Characters
- Aerope — earlier adulteress (motive frame from 113)
- Agamemnon and Menelaus — sons of Atreus who inherit the cursed house
- Atreus — host and cook of the revenge banquet; reveals the heads
- Cassandra / chorus — later witnesses who recall the feast
- Helios — turns from the horror (tragic image)
- Tantalus — slaughtered and served
- Thyestes — guest; eats his children’s flesh; curses the Pelopid house
Places
- Mycenae — scene of the banquet and the curse
- Table of Thyestes — overturned at the recognition
Themes
Narrative
Atreus, restored to Mycenae and burning for revenge after Thyestes’ adultery with Aerope and the theft of the golden lamb, pretended reconciliation. He recalled Thyestes under truce and, in secret, slaughtered Thyestes’ young sons—Tantalus and Plisthenes (names vary; Aegisthus is not among the cooked children in the standard feast strand). He cut them up, boiled or roasted the flesh, and served it to Thyestes at a royal banquet, withholding the heads and extremities.
When Thyestes had eaten, Atreus showed the children’s hands, feet, and heads. Thyestes recoiled, overthrew the table, and called down a curse on the house of Atreus—that so might the whole line perish. The sun again turned back in horror (or the earlier solar reversal is conflated with this moment in tragic lyric). Thyestes fled. The banquet reenacts and surpasses Tantalus’s crime against the gods: now brother feeds brother his own children. From this table the curse runs to Agamemnon, Menelaus, and the next generation’s murders; Aeschylus’s palace still “drips” with the children’s blood when Cassandra enters.