The ancient Greeks were the great myth makers of Europe. They even gave us the name by which we refer today to the amazing stories told about gods, heroes, men and animals. Around 400 BC the Athenian philosopher Plato coined the word mythologia in order to distinguish between imaginative accounts of divine actions and factual descriptions of events, supernatural or otherwise. Although he lived in an age that was increasingly scientific in outlook, and no longer inclined to believe every detail related about gods and goddesses, Plato recognized the power that resided in myth, and warned his followers to beware of its seductive charm.

The strength of Greek mythology, like all active traditions, lay in its collective nature. Unlike a story composed by a particular author, a myth always stood on its own, with a plot and a set of characters readily understood by those who listened to the story-teller or dramatist making use of it. When, for instance, the Athenians watched the great cycle of plays that Aeschylus staged about the murder of Agamemnon, they were already aware of the main characters and their actions. The audience knew how the House of Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, was fated to endure a terrible period of domestic strife. Not only had Atreus and his brother Thyestes been cursed by their own father, Pelops. For killing his favorite child, their half-brother Chrysippus, but a bloody quarrel of their own had also added to the family misfortune. A dispute over the succession of Pelops’ throne at Mycenae led Atreus to kill three of Thyestes’ sons, although they had sought sanctuary in a temple dedicated to Zeus, the supreme god. Even worse, the murderer then served the bodies of his nephews up to his brother at a banquet, after which he dared to show Thyestes their feet and hands. Atreus paid for the outrage with his life at the hands of Thyestes’ surviving son, Aegisthus, who later become the lover of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra during his absence at the Trojan War.

All this would have been familiar to the Athenians before Aeschylus’ treatment of the myth began with Agamemnon returning home from the Trojan War. Some of the audience doubtless recalled an even older curse laid on Pelops himself by the messenger god Hermes. Pelops had provoked the god by refusing a promised gift to one of his sons. Nothing that Aeschylus included in his plays was unexpected: neither the murder of Agamemnon, nor the revenge of his son Orestes, nor Orestes’ pursuit by the Furies for shedding a mother’s blood. What would have fascinated the audience was the dramatist’s approach to these tangled incidents, his view of motive, guilt and expiation. For that reason another dramatist was able to tackle the same story later in Athens during the fifth century BC. It needs to be remembered that such drama remained very much part of ancient religion. Today we cannot expect to appreciate the full meaning of these performances, but we are fortunate in having the raw materials from which they were made, the myths themselves.