The chariot race

Pelops was not deterred by the rows of heads facing him as he approached the palace. Poseidon, god of the sea, had given him a fast golden chariot that was able to race across water. When Hippodameia saw Pelops, she fell in love with him immediately.

She feared that he also would suffer the fate of the other suitors and decided to do her best to help him. Together with Pelops, she bribed her father’s charioteer, Myrtilus, to sabotage Oenomaus’s chariot by replacing the pins that held the wheels on the chariot’s axles with wax plugs. Myrtilus’s reward was to be half of the kingdom.

The race began. Oenomaus knew that Pelops would be harder to beat than the other suitors. He let Pelops get slightly ahead, and then he stood up and poised his spear to fling at Pelops to kill him. At that moment the wax pins melted completely, and Oenomaus’s chariot crashed and killed him.

Pelops had won the race and the hand of Hippodameia, but he had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain with Myrtilus. He killed him by throwing him into the sea. Before Myrtilus drowned, however, he managed to curse Pelops and all his descendants.

Pelops and Hippodameia ruled Oenomaus’s kingdom and extended it by conquering neighboring regions.

Their rule covered a large part of Greece, and the southern peninsula of Greece is still known today as the Peloponnese, which means “Pelops’s land.”

As for the curse of Myrtilus, it hung over all Pelops’s descendants, including his son Atreus, his grandsons Agamemnon and Menelaus, and his great-grandson Orestes.

A shrine to Pelops at Olympia, a city in Elis, was said to have been built by Heracles, one of Pelops’s most renowned descendants. Artistic representations of Pelops include a sculpture on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, which shows the moment before the chariot race began. According to Greek travel writer Pausanias (143—176 CE), the race was also depicted on the seventh-century-BCE Chest of Cypselus.

Peter Connor

Bibliography

Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfmch’s Mythology. New York: Barnes &

Noble, 2006.

Howatson, M. C. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

See also: Agamemnon; Atreus; Heracles; Menelaus; Orestes; Philoctetes.