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Updated: June 4, 2025
Blood drips from the palace; in its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the past that one of the future floats and fades, clearly discerned, impossible to avert, the murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in vain and may not help.
This tragedy, it is true, is framed according to a false idea of the tragic, which by an accumulation of cruelties and enormities, degenerates into the horrible, and yet leaves no deep impression behind: the story of Tereus and Philomela is heightened and overcharged under other names, and mixed up with the repast of Atreus and Thyestes, and many other incidents.
It was in 1728 that he began to write that formal confession of his fraud, which he left for publication after his death, and whereby he made his great public appearance as Thyestes. When I was in France, I used to gaze with great Astonishment at the Splendid Equipages and Party-coloured Habits, of that Fantastick Nation.
There lie they; just upon Thyestes' rags, And under those of Ino. CEPHISOPHON. Here! take them. Now Jove! who lookest on, and see'st through all, Your blessing, while thus wretchedly I garb me.
In Cataline, the prologue is spoken by the spirit of Sylla, and it bears a good deal of resemblance to that of Tantalus, in the Atreus and Thyestes of Seneca; to the end of each act an instructive moralizing chorus is appended, without being duly introduced or connected with the whole.
The latter is silent and unmoved, but the queen is hardly gone, when, seized with prophetic furor, she breaks out into the most confused and obscure lamentations, but presently unfolds her prophecies more distinctly to the chorus; in spirit she beholds all the enormities which have been perpetrated within that house the repast of Thyestes, which the sun refused to look upon; the ghosts of the mangled children appear to her on the battlements of the palace.
And while they talked thus with each other, there came forward the Prince Ægisthus, with his guard about him, boasting that now the wrongs of his father Thyestes were avenged.
He reigned at Elis, and after his death his sons Atreus and Thyestes struggled for the rule, but both were horribly wicked men, and Atreus was said to have killed two sons of Thyestes, and served them up to him at a feast. There was, therefore, a heavy curse on the whole family, both on Ægisthus, son of Thyestes, and on his cousins Agamemnon and Menelaus, the Atridæ, or sons of Atreus.
Though the poets began by accepting any tragic story that came to hand, in these days the finest tragedies are always on the story of some few houses, on that of Alemeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, or any others that may have been involved, as either agents or sufferers, in some deed of horror. The theoretically best tragedy, then, has a Plot of this description.
We must, therefore, adhere to this, that nothing is to be regarded after we are dead, though many people revenge themselves on their dead enemies. Thyestes pours forth several curses in some good lines of Ennius, praying, first of all, that Atreus may perish by a shipwreck, which is certainly a very terrible thing, for such a death is not free from very grievous sensations.
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