon and Menelaus to Delphi, where they happened upon Thyestes, who was consulting the oracle about what he should do next to execute his revenge. The brothers brought their uncle in front of their father. However, Thyestes recognized Aegisthus’s sword as his own and told the boy to bring his mother to Thyestes’s cell. When Pelopia arrived, Thyestes revealed himself as the father of her child, as well as her own, and Pelopia threw herself upon his sword. Aegisthus realized then that his true father was Thyestes, and in an effort to please his father, he slew Atreus. Agamemnon and Menelaus fled from Mycenae.

During their stay in Sparta, Agamemnon killed his cousin and married his wife Clytemnestra, while Menelaus wedded her twin sister Helen in order to assume the throne. Clytemnestra was less than pleased with her husband as he had murdered her first husband and sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods, so when Agamemnon went on the war quest for Troy in an effort to reclaim Menelaus’s wife from the Trojan prince Paris, Clytemnestra took Aegisthus as her lover. When Agamemnon returned, he brought his foreign mistress Cassandra with him, and with the help of Aegisthus, Clytemnestra killed them both. Aegisthus and Clytemnestra claimed Agamemnon’s throne as their own. However, two children of Agamemnon’s survived: Orestes and Electra.

Electra was permitted to live in the palace, where she was treated badly by her mother and step-father. Orestes was sent to live in Crisa, where he made friends with Pylades. After eight years he returned to his birth-home with Pylades to avenge his father’s murder. With the aid of his sister Electra, Orestes killed Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. After the deed was done, Orestes himself was cursed by the Erinnyes who tormented him day and night. After a year of exile, he pled for mercy from the gods. Apollon and Artemis sided with him, as did Athena. Orestes was tasked to retrieve a statue of Artemis from the Taurians, a people notorious for their habit of sacrificing Greeks in the name of Artemis. He succeeded in this task, and thus placated the anger of the Erinnyes, bringing an end to the curse upon the House of Atreus.