Along with Thebes Mycenae was the most popular source for legends among Greek poets; its sagas are particularly concerned with the House of Atreus and the greatest of its representatives, Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans against Troy. We shall consider the Trojan War later; in the present chapter we shall discuss the fortunes of the House as they developed in Greece itself. The family of Atreus was afflicted with a curse that brought evil on its members generation after generation. The father of Atreus was Pelops, son of Tantalus, who came from Asia Minor to Greece as a suitor for the hand of Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus, king of Pisa (in Elis). To win Hippodamia, a suitor had first to win a chariot race from Pisa to the Isthmus of Corinth against Oenomaus.

He would have a short start and take Hippodamia in his chariot with him; Oenomaus would follow, and if he caught up would kill the suitor. Thirteen suitors had failed when Pelops came, and their heads decorated Oenomaus' palace. Pindar in his first Olympian Ode makes Pelops pray to Poseidon during the journey to Pisa. In reply, says Pindar (Olympian 1.87-89), Poseidon "gave him a golden chariot and tireless winged horses. And Pelops overcame the violence of Oenomaus and took the girl as wife. She bore him six princes, sons full of courage. . . . ' 9 This version, with its easy intercourse between god and man, is simpler and probably older than the better-known one, according to which Pelops bribed Oenomaus' charioteer, Myrtilus (son of the god Hermes), to remove the linchpins from Oenomaus' chariot so that it crashed during the pursuit and Oenomaus was thrown from it and killed.' So Pelops won Hippodamia and drove away with her, accompanied by Myrtilus. Now Myrtilus expected that -Pelops would reward him by allowing him to enjoy Hippodamia. At a resting place on the journey he attempted to rape her, and when Pelops discovered this he threw Myrtilus from a cliff into the sea; as Myrtilus fell he cursed Pelops and his descendants, and it is this curse and the blood-guilt of the murder of Myrtilus that led to the misfortunes of the House of Atreus. Pelops returned to Pisa and became king in place of Oenomaus; he extended his power over the nearby areas and the southem part of Greece was called after him "The Island of Pelops" (Peloponnese). His children were Thyestes and Atreus, and they quarreled over the kingdom of Mycenae, which had been offered to "ason of Pelops" in obedience to an oracle. It was agreed that the possessor of a golden-fleeced ram should become king. According to Euripides (Electra 698-725), Pan brought the golden-fleeced ram to Atreus, and the people of Mycenae were celebrating his succession to the throne: The golden censers were set out, and throughout the city the altar-fires blazed.

The flute, the Muses' servant, sounded its music, most beautiful. The lovely dances spread, honoring the golden ram-of Thyestes. For he had persuaded Atreus' own wife with secret love and took the talisman to his house. Then he came to the assembly-place and cried out that he had the horned sheep in his house, the golden-fleeced one. Euripides further says that Zeus, in anger at Thyestes' deception, caused the sun to travel in the opposite direction. So Thyestes for a time enjoyed the reward of his adultery, and Atreus was banished. Later, Atreus returned and became king, exiling Thyestes in his turn, only to recall him and avenge himself for Aerope's seduction. He invited Thyestes to a banquet and put before him as food Thyestes' own sons; when Thyestes discovered the truth, he went into exile again after cursing Atreus. Thus the curse of Myrtilus affected the first generation of Pelops' descendants; the quarrel of Thyestes and Atreus was continued by their sons. In his second exile Thyestes lay with his daughter, Pelopia, as he had been advised to do by an oracle, and became the father of Aegisthus; it was he who continued the vendetta against Atreus' son, Agamemnon, who succeeded his father as king of Mycenae. Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter, Iphigenia, at the start of the Trojan expedition and by doing so had earned the implacable hatred of his wife, Clytemnestra.

While he was at Troy she committed adultery with Aegisthus, and the two of them plotted a common vengeance against Agamemnon. He was murdered on his return from Troy: "I struck him twice," boasts Clytemnestra, "and with two cries he let his limbs go slack; a third blow did I add as a thank offering to Hades below the earth, keeper of the dead. . . . And as he fell a rain of blood spattered me with black drops and I rejoiced no less than the fields in ~ k u sb'r ight rain at the time of swelling of the buds" (Aeschylus Agamemnon 1389-92). Likewise Aegisthus takes full responsibility for the deed, which he rejoices in as a just vengeance upon the son of Atreus. In the Odyssey, Agamemnon's ghost tells Odysseus how he and Cassandra (daughter of Priam and Agamemnon's' prisoner) were murdered (Homer, Odyssey 11. 408-26): "It was not brigands who murdered me on land, but Aegisthus, with my cursed wife, who killed me, arranging my death and fate, having called me into the house and given me a feast-killing me like an ox at the manger. Thus I died a most pitiable death, and around me my other companions were being ruthlessly killed, like tusked boars. . . . You have in the past experienced the death of many men, but if you had seen those deaths you would have most of all been grieved to see us lying in the hall amid the wine-bowls and tables full with food, and the whole floor flowing with blood. Most pitiable was the voice of the daughter of Priam that I heard, of Cassandra, whom treacherous Clytemnestra killed with me. But I, lifting my hands (in supplication) let them fall to the earth as I died by the sword, and my shameless wife turned away, nor did she dare, even though I was going down to the House of Hades, to close my eyes or mouth with her hands." In this version Agamemnon was killed by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra at the banquet celebrating his homecoming. The more widely accepted version is that of Aeschylus, in which Clytemnestra kills him in his bath, trapping him in a robe while she stabs him. Aeschylus has Cassandra foresee the murder and her own death in a dramatic prophecy before she enters the palace (Agamemnon 1095-1125).

She links Agamemnon's murder to the banquet of Thyestes, which she describes as if it were before her eyes: Yes, I am persuaded by the evidence I see, as I weep for these children murdered, for the cooked flesh eaten by their father. . . . What now is this new sorrow? Great is the evil being plotted in this palace, intolerable to its friends, hard to atone for, and one where defence is far away. . . . Oh, wretched woman, is this your purpose? As you wash your husband, who shares your bed, . . . how shall I describe the end? . . . What is this I see? Some net, the net of Hades? But the net is she who shares the guilt for the murder. . . . Ah! Ah! Keep the bull from the cow! She takes him in the robes and strikes him with the blackhomed weapon. He f alls in the bath full of water. It is the fate brought by the bath, contriver of treacherous murder, that I describe to you. The prophetic cries of the inspired victim describe as vividly as any objective report the death of Agamemnon, which she shortly is to share. Still the curse continued. Orestes, Agamemmon's son, was not at Mycenae at the time of the murder; while Clytemnestra and Aegisthus usurped the throne, he grew to manhood in exile at the court of Strophius, king of Phocis. It was now his duty to avenge the murder of his father, even though one of the murderers happened to be his own mother, and he was commanded by Apollo to carry out his duty. He returned to Mycenae, and with the encouragement of his sister, Electra, murdered Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.

In the Odyssey Homer makes Zeus praise Orestes for his piety toward his dead father, but in later authors (most notably Aeschylus) the feeling of revulsion at the matricide predominates. In this tradition, then, Orestes was pursued by the Erinyes, the avenging Furies, who drove him mad. Finally, again on the advice of Apollo, he came to Athens and there pleaded his case before the court of the Areopagus, whose members, citizens of Athens, were the jury. Apollo defended him, and Athena presided, while the Erinyes claimed the justice of their punishment. Athena gave her casting vote in favor of Orestes' acquittal, on the grounds that the killing of a mother did not outweigh the murder of a husband and father and that the son's duty toward a father outweighed all other relationships. Thus the curse on the House of Atreus came to an end; the Erinyes were appeased and given a new name, the Eumenides (i.e., Kindly Ones), and worshiped thereafter at Athens. This version of the myth, which is the subject of Aeschylus' play, Eumenides, emphasizes the development of law as the vehicle for justice, as against the long-outdated system (represented by the ancient goddesses of vengeance, the Erinyes) of blood-guilt and vengeance. But the arguments of Athena are hardly persuasive, and we are left in some doubt as to whether Aeschylus himself believed in their validity. Indeed, to him, as to many poets since his time (including Eugene O'Neill and T. S. Eliot in this century), the legend of Orestes is more important because of the new moral and religious principles that it introduces. In its original form the story of the House of Atreus is one of blood-guilt descending from one generation to another; the murder of Agamemnon is an act of vengeance; such things as the pride (hybris) that precedes his fall or the jealousy of Clytemnestra for Cassandra are literary additions.

Similarly Orestes acted with piety in avenging his father's death; his "guilt" is a later-if more humane-interpretation; indeed, it is illogical, for it ignores the fact that Apollo had ordered him to murder Clytemnestra. It was the genius of Aeschylus that transformed the primitive legend and in place of the ancient doctrine of bloodguilt and vengeance substituted the rule of Reason and Law. It is not surprising that there are other versions of Orestes' story, which allow him to be purified from the blood-guilt either by some ritual or by performing an expiatory deed, without undergoing trial and acquittal. According to one story he was told by the oracle of Apollo to go to the land of the Tauri (the modern Crimea) and fetch a wooden statue of Artemis. It was the custom of the Tauri to sacrifice strangers in their temple, and Orestes was handed over by their king, Thoas, to the priestess of Artemis, who was none other than Orestes' sister, Iphigenia. She (in this version) had been miraculously saved by Artemis at the moment of sacrifice at Aulis and removed by her to be her priestess among the Tauri. She recognized Orestes; together, under the protection of Athena, they returned to Greece taking the statue with them, which they dedicated at Halae in Attica. Orestes returned to Mycenae, while Iphigenia stayed in Attica as the priestess of Artemis at Brauron, where she died. Thus Orestes recovered his sanity and reigned at Mycenae; later he is said to have married his cousin Hemione (daughter of Helen and Menelaus), and by her to have been the father of Tisamenus. He had before his madness been betrothed to her, but she had married Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, and had gone with him to Epirus. Orestes met Neoptolemus at Delphi and there murdered him; in this way he won Hermione. He eventually died from a snake bite. Tisamenus was the Achaean leader against the Heraclidae, at whose hands he perished. As for Electra, she married Orestes' constant friend and companion, Pylades, son of Strophius, and by him had two sons, Strophius and Medon. Thereafter she disappears from the legend.