Thyestes

Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses refer to the death of children, which features in the source text.

The play begins with the Ghost of Tantalus addressing the audience. He notes that he has been called up from the underworld, where he suffers endless punishment for the sins he committed while he was alive: In death, he has been condemned to stand in a pool of water surrounded by fruit trees, parched by hunger and thirst, only to have the water recede from him when he stoops for a drink and the fruit swing out of reach when he reaches out to pluck it from the tree. He wonders if the gods have devised “some new torture” (13) for him, reflecting that despite his eternal sufferings, the crimes of his family are continued by his descendants.

A Fury commands Tantalus to infect the hearts of his descendants in Argos, Atreus and Thyestes, with his erratic and cruel passions. Tantalus recoils from this task, preferring to return to his torment in the underworld, but the Fury—and Tantalus’s own “desperate hunger” (98)—gives him no choice. Tantalus follows the Fury to Argos.

The Chorus enters and sings the first