Thyestes

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 65

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Summary

Background

Act Summaries & Analyses

Acts I-II

Act III

Acts IV-V

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Nature

In a play that explores the way human desires and wickedness contravene the natural order, it is no surprise that the natural world becomes a particularly prevalent symbol. In the world of the play, Atreus’s horrific revenge causes the sun to turn back in its course. Even before Atreus carries out his revenge the firmament shakes, foreshadowing what is to come. Animal imagery is also part of the play’s sustained engagement with the natural world. Thyestes, when he comes on stage, reflects on his exile “in the wild / with animals, and like them” (413-14), and as the play wears on, his character only becomes more bestial. First, Thyestes turns into a “beast […] tangled in the nets” (491) of his brother Atreus, and later he is shown eating in a peculiarly animalistic way as he “rips apart his sons” (778). As Thyestes turns into an animal, so too does Atreus. He likens his dark desires to an “Umbrian hound” (497), and in the Messenger’s speech is compared to a tigress and a lion as he kills Thyestes’s sons.

Food and Drink

Food and drink become the principal symbol for the play’s exploration of the theme of The Destructive Power of Desire. Tantalus’s punishment, “to be always wet and always thirsty […] hunger / yearning without end” (5-6) sets the tone for the all-consuming desires of Atreus and Thyestes. The desires of the brothers are routinely described throughout the play in terms of food metaphors, as hunger for power or thirst for blood. These desires culminate in Thyestes’s bestial feast in which he devours his own children, a scene already prefigured by the Fury in Act I:

Now let the fires be lit,

To boil the cauldrons; chop up the bodies in pieces,

Let children’s blood pollute the ancestral hearth,

Let the tables be set. You will come as a guest to a crime,

But one you already know well. Today you will have a vacation,

To free yourself from hunger at that table.

Fill up your empty belly; watch as he drinks that cocktail

Of blood and wine. I have found a type of feast

Which even you would avoid (59-67).

The cooking of Thyestes’s sons and the subsequent feast—rendered in gruesome detail in Acts IV and V—thus become metaphors for the catastrophic consequences of failing to control one’s desires.

Heredity

Heredity (especially in relation to fate) is an important motif in the play. It is thus Tantalus, the ancestor of Atreus and Thyestes (and their forerunner in evildoing) who opens the play, as his ghost is dispatched to Argos to infect the royal house with his uncontrollable and erratic desires. The Chorus hopes in vain for an escape from the cycle of violence initiated by Tantalus: Atreus and Thyestes themselves do not seem much interested in escaping their heredity. Thus, Atreus tells himself to “Look to Tantalus and Pelops: / my actions must be made to fit their model” (242-43), and he is evidently successful: The Messenger reflects in Act IV that Atreus’s sins “Would make blush / even Pelops and Tantalus” (625-26).

Thyestes, similarly, implicitly rejects the philosophical life when he embraces his hereditary position, construing his apparent good fortune as a result of him being “faithful to [his] loyal blood” (931), but family loyalty becomes something singularly sinister and grim when the family in question is that of Tantalus. Thus, Atreus’s idea of a brotherly feast involves him feeding him his own children, and his idea of “family feeling” (717) means killing his brother’s eldest son first. As Tantalus says at the end of his first speech, the punitive powers of the underworld will aways have “work to do” (22) as long as his family remains standing.