Plato Scroll › Encyclopedia › Aegisthus

Mythic Figure

Aegisthus

Αἴγισθος

mythepictragedy

Thyestes’ son — seducer of the queen, murderer of Agamemnon, slain by Orestes.

Born of the cursed remnant of Thyestes’s house, Aegisthus stayed home from Troy, won Clytemnestra, and struck down Agamemnon at the feast — “as a man fells an ox at the manger,” says the king’s ghost. Zeus himself opens the Odyssey with his case: warned by Hermes and destroyed by his own choices, he is Homer’s proof that mortals’ sufferings exceed their fate through their own folly.

Open this entry in the reader · every entry