Dictionary
THYESTES	100.00%
Son of Pelops, brother of Atreus (q.v.).
PELOPS	100.00%
Son of the Lydian or Phrygian king Tantalus and Dione, daughter of Atlas. When he was a child, his father slew him, cut him to pieces and seethed him, and set him as food before the gods. The gods did not touch the horrible meal; only Demeter, absorbed in grief for her stolen daughter, ate one shoulder. By the command of Zeus, Hermes replaced the pieces in the caldron, and Clotho drew the boy from it in renewed beauty, while Demeter replaced the missing shoulder by one made of ivory. Hence it was that his descendants, the Pelopidae, bore on one shoulder a mark of dazzling whiteness. Pelops, when grown to manhood, went to Pisa in Elis as a wooer of Hippodamia, daughter of king (Enomaus. He won the victory, the bride, and the kingdom, by the help of the winged steeds given him by Poseidon, and by the treachery of Myrtilus, the chariot driver of (Enomaus. When Myrtilus (or Myrsilus), a son of Hermes, claimed the promised reward, half the kingdom, Pelops hurled him from his chariot into the sea. Through his curse and the anger of Hermes, the baneful spell was once more cast upon the house of Pelops. He returned to Pisa, and, after he had made himself master of Olympia, he is said to have restored the games with great splendour, a service for which his memory was afterwards honoured above that of all other heroes. By another act of violence he obtained possession of Arcadia, and extended his power so widely over the peninsula that it was called after his name the Peloponnesus, or "island of Pelops." By Hippodamia he had six sons (cp. ALCATHOUS, ATREUS, PITTHEUS, THYESTES), and two daughters; and by then Nymph Axioche, a son Chrysippus. The latter, his father's favourite, was killed by Atreus and Thyestes, at the instigation of Hippodamia, and his dead body was cast into a well. Peleus discovered the crime, and banished the murderers from the country. Hippodamia thereupon took refuge with her sons at Midea in Argolis. On her death, Peleus buried her bones in the soil of Olympia.
HIPPODAMEIA	92.84%
The daughter of (Enomaus and the wife of Pelops (q.v.).
CHRYSIPPUS	89.12%
Son of Pelops and the Nymph Axioche, murdered by his step-brothers Atreus and Thyestes, who were consequently banished by Pelops.
MYRTILUS	74.38%
Son of Hermes, charioteer of (Enomaus, whose defeat by Pelops was due to his treachery. When he demanded the reward that had been settled, the half of the realm of Cenomaus, Pelops threw him into the sea near Geraestus in Eubcea, and that part of the Aegean was thence called the Myrtoan Sea. (Cf. CENOMAUS and <smalLCaps>PELOPS.)
LAIUS	34.72%
The son of Labillcus, grandson of Polydorus, and great-grandson of Cadmus. When his guardian Lycus was banished or slain by Amphion (q.v.) and Zethus, he fled to Pelops. At the death of the usurpers, he ascended the throne of his fathers and married Jocasta. (See (EDIPUS.)
ATREUS	25.97%
Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /www/www-ccat/data/classics/myth/php/tools/dictionary.php on line 64 Son of Pelops and Hippodamia, grandson of Tantalus. (See PELOPS.) With the help of his brother Thyestes he murdered his step-brother Chrysippus. To escape the wrath of their father, the pair of brothers took refuge with their brother-in-law Sthenelus, king of Mycenae, who gave them Media to live in. Eurystheus, the brother of their protector, was killed in battle with the Heracleidae. Atreus kept possession of the kingdom of Mycenae, which had been given him in charge by Eurystheus, and maintained it in virtue of possessing a golden lamb, which had been given him by Hermes for the purpose of exciting discord in the house of Pelops and avenging the death of his son Myrtilus. Thyestes debauched his brother's wife Aerope, daughter of the king of Crete, and with her aid got possession of the golden lamb and the kingdom. But, as a sign that right and wrong had been confounded, Zeus turned the sun and the moon back in their course. Atreus accordingly recovered the kingdom and expelled Thyestes. To revenge himself, Thyestes sent Pleisthenes, a son of Atreus whom he had brought up as his own, to Mycenae to murder Atreus. But Atreus slew Pleisthenes, not knowing that he was his son. Atreus replied by bringing back Thyestes and his family from exile, and serving up to Thyestes at table the limbs of his own sons. Thyestes fled away; the land was visited with barrenness and famine. In obedience to an oracle, Atreus goes forth to seek him, but only finds his daughter Pelopia, whom he takes to wife. Egisthus, her son by her father Thyestes, who is destined to avenge him, Atreus adopts and rears as his own child. Thyestes is afterwards found by Agamemnon and Menelaus, who bring him to Mycenae. He is imprisoned, and Aegisthus ordered to murder him. By the sword which Aegisthus carries Thyestes recognises him as his son, and proposes to him to slay Atreus. Meanwhile Pelopia, in horror at the discovery of her son's incestuous origin, drives the sword into her own breast. Aegisthus takes the bloody sword to Atreus as a proof that he has executed his commission, and afterwards falls upon him with Thyestes, while he is engaged in making a thank-offering on the sea-shore. Thyestes and Aegisthus thereupon seize the government of Mycenae, and drive Agamemnon and Menelaus out of the country. The older story knows nothing of these horrors. In Homer Pelops receives the sceptre from Zeus by the ministration of Hermes; he leaves it to Atreus, and Atreus to Thyestes, who hands it down to Agamemnon. Hesiod alludes to the wealth of the Pelopidae, but is silent as to the rest.
PHORBAS	25.00%
Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /www/www-ccat/data/classics/myth/php/tools/dictionary.php on line 64 Son of Lapithes, honoured as a hero by the Rhodians, for having come at the bidding of the oracle to free their island from a plague of serpents. He was placed among the stars as the constellation Ophiuchus (snake-holder). Another legend made him come from Thessaly to Elis, where he assisted king Alector against Pelops, and as a reward received in marriage the king's sister Hyrmine, the mother of Augeas and Aetor (see MOLIONIDAe). Being a mighty boxer, he challenged in his pride the gods themselves, but Apollo overcame and slew him.
ALCATHOUS	18.15%
The son of Pelops and Hippodameia. He slew the lion of Cithaeron, which had torn to pieces Euippus, the son of Megareus. Thus he won the daughter of Megareus, Euaechma, and the sovereignty of Megara. With Apollo for his friend and helper, he rebuilt the city walls, and reared one of the two castles, Alcathoe, with temples to Artemis and Apollo. A singing stone in the castle was shown as the one on which the god laid down his lyre when at work. Alcathous' eldest son, Ischepolis, fell in the Calydonian hunt; the second, Callipolis, running in with the news to his father when sacrificing to Apollo, scattered the altar fire, and Alcathous struck him dead with a firebrand for the supposed sacrilege. By his daughters Automedusa and Periboea, the wives of Iphicles and Telamon, he was grandfather to Iolaus and Aias (Ajax).
OLYMPIAN GAMES	11.97%
NIOBE	10.03%
Daughter of Tantalus and Dione, sister of Pelops and wife of Amphion of Thebes. Like her father, she stood in close connexion with the gods, especially with Leto, the wife of Zeus, and fell into misfortune by her own arrogance. In maternal pride for her numerous progeny of six sons and six daughters, the ill-fated woman ventured to compare herself to Leto, who had only two children. To punish this presumption Apollo and Artemis slew with their arrows all Niobe's children, in their parents' palace. For nine days they lay in their blood without any to bury them, for Zeus had changed all the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. Niobe, who was changed to stone on the lonely hills of Sipylus, cannot even in this form forget her sorrow. Thus runs Homer's account [Il. xxiv 614], in which we have the earliest reference to "a colossal relief roughly carved on the rocks" of Mount Sipylus in Lydia, the face of which is washed by a stream in such a manner that it appears to be weeping [cp. Jebb on Soph., Ant. 831]. The accounts of later writers vary greatly in respect of the number of the daughters of Niobe and of the scene of her death. Sometimes the spot where the disaster occurs is Lydia, sometimes Thebes, where moreover the grave of Niobe's children was pointed out: the sons perish in the chase or on the race-course, while the daughters die in the royal palace at Thebes or at the burial of their brethren. This story describes Niobe as returning from Thebes to her home on Sipylus, and as there changed into a stone by Zeus, at her own entreaty. The fate of Niobe was often in ancient times the theme both of poetry and of art. The group of the children of Niobe discovered at Rome in 1583 and now at Florence (part of which is shown in the cut) is well-known: it is probably the Roman copy of a Greek work which stood in Pliny's time in a temple of Apollo at Rome, and with regard to which it was a moot point with the ancients whether it was from the hand of Scopas or of Praxiteles [Pliny, N. H. xxxvi 28. Cp. Stark, Niobe und die Niobiden, 1863].