162 HISTORY OF GREECE. burst of indignation/pretended to be reconciled, and invited Thy- estes to a banquet, in which he served up to him the limbs of his own son, and the father ignorantly partook of the fatal meal. Even the all-seeing Helios is said to have turned back his chariot to the east in order that he might escape the shocking spectacle of this Thyestean banquet : yet the tale of Thyestean revenge the murder of Atreus perpetrated by JEgisthus, the incestuous offspring of Thy estes by his daughter Pelopia is no less replete with horrors. 1 Homeric legend is never thus revolting. Agamemnon and Menelaus are known to us chiefly with their Homeric attributes, which have not been so darkly overlaid by subsequent poets as those of Atreus and Thyestes. Agamemnon and Menelaus are affectionate brothers : they marry two sisters, the daughters of Tyndareus king of Sparta, Klytsemnestra and Helen ; for Helen, the real offspring of Zeus, passes as the daughter of Tyndarius. 2 The " king of men " reigns at Mykenae ; Menelaus succeeds Tyn- dareus at Sparta. Of the rape of Helen, and the siege of Troy consequent upon it, I shall speak elsewhere : I now touch only upon the family legends of the Atreids. Menelaus, on his return from Troy with the recovered Helen, is driven by storms far away to the distant regions of Phoenicia and Egypt, and is ex- posed to a thousand dangers and hardships before he again sets foot in Peloponnesus. But at length he reaches Sparta, resumes his kingdom, and passes the rest of his days in uninterrupted happiness and splendor : being moreover husband of the godlike Helen and son-in-law of Zeus, he is even spared the pangs of death. When the fulness of his days is past he is transported to the Elysian fields, there to dwell along with " the golden-haired Ilhadamanthus " in a delicious climate and in undisturbed re pose. 3 Far different is the fate of the king of men, Agamemnon. brought out, with painful fidelity, the harsh and savage features of this family legend (see Aul. Gell. xiii. 2, and the fragments of Attius now remain ing, together with the tragedy called Thyestes, of Seneca). 1 Hygin. fab. 87-88.
- So we must say, in conformity to the ideas of antiquity : compare Ho
mer, Diad, xvi. 176 and Herodot. vi. 53. 1 Horn. Odyss. iii. 280-300 ; iv. 83-560.
