Characters
- Hippodamia — prize of the race; object of Myrtilus’s claimed reward in some strands
- Myrtilus — son of Hermes; Oenomaus’s charioteer; saboteur; victim; curser of the Pelopids
- Oenomaus — master killed by the wax-axle treachery; curses Myrtilus as he dies
- Pelops — briber (or beneficiary); murderer of Myrtilus; first bearer of the curse
- The Hours — father of Myrtilus
- Thyestes — later Pelopids who inherit the curse (forward glance)
Places
- Elis — Oenomaus’s court; start of the race
- Mycenae — lands where the curse ripens
- Myrtoan Sea — waters of Myrtilus’s death and name
Themes
Narrative
Myrtilus, son of Hermes, was charioteer to Oenomaus of Pisa. When Pelops came to race for Hippodamia, he (or Hippodamia herself, in love with the suitor) won Myrtilus’s help by promise of a night with the bride, or by gold, or by both. Myrtilus replaced the bronze linchpins of Oenomaus’s axle with wax (or withheld the pins). In the race the wheels failed; Oenomaus crashed, entangled in the reins, and died cursing the treacherous driver.
Pelops took Hippodamia and set out with Myrtilus. On the sea cliffs (Geraestus in Euboea, or a Peloponnesian headland) Myrtilus claimed his reward—or Pelops suspected him of reaching for Hippodamia—and Pelops hurled him into the water. As he drowned, Myrtilus cursed Pelops and all his descendants. The sea there was called Myrtoan after him. Hermes’s son thus becomes the moral hinge of Pelopid doom: without his sabotage Pelops may not win; without his murder and curse the cannibal banquet of Atreus, the adultery of Aerope, and the murders in Agamemnon’s house lack their ancestral spring.
Pausanias notes graves and local anger of Myrtilus; tragic plots treat the curse as still active when Orestes stands in Argos. The charioteer’s brief life—betrayal of a master, betrayal by a master—concentrates the Tantalid pattern of broken faith rewarded with generational ruin.