Atreus

Also Known As: Greek Atreus, Ἀτρεύς; son of Pelops, king of Mycenae, father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, and the man the House of Atreus is named after
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He plans further ahead than anyone else in his family and puts the entire advantage into a single act of revenge that ruins his own descendants.
Role in Mythos: He is the king of Mycenae who cooks his brother’s children and serves them to him, and whose surname becomes the shorthand for a cursed dynasty.
Relation to Humans: He is a mortal king, and the people of Mycenae choose him after an oracle tells them to take a son of Pelops. Everything he does to his own family he does under the forms of ordinary hospitality, which is what makes his story so much worse than a battle.

The lamb has a golden fleece and it has just been born into his flock, which is a problem, because Atreus has already sworn to give Artemis the finest animal he owns. The obvious course is to keep the vow. Instead he strangles the lamb, packs it into a box, and puts the box away in the house. Nothing in the rest of the story is as small as that decision, and everything in the rest of the story follows from it.

He kept the lamb.

Atreus is the son of Pelops, the grandson of Tantalus, the brother of Thyestes and the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, and his name ends up meaning more than he does. The House of Atreus is where Greek tragedy keeps its worst material, and by the time Aeschylus is writing, an Athenian audience only needed the family name to know that somebody was going to be killed indoors by a relative.

That is not how the story starts out. In the oldest surviving text that mentions him, Agamemnon stands up in the assembly at Troy holding a staff, and Homer gives the staff a pedigree instead of giving Atreus one. Hephaestus made it. Hephaestus gave it to Zeus, Zeus to Hermes, Hermes to Pelops the horseman, Pelops to Atreus, shepherd of the host. Atreus at his death left it to Thyestes, rich in flocks, and Thyestes left it to Agamemnon. Two brothers reigning one after the other and a staff handed down without incident. There is no adultery in it, no cannibalism, no reversed sun. Whatever the Athenians later did with this family, the Iliad does not know about it.

The version everyone remembers begins with the lamb in the box, and it goes wrong because Atreus’s wife Aerope was sleeping with his brother and took the box out of the house. When Mycenae needed a king, and the oracle said to choose a son of Pelops, and both brothers were summoned, Thyestes proposed in front of the assembled people that the throne should go to whichever of them held the golden lamb. Atreus agreed to that in public, because he believed the lamb was still where he had put it. It was not.

What follows is the strangest intervention in the whole cycle. Zeus sends Hermes to Atreus with a wager to offer: the kingdom to Atreus if the sun runs backward. Thyestes takes the bet. The sun sets in the east. The sky has publicly declared for one brother, and Atreus takes the throne and drives the other into exile, and no god ever explains why it was worth reversing the heavens to install this particular man.

Then he learns about the adultery.

His revenge is patient and it is dressed as reconciliation. He sends a herald to his exiled brother with an offer of peace, and the offer is accepted, and Thyestes comes home with his three young sons. Atreus kills the boys, Aglaus and Callileon and Orchomenus, while they are sitting as suppliants on the altar of Zeus, which for a Greek audience is a separate and sufficient crime by itself. He butchers them and boils the meat and holds back the hands and the feet. He serves his brother dinner and lets him eat his fill, and only then brings out the extremities and shows him what they are.

Aeschylus, putting the account in the mouth of Aegisthus a generation later, calls him a godless man who welcomed his brother with more heartiness than kindness and pretended to be celebrating a happy day by serving meat. He also records the small detail that does most of the damage: the fingers and the toes were broken off first. What Atreus gets for it is a curse spoken over an overturned table on the entire line of his father, and the curse eventually takes his sons and his grandchildren and leaves the throne to the man who murders him.

His own death gets one sentence. Aegisthus, the son Thyestes fathered for exactly this purpose, grows up, discovers whose child he is, kills Atreus and gives the kingdom back to his father. There is no scene, no last words, no burial.

There is a building, though. Outside the citadel at Mycenae stands the largest and finest of the beehive tombs, cut into a hillside around 1300 BC, fifteen metres across inside, entered under a single door lintel of stone weighing something in the order of a hundred and twenty tons. Nobody knows who was buried in it. It has been called the Treasury of Atreus since at least the second century AD, when travellers in the region were already pointing at it and using the name. The one thing on earth that carries his name is a magnificent stone room built for somebody else.

His powers are entirely those of an ordinary and very determined man. He can wait. He can keep a grievance intact through the years it takes to arrange a hospitable dinner. He understands that the strongest weapon available to a Bronze Age king is not an army but the guarantee of safety extended to a guest, and that the guarantee is worth using once.

His limit is that he only sees as far as the table. He wins completely, and the completeness of the win is what kills his family: the brother survives to be avenged, the curse attaches to the descendants rather than to the man who earned it, and every subsequent horror in Argos and Mycenae runs on the fuel he supplied. Agamemnon dies in a bath because of a meal Agamemnon never attended. There is no version of the story in which Atreus profits from what he did.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Atreus in Greek mythology?

Atreus was a king of Mycenae, the son of Pelops and grandson of Tantalus, and the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. He is best known for murdering his brother Thyestes’s children and serving them to him at a banquet. His name is used for the whole cursed dynasty, the House of Atreus, which supplies the plots of much of Greek tragedy.

Why did Atreus kill his brother’s children?

Thyestes had seduced Atreus’s wife Aerope and used a stolen golden lamb to take the throne of Mycenae. After Atreus regained the kingdom and afterwards learned about the adultery, he lured Thyestes back with an offer of peace and killed his three sons at the altar of Zeus, then cooked them and served them to their father.

What is the curse of the House of Atreus?

After eating his own children, Thyestes cursed the entire line of Pelops. The curse is treated in Greek tragedy as the reason for the disasters that follow: the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and Orestes killing his mother in revenge. The family’s troubles are usually traced back further, to Tantalus and to Pelops.

Does Homer mention the banquet of Thyestes?

No. In the Iliad, Homer traces Agamemnon’s sceptre from Hephaestus down through Zeus, Hermes and Pelops to Atreus, who at his death leaves it to Thyestes, who leaves it to Agamemnon. The brothers reign one after the other with no hint of the murders. The cannibal banquet belongs to later tellings, above all the Athenian tragedians.

Is the Treasury of Atreus really his tomb?

No. It is a Mycenaean beehive tomb built around 1300 BC, the largest of its kind, with an entrance lintel weighing about 120 tons, and nobody knows who was buried there. The name is an old local tradition already attached to the monument in Roman times, not an identification made by archaeologists.