The curse of the House of Atreus

According to Apollodorus, a second-century-BCE collector and recorder of myths, Menelaus’s mother was Aerope, the daughter of Catreus, king of Crete. Atreus, king of Mycenae, was either Menelaus’s father or in some ; _ accounts his grandfather. This meant that Menelaus

Was a member of the cursed House of Atreus, also known as the House of Pelops.

" '  In the tragedy Agamemnon by the fifth-

Century-BCE Athenian dramatist Aeschylus, the prophetess Cassandra says that the family from which Menelaus sprang had been ¦ cursed for generations. Certainly a reading of the deeds committed by the family supports this view. Every generation saw some monstrous crime, including cannibalism, incest, and murder, usually committed by one member of the family against another.

Tantalus, the clan’s founder, killed his own son, Pelops, and served him to the gods in a stew. Pelops, when resurrected by the gods, murdered his prospective father-in-law as well as his own best friend in order to win Hippodameia in marriage. Atreus and Thyestes, the sons of Pelops, quarreled over the rulership of Mycenae and over Atreus’s wife, Aerope, whom Thyestes seduced. In vengeance Atreus boiled Thyestes’ children and served them to him in a stew. Thyestes also committed incest with his surviving daughter (who later murdered him) in order to conceive a son who would avenge him by killing Atreus.

In the next generation, Agamemnon, one of Atreus’s sons, sacrificed one of his own daughters, Iphigeneia, in

Right: This is an ancient Greek stone relief carved around the sixth century BCE depicting King Menelaus and Queen Helen. It is located in Sparta, the city that the couple are said to have ruled.

Order to gain a fair wind from the gods and sail the Greek army to Troy. While Agamemnon was away fighting the Trojans, Thyestes’ son Aegisthus seduced Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, and on Agamemnon’s return Aegisthus and Clytemnestra murdered him. Years later Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, avenged his father’s death by murdering Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.