The ancestors of Agamemnon incur the curse that will later destroy Agamemnon and his family.

Aeschylus: The Curse of the Mouth

In Agamemnon, a play rife with the magical power of speech, Aeschylus emphasizes the oral origin of the ancestral curse. King Atreus, Agamemnon’s father, punishes his treasonous brother Thyestes by feeding him the flesh of Thyestes’ own children. Realizing the truth, Thyestes vomits out the meat - and coughs up a curse. As his surviving son Aegisthus recounts:

Now, discovering his unhallowed deed, he uttered a great cry, reeled back, vomiting forth the slaughtered flesh, and invoked an unbearable curse upon the line of Pelops, kicking the banquet table to aid his curse, thus perish all the race of Pleisthenes! (1598-1602)

This episode emphasizes the mouth, with its powers of consumption and speech, as a site of mediation between humans and the external world. Through the perverted feast, the dispute between King Atreus and Thyestes physically invades Thyestes' body; political struggle is converted into personal grief, revulsion and rage. It is through the mouth, too, that Thyestes converts his rage into external action, invoking the curse that haunt will his brother’s lineage.

Sophocles: Curse of the Chariot Race

Shifting away from Aeschylus’s oral focus, Sophocles’s Electra locates the curse in an earlier episode: the chariot race of Pelops, Agamemnon’s grandfather. Competing to win the hand of King Oinomaos’s daughter, Pelops meddles with the chariot of the king’s charioteer, Myrtilus. As a result, Myrtilus is thrown to his death:

Chorus: O chariot-race of Pelops long ago, source of many a sorrow, what disaster you have brought upon this land! For ever since Myrtilus sank to rest beneath the waves, hurled to utter destruction from his golden chariot in disgraceful outrage, from that time to this, outrage and its many sorrows were never yet gone from this house. (504-515)

Sophocles pairs this chariot race story with a second chariot story of his own imagining: the feigned death of Pelops’ great grandson, Orestes, in a chariot race. In the play, Orestes’s tutor helps the young man infiltrate his mother’s household and avenge his father by delivering a vivid but false story of the young man’s death by chariot (696-765). Thus Orestes, the great grandson of Pelops, appropriates the scene which first incurred his family's curse. Once a source of many a sorrow for Orestes' lineage, the chariot race becomes the key to his success, the ruse through which Orestes avenges his father.

Euripides: The Curse Psychologized

In Orestes, the curse episode surfaces in the speech of Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, in a moment of terror. Sentenced to death for her role in her mother’s murder, Electra ties her own misfortune to her ancestors' woes, beginning with her great-great-grandfather Tantalus. The curse itself, she claims, began in Pelops' generation with the death of Myrtilus and manifested itself in her grandfather’s generation. The crowning woe, she concludes, has come on me and on my father (110-2).

Euripides, characteristically attuned to the psychological and skeptical of the divine, casts doubt on the way that Electra interprets her own life through the curse. Electra's account seems self-evident in her moment of terror - yet a few lines later, Electra has changed her mind about the inevitability of her death, opting for preventative action (177-8). In fact, she ultimately escapes the crowning woe she once bemoaned. Tales of divine cycles and fate, Euripides suggests here, are a product of human psychology: appealing in moments of despair, but quickly thrown away at the barest glimmer of hope.