Pelops, cursed ancestor of the Atreidae and hero of Olympia

Pelops is the hero who gives the Peloponnese its name, son of Tantalus, husband of Hippodamia, and grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Two stories define him, and both turn on a dismembered body: the child served up at his father’s banquet, and Oenomaus torn apart in the chariot race he himself had imposed. Out of that double violence comes a dynasty — and the curse that will pursue it as far as the trial of Orestes.

Tantalus’ banquet, and Pindar’s refusal

The best-known version is also the one a major poet expressly refused to tell. Tantalus, king of Mount Sipylus in Lydia and a guest at the gods’ table, is said to have set out to test their omniscience: he cut up his son, cooked him, and served him at a feast. Every god recognised the dish except Demeter, who, preoccupied with the loss of Persephone, absently ate the flesh of the shoulder. The gods put the limbs back in the cauldron, restored the child to life, and replaced the missing part with ivory.

Pindar, in the first Olympian (476 BC), breaks off his own narrative to reject this: it is impossible, he says, to call any of the blessed ones a glutton. His version is quite different: Poseidon, in love with the young Pelops, carried him off on his golden chariot to Olympus, as Zeus would later carry off Ganymede; when the boy vanished from home, an envious neighbour invented the story of the cauldron to account for it (Olympian 1.23-53).

That disavowal is one of the clearest passages in Greek poetry about how myth gets made. Pindar does not say the story is false for lack of witnesses: he says it is unworthy of the gods, and that a poet has the right to correct it.

From Asia into Greece

Driven out of Lydia — by Ilus, king of Troy, according to Pseudo-Apollodorus (Epitome 2.3) — Pelops crosses into Greece with his treasure. Classical authors never let that Asian origin drop. Herodotus puts into Xerxes’ mouth the claim that “Pelops the Phrygian”, once a subject of the Persian kings, conquered the land that now bears his name (7.8 and 7.11). Thucydides gives a rationalising account with nothing supernatural in it: Pelops arrived from Asia with great wealth among poor populations, bought power, and eventually gave his name to the whole country (1.9).

Homer points the same way without telling the story: in Iliad 2, the sceptre Agamemnon raises before the army was forged by Hephaestus, given by Zeus to Pelops, and handed on from Atreus to Thyestes and from Thyestes to Agamemnon (2.100-108). For epic, Pelops is already the starting point of a royal title.

The chariot race

Oenomaus, king of Pisa, would not let his daughter Hippodamia marry — either from love of her, or because of an oracle warning that his son-in-law would kill him. So he set each suitor a chariot race: the young man started ahead with the girl in his chariot, the king pursued, and when he caught up he speared him. His horses, a gift of Ares, were faster than the wind; Pindar counts thirteen suitors dead before Pelops (Olympian 1.79).

Two traditions explain the victory. In Pindar, Pelops calls on Poseidon by night at the shore and is given a golden chariot and tireless horses: the win is clean. In the more widespread version, he buys off Myrtilus, the king’s charioteer, promising him half the kingdom and the first night with Hippodamia; Myrtilus pulls the bronze linchpins out of the axle and puts wax pegs in their place. Mid-race the wheel comes off, Oenomaus is dragged by his own horses, and dies.

Then comes the decisive crime. Rather than pay, Pelops throws Myrtilus into the sea — the one that will bear his name, the Myrtoan — and as he falls the charioteer curses his house (Apollodorus, Epitome 2.6-8). Everything that afterwards happens to the Atreidae, the feud of Atreus and Thyestes, the banquet of the children, Agamemnon killed in his bath, the matricide of Orestes, is read in the tragedies as that curse unfolding. Euripides traces Orestes’ ruin explicitly back to “the ancient frenzy of the Tantalids” (Orestes 988-1012).

The hero of Olympia

Pelops is not only a figure in stories: he is one of the heroes most firmly installed in a real sanctuary. At the heart of the Altis at Olympia stood the Pelopion, a consecrated enclosure where his tomb was shown. Pausanias describes the ritual: the Elean magistrates sacrificed a black ram there every year, the victim was offered in a pit, and whoever ate of that flesh could not enter the temple of Zeus before washing (5.13.1-3).

Pausanias also tells the fate of the shoulder blade. Pelops’ bone, kept at Olympia, was said to have been brought from Lydia during the Trojan War on the instruction of an oracle, then lost at sea on the return; long afterwards a fisherman from Eretria pulled it up in his net, consulted Delphi, and the Eleans recovered it in exchange for making his family its hereditary keepers. By Pausanias’ own day the bone had disappeared (5.13.4-6). The story is an excellent witness to how a Greek city built and maintained a heroic relic.

The east pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, finally, showed the moment before the race: Zeus at the centre, Oenomaus and Pelops on either side with their teams, the figures motionless before the start (Pausanias 5.10.6-7). At the entrance to the greatest panhellenic sanctuary, then, the Greeks placed the image of a contest won — depending on which version you took — either by a god’s favour or by bribing a servant.

A line that carries the guilt

The children of Pelops and Hippodamia are the hinge of several cycles: Atreus and Thyestes, whose feud produces the Atreidae of Mycenae; Pittheus, king of Troezen, whose daughter Aethra is the mother of Theseus; Nicippe, mother of Eurystheus, the king who imposes the labours on Heracles.

One tradition adds a son born outside the marriage, Chrysippus, whom Laius abducted while a guest in his house; Pelops cursed the abductor, and several sources make that curse the reason for the fate of Oedipus and the ruin of Thebes. In Hyginus it is Hippodamia herself who drives Atreus and Thyestes to kill the boy, for fear that he might inherit the kingdom (Fabulae 85). So the same figure stands at the origin of two of the greatest family curses in Greek mythology.

Why he matters

Pelops is an unusual case: a hero whose main function is to be a beginning. He is not there to supply an exploit but to explain why a dynasty is doomed, why a peninsula carries that name, and why the greatest athletic contest in Greece was held beside his tomb. His legend therefore ties together three things the Greeks kept together: genealogy, territory and cult.

With the first Olympian, he is also one of the rare places where an ancient author says out loud that he is rewriting a myth because the received version strikes him as morally unacceptable — a precedent modern criticism cites constantly.

Further reading

For his direct descendants and the working-out of the curse, see Agamemnon and Menelaus, then Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes. For the god who carries him off and gives him his horses, see Poseidon; for the abductor of Chrysippus and the Theban curse, Laius and Oedipus. For the hero his line gives Athens through Pittheus, see Theseus.