The House of Atreus

No family in Greek story carries a heavier inheritance. Tantalus, beloved of the gods, tested them with a feast of his own butchered son and earns eternal punishment; the restored Pelops wins his bride by treachery and a charioteer’s curse; his sons Atreus and Thyestes contend for Mycenae until Atreus serves his brother the flesh of his own children — the Thyestean banquet whose horror the sun itself turned back to avoid.

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The curse descends: Agamemnon buys his fleet’s wind at Aulis with the life of Iphigenia; Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, Thyestes’ surviving son, net the king in his bath on the day of his triumph; Orestes, commanded by Apollo, kills his mother and flees the Furies until Athena’s court at Athens votes him free — the moment, in Aeschylus, where blood-vengeance ends and law begins. The whole arc stands in this library: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Electra, and behind them Homer, for whom Orestes is already the exemplar held up to Telemachus.