Atreus

Atreus slaughtered Thyestes’ infant sons and served them up for dinner, so that Thyestes unsuspectingly ate the flesh of his own children. Of the brothers, one was a killer, the other an eater, but the worse pollution belonged to the

Burkert identifies the Atreus-Thyestes feast as the essential transgressive act across all mythological versions, and locates its deeper logic in the ritual-symbolic equivalence between animal sacrifice and human slaughter.

Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis

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what appear as successive events in the story collapse into a single act as soon as the ritual-symbolic equivalence of animal and man in the sacrificial ritual is recognized.

Burkert argues that the lamb theft and the cannibalistic feast attributed to Atreus are not sequential events but a single sacrificial symbol, only artificially separated by later tragic dramaturgy.

Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972thesis

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His father Atreus won the kingship of Mykenai after a dispute with his brother Thyestes; after learning that Thyestes had seduced his wife, Atreus killed, cooked, and served to Thyestes his own children.

The Iliad commentary frames Atreus’s crime as the shadowed genealogical backstory that lends Agamemnon’s inherited scepter a darkly ironic dimension, embedding dynastic guilt in the poem’s heroic surface.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011thesis

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Agamemnon (Greek). King of Argos, he was a member of the house of Atreus, upon which a curse had been laid.

Greene identifies the House of Atreus as a cursed lineage, situating Agamemnon’s fate within a transgenerational mythological pattern central to her astrological-psychological reading of fate.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting

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And on his descendants the curse of the Erinye

Greene traces the Erinyes’ curse from Tantalos forward through the lineage that includes Atreus, establishing the hereditary chain of pollution as the mythological substrate of fate.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate, 1984supporting

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Atrei’des: ‘Son of Atreus,’ used of Agamemnon, less often of Menelaos. At’reus: Father of Agamemnon and Menelaos, 2.105.

The Iliad index entry establishes Atreus’s primary Homeric function as progenitor of the Atreidae, anchoring his significance genealogically rather than dramatically within the epic.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside

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gave fresh-faced Chryseis to Agamemnon, son of Atreus… and prayed to all the Greeks, and most especially the pair of men who brought the troops to Troy, the sons of Atreus.

The repeated patronymic ‘son of Atreus’ in the Iliad’s opening conflict underscores how Agamemnon’s identity and authority are inseparable from his dynastic inheritance.

Homer, The Iliad, 2023aside

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Now the son of Atreus, powerful Agamemnon, has dishonored me, since he has taken away my prize and keeps it.

Achilles’ complaint against Agamemnon uses the patronymic ‘son of Atreus’ to frame the dishonor in dynastic terms, invoking the family name as a marker of tyrannical power.

Lattimore, Richmond, The Iliad of Homer, 2011aside

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the soul of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, recognized glorious Amphimedon

In the Odyssey’s underworld scene, Agamemnon is identified by his Atreidal patronymic even in death, suggesting the lineage persists as a defining mark beyond mortal existence.

Lattimore, Richmond, Odyssey of Homer, 2009aside

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