The New Student's Reference Work/Atreus

A'treus, according to the Greek legend, the son of Pelops and Hippodamia. By some versions he is accounted the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, while others say he was their grandfather but that he reared them as sons. The whole story of the house of Atreus is one of bloodshed, the series of crimes beginning with the murder of Chrysippus by his half brothers, Atreus and Thyestes, and ending with the murder of Clytemnestra and her husband by Clytemnestra's son, Orestes. Because of the first murder, Pelops pronounced the curse upon his sons that they and their posterity should perish by means of one another.