Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The glory of Pelops was Olympia. In the history of the gods, the games were founded in the Golden Age, when the Curetes ran. In human history, the games began their glorious period under Pelops. The most rigged and bloody of races had thus breathed new life into that place that enshrined the notion of Hellenic peace, a place where those who cheated were punished. Between the temples of Zeus and Hera, a sacred burial mound with polygonal perimeter, trees and statues was given over to Pelops. “In Olympia, the Eleans venerate Pelops above all other heroes, just as they venerate Zeus above all other gods.” In the area dedicated to Pelops, the Eleans sacrificed a black ram every year, making the same gesture Oenomaus had made before his last race. Nobody who wanted to enter the temple of Zeus could taste the meat of that sacrifice.

When Hippodameia’s bones were brought back to Olympia, she found herself beside Pelops once again, bones beside bones. By now they had become the guardians of the place. And, although the women’s games were no less old than the men’s, it had been Hippodameia who first got together sixteen virgins and had them race with their hair loose, their tunics over their knees, right shoulders and breasts uncovered. This had been her way of thanking Hera for her marriage to Pelops. Later she was responsible for a gift to the temple of Hera: a small ivory bed. It was still there when Pausanias visited Olympia and commented: “They say it was Hippodameia’s toy.”

There are two strands to the story of the Pelopids: the tale of a king’s descendants, a succession of atrocities, each worse than the one before; and the tale of a series of talismans, each taking over from another in silence, each deciding the fate of men. In the beginning we have Pelops’s ivory shoulder, but later there is his scepter too, the scepter he intended for his son Atreus; then we have the golden lamb that Atreus and Thyestes fought over; then Pelops’s lance, which his great-granddaughter Iphigenia would keep in her bedroom; then the ancient wooden statue of Artemis that Orestes brings to Greece from the land of the Tauri.

Pelops was long dead and the Trojan War dragging on interminably when the sages prophesied that the city could only be taken with the help of Heracles’ bow and Pelops’s shoulder blade. So Pelops’s bones were sent off to Troy. On the return trip, the ship carrying the bones sank off the island of Euboea, not far from the place where Myrtilus had long lain at the bottom of the sea. “And many years after the sacking of Troy, an Eretrian fisherman called Damarmenus cast his nets into the sea and pulled up the shoulder blade. He was amazed how big it was and kept it hidden in the sand, but in the end he went to Delphi to ask the oracle whose bone it was and what he should do with it. Thanks to some stroke of divine providence, a delegation of Eleans had come to Delphi at exactly the same time to ask advice about how to cure the plague, so the Pythia told them they must recover Pelops’s bones, and told Damarmenus to give the Eleans what he had found. He did as the Pythia said and, among other acts of gratitude, the Eleans named him and his descendants guardians of the bone. When I visited, the shoulder blade of Pelops was no longer there, I suppose because it had been on the seabed for so long and the salt water together with the passage of time had reduced it to dust.” So writes Pausanias. The talisman had outlived Pelops’s descendants, but in the end it too succumbed. Only the guardians of the bone remained.

The tension we find in Pelops, dismembered and dismembering, splits apart into two poles, two sons: Atreus and Thyestes. They are brothers and enemies, like so many one comes across in myths, in history, in the street. But in comparison with those of all other analogous pairs, their quarrel is a little more cruel, more comic, more abstract, if by comedy and abstraction we mean an algebraic elevation of horror to a far higher power. Every story of two is always a story of three: two pairs of hands grab the same thing at the same time and tug in opposite directions. In this case the third thing is the golden lamb, the talisman of sovereignty. Times have changed: Pelops’s shoulder blade is no longer something given by a god and thrust inside a body but an external body that hands must grasp and offer to a god, in this case, Artemis. Atreus tightens his grip on the lamb to strangle it, then hides it away in his house, attempting to transform the talisman into a treasure. Until Thyestes manages to steal it from him, with the help of Atreus’s wife, the Cretan Aërope, whom he has been busy seducing.

This should be the first link in the chain of wrongs. But we immediately realize that it isn’t: before Thyestes proved treacherous to Atreus, Atreus had already deceived Artemis, by refusing her the beast promised as a sacrifice. Up to this point, the brothers were exactly equal in terms of their crimes. Both had helped their mother murder their bastard brother, Chrysippus. And both had been afflicted by the curse of their father, Pelops, which echoed and renewed the curses of Myrtilus on Pelops, of Oenomaus on Myrtilus, and, at the beginning of it all, of Zeus on Tantalus, ancestral founder of the family. Henceforth, the struggle between the two brothers will be admirably balanced, in the sense that it would be quite hopeless to attempt to establish which of the two is more unjust. Both strive for the worst. Any difference lies in style and in divine whim, which initially favors Atreus. In fact, in order to trick Thyestes, as Thyestes tricked Atreus, and so have Atreus win the struggle for sovereignty over Mycenae, Zeus goes so far as to invert the courses of the sun and stars. This intervention is equivalent to his gesture of turning over the table in anger at Lycaon’s cannibalism: it is an allusion to the tilting of the earth’s axis, to the new world that comes into being with the obliquity of the ecliptic. But Zeus’s intervention is only one small episode in the thrilling struggle between two brothers who have now discovered that man is autonomous and proceed to try out the mechanics of that autonomy to the full.

Having recovered the talisman, and with it his power, and having thrown Thyestes out of Mycenae, Atreus, one would imagine, would be satisfied that the struggle had run its course, or at most would flare up again with Thyestes seeking revenge. Instead the conflict is raised to a higher power: it is the winner who wants to revenge himself on the loser, and what’s more wants his revenge to outdo all others. Giving the impression that he is eager to make up with his brother, Atreus invites him back to Mycenae. Thyestes returns and is welcomed with a sumptuous banquet. In a big bronze pot lashings of white meat are bubbling away in little chunks. Atreus chooses a few and offers them to his brother. So memorable is the stony stare on his face as he does so that ever afterward people will speak of making “Atreus eyes.” At the end of the banquet, Atreus has a servant come in. The servant carries a plate crammed with human hands and feet. Thyestes realizes he has been eating the flesh of his children. With a kick he turns over the table. And curses the house of Atreus.

From this point on the vendetta between the two brothers loses all touch with psychology, becomes pure virtuosity, traces out arabesques. Thyestes disappears again, a horrified fugitive. There’s just one thing on his mind: how to invent a revenge that will outdo his brother’s, who in turn had thought up his with the intention of making it unbeatable. Thyestes looks to future generations now. It would be too simple to kill Atreus. He will have to get his son too, and his son’s son. At this point the gods come to his aid. On a pilgrimage to Delphi, Thyestes asks for Apollo’s advice. With perfect sobriety, the god replies: “Rape your daughter.” The avenger would be born from that rape. Pelopia, Thyestes’ daughter, had taken refuge at the house of King Thesprotus in Sicyon. She was a priestess of Athena. One night she was sacrificing to the goddess along with some other girls. Thyestes watched from behind a hedge. The priestesses were dancing around a sheep that had had its throat cut when Pelopia slipped in a pool of blood, staining her tunic. Thyestes saw her leave the others to go to a stream. She slid off the bloodstained tunic. It was the first time the father had seen how beautiful his daughter was naked. He leaped on that white body, covering his head with his cloak (or did he have a mask?). Pelopia fought furiously. The two rolled over on the ground. Thyestes managed to penetrate and empty his sperm into her. When it was over, Pelopia found herself alone again, holding the sword she had grabbed from her unknown assailant. That night Aegisthus was conceived, the man Homer would call “the blameless one.”