04 - Fathers and Sins: Pelops

THE ODYSSEY ODYSSEY - EPISODE FOUR – FATHERS AND SINS,  

PART
ONE – PELOPS 

One of the stories that has the most to do with me becoming a professional
storyteller is a story from the Brothers Grim called “The Juniper Tree.” This
is a story that I first encountered about 40 years ago, and I found it so
strange and so horrifying and so weirdly beautiful I didn't know how to think about
it. I didn't know what to do with it. The story tells of a woman who conceives
such an intense sort of mind altering hatred of her husband's little boy that
she murders the child. And then in a panic to cover her tracks, she cuts the
child up and she cooks him into a stew, which she then feeds to the father. And
then the boy, from his bones, is reborn as a bird, and the bird flies off into
the world singing this strange song about how his mother butchered him and his
father ate him. And it's kind of a long story. The bird has lots of sort of
strange encounters and then returns to the house and ultimately destroys the
woman in this sort of great flame and then out of the flame the child is
reborn. So, it's kind of a lot - to get your head around that story. So on my
22nd birthday, I interrupted my party and I filed everyone into the living room
and I sat down and I told them the story of The Juniper Tree. And I don't know
that that made me understand the story any better, but it certainly opened my
eyes to the incredible power of telling and listening to stories. And I spent a
lot of time with that story performing it and studying it in German, and different
versions of it. And I was astonished a few decades later when I was doing a
very deep dive into the story of Electra for the Metropolitan Opera. I was
working with some teachers on Richard Strauss's Opera Electra. And I had to
delve into the curse of the House of Atreus. And, lo and behold, there's the Grim
fairy tale at the origin of this incredibly important and complex myth. The
House of Atreus, the curse of the House of Atreus is kind of a gigantic planet
in the solar system of Greek mythology, and it exerts A tremendous
gravitational pull. Well, it certainly casts a long shadow over the story of
the Odyssey, especially Telemachus. Odysseus's son in the last episode, episode
3, Athena, in disguise, was urging Odysseus's son Telemachus to go out into the
world. And find news about his missing father. And also, she urges him to seek
revenge on the suitors. The men who have taken over Odysseus's home in his
absence. And she tells him that Orestes has killed Aegisthus. He has killed the
man who killed his father, and this shadow hangs over Telemachus for the whole
story that he must avenge the wrong that has been done to his father's house.
And we hear hints about the story of Agamemnon and his cursed family throughout
the Odyssey. So, hello, I'm Tom Lee, and this is “The Odyssey Odyssey,” the
podcast that tells the story of the Odyssey and the stories that surround the
story of the Odyssey. And today, we're going to take a sharp detour away from
the main narrative and dive into this curse of the House of Atreus. Of whom Orestes
is such an important figure. He's kind of the end of the line, but he really
puts his mark on the Odyssey at the very beginning, and I have to jump in here
and say that the whole of this little saga turned out to be too long for a
single episode. So I'm only telling the first half of it, sort of the prequel to
the curse. Of the House of Atreus in this episode. And before I dive into that,
I want to say a word about all the names that are coming up in all of these.
Myths, one of the most distinctive things about mythology as opposed to folk
tales, is that every character, even the smallest character in every myth. Has
a name, has an identity in most cases has a whole lineage. We learn every
character’s, parents and grandparents and all of their back stories. And this
doesn't happen when you're telling folktale. Very often, in most cases in folk
tales, the characters don't even have names. The ones that we tend to know have
sort of names - Red Riding Hood. That's not really a name, but it's how we
identify her. Hansel and Gretel means sort of “Jack and Jill” - they really
could be any names at all, but most characters in most folk tales all around
the world - they don't have names. They're called the oldest son, the youngest
son, the Princess, the king, the mother, the old woman. And this makes them, I
think, a lot easier to listen to in the abstract, whereas in myth. Every
character has an identity. Nobody's worried about the name of little Red Riding
Hood's grandmother. Nobody wants to know who little Red Riding Hood's
grandmother's mother was, or where she was born, or who her husband was or how
she came to be living in that house in the woods. We just accept these things.
It's part of the story. But if these characters were characters in myth, we
would know all of those things about all of those characters. I think it's
important to remember that in Ancient Greece you had a lifetime to immerse
yourself in these stories and these characters. You would
hear them over and over again and you would come to a familiarity with these
names. I think almost akin to sort of relatives in your family sorting out
these mythological family trees. And, in fact, a lot of people in ancient
Greece traced their lineage back to certain characters in mythology. Even the
way today there are people who look at the descendants of Noah, the sons of
Noah, and determine where they went in the world. And see them as their
ancestors, as their personal ancestors. In Steve Reich's amazing multimedia
musical piece, The Cave. There's a long narrative by a man who says that he
sees Abraham as his ancestor, as his personal ancestor in his own family tree.
And we know that some ancient Greek people felt the same way about the
characters in mythology. It's also nice to know that by about 200. A.D. there
were several important books that were anthologies of Greek myth, where authors
tried to get everything down and sort out all the names and all the characters
and all the stories. There was one, the Biblioteca
of Apollodorus, and this is almost 1000 years after. The Odyssey sort of
crystallizes into the form that we know now. And I want to read you just one
sentence from this where he's talking about a character named Niobe. “Niobe
bore seven sons and the same number of daughters. But Hesiod says that she had
ten sons and ten daughters, Herodotus, that she had two male and three female
children, and Homer says that she had six sons and six daughters….” So all of
that to say, if you feel like you can't tell the players without a program,
don't worry about it. You're not alone, and you're certainly not the first, but
the story that I want to tell today begins with the character of Tantalus. Now
this is a name that that you may know. Most people know that this character,
Tantalus, is the person who gives us the word tantalize. And if you know even a
little bit more about Tantalus, you'll know that he's one of the most famous
characters in the underworld. He has one of the most famous punishments in Hades.
We often hear about Sisyphus in the underworld who's pushing an enormous stone,
rolling the stone up this great hill. And as soon as he gets to the top, it
rolls back to the bottom again and he has to begin this process over and over
again. And eternity. There's a great line in a Saki story where someone calls their
car “The Envy of Sisyphus” because “it goes quite well uphill, darling, if you
push,” and, of course, we hear about Prometheus, who gave fire to humans and is
punished by being chained to a rock and having an eagle come and eat out his
liver every day and then in the night, his liver grows back and the eagle
returns day after day after day. These are the famous tortured souls in Hades
and it's. It's worth pointing out that not everybody got such a sort of
spectacular or memorable punishment. You really had to commit a great offense
against the gods to get one of these sort of marquee punishments. And by the
way, this is as good a place as any for me to beat my drum that there is no
flame in Hades. There's no fire in the ancient Greek underworld, everybody. For
hundreds and hundreds of years, we've conflated this sort of medieval Christian
idea of Hell with the classical Greek idea of Hades. And you know you don't
want to get me started – but, Walt Disney’s Hercules has Hades as a character
who is made entirely of flame. There is no flame in Hades. It's cold, it's
dark, and if you weren't already dead, you'd probably be bored to death. But
back to the punishment of Tantalus. Tantalus is in a pool of water or some
people say wine that comes right up to his chin almost up to his lips and above
his head are the most luscious fruits dangling from branches. They're so close.
Some writers say that the fruits rest on his shoulder.  And Tantalus is starving. Every time he bends
to sip the water of the pool, it disappears. It drains out more quickly than he
can even take a single drop, and if he turns his head to bite one of those
luscious succulent fruits, they spring into the air. The branches hang just
beyond his reach. He can reach as far as he can, but he can never get them. In
short, the food tantalizes him. So this is a very famous image, but what did he
do to deserve this punishment? The punishment of Tantalus in a perverse way
very much fits his crime. Not the crime of greed. A lot of times you read these
versions that he was a greedy king. It's much
worse than that. Tantalus was the son of Zeus and the nymph Pluto, who is not
to be confused with the Roman God of the underworld Pluto (that’s just to make
things more confusing.) But he was a child of Zeus. And Zeus loved Tantalus,
and Tantalus was welcomed at the feasts of the gods. And there was an occasion
when the gods were to come to Tantalus's home and to feast at Tantalus's table.
This was an enormous honor for Tantalus. To welcome all of the great gods and
goddesses into his home, and as that one sentence
has six different versions of niobe's
children, there are many different possibilities of how and why Tantalus did
what he did. Some people say that he simply didn't have enough food, which to
me seems unlikely. You're going to plan ahead for a dinner like this. And other
people say that he wanted to test the God's omniscience. He wanted to know if
the gods were truly, truly wise. But for whatever reason he did a horrifying
and very unwise thing. He took his own child. His son Pelops and he killed his
own son. He butchered him and he cooked him into a stew, which he then served
to the Immortals. And the gods and goddesses instantly knew - they were
omniscient, and they instantly knew what they had been served. And they were
horrified and they completely rejected this, except for one. The story says
that Demeter, who was so distracted by the loss of her own daughter, Persephone,
who had been abducted into the underworld. She was so distraught and distracted
that she wasn't paying attention to what she was eating, and she actually ate
the shoulder of Tantalus's son. But the gods decided that Tantalus would
instantly be destroyed, killed, and sent to the underworld. To this eternal
punishment, but that his son Pelops. Would be brought back to life, so they
called on Clotho and Clotho is one of the three fates, who spin and draw out
and cut the threads that are human lives. Clotho is responsible for the length
of a person's life on Earth, and she took all the pieces of poor Pelops.
She put them back into the same cauldron and with the aid of Zeus, she restored
Pelops to life, except for his shoulder blade, which Demeter had eaten, and
that was replaced with a shoulder blade of ivory, but Pelops emerged from this
cauldron so beautiful, so magnificently reborn that Poseidon fell hopelessly in
love with this boy and kept him there on Mount Olympus for many years as his
lover. And at the end of this affair, Pelops was sent back to Earth to rule
over his father's Kingdom, and on the way he enters into a story that could
certainly be the root of dozens of other fairy tales. Once Upon a time there.
Was a king who had a daughter more beautiful than words can describe. And every
man far and wide wished to marry this Princess, and they came to the king. But
the king did not want any man to marry his daughter. So he created a test, a
test that was absolutely impossible to pass, if you wished to marry the
Princess, you had to submit to the test, and if you failed, you were killed.
There are countless fairy tales that follow this pattern, and their origin may
well be the story of Oenomas
and his daughter Hippodamia. Oenomas was a great king. He ruled not far from
Mount Olympus. His daughter Hippodamia was more beautiful than words can
describe, and men came from far and near to ask for her hand in marriage. But
the king, for reasons of his own. Did not wish for his daughter ever to marry.
Now there are two possible reasons. One involves an Oracle - and this kind of
happens a lot in Greek mythology, he was told by an Oracle that if his daughter
married his son-in-law would kill him. So that would explain why he would never
want his daughter to marry. But there's a much more sinister possibility, which
is that he was having an incestuous affair with his daughter. and this very
creepy idea, strangely, turns up in a Shakespeare play, a play called “Pericles,
Prince of Tyre.” Maybe one of the least performed of Shakespeare plays. It's
one of my favorite, and it's based on a medieval story which is based on a
Latin story which is based on, you guessed it, a Greek story. The original
Greek story is lost, but we have a Latin version of it and this king asks
anyone who wants to marry his daughter a riddle. And if you can guess the
Riddle, you can marry the daughter. But the answer to the Riddle is that the
king and the daughter are having an incestuous affair and no one wants to
articulate this. Once they realize the answer to the riddle, no one will answer
it - and so they fail and the king chops their heads off. And his daughter
doesn't get married. And this, I think is probably what's really going on with Oneus
and Hippodamia and the contest that Oenomas
dictated for anyone to marry his daughter was a chariot race. You had to race
the princess's father and Oenomas always won, for two reasons. He had the
fastest horses. His horses were the children of the north wind and there were
no horses faster than his, and he always made his daughter ride in the chariot
with the suitor and the suitor would be so distracted by his daughter's beauty.
That he wouldn't be able to focus on the chariot race and at the point when it
was obvious that they were going to lose the race, Oenomas
would throw his bronze spear and kill the suitor. And their heads were
displayed above the gate of his palace. And this is what Pelops
saw as he approached the Kingdom. But Pelops had friends in high places. He had
friends who would certainly be able to help
him win a horse race because he was the former lover of the God. Poseidon and
Poseidon was the God of horses. And we know this story from a somewhat unlikely
and kind of wonderful source. The year 476 BC was one of the years that the
Olympic Games were held in their four year cycle. And a man named Hyron,
who was the son of a man named Denominates, won in the horse race. If you won
in the Olympic Games in 476 BC, you did not get a contract with Nike. Nike was
too busy being the goddess of victory. She wasn't making shoes at the.time. And
you didn't get your face on a Wheaties box, but what you got was a poem written
about you to celebrate your achievement. And one of the greatest poets who
wrote these victory Odes was a poet named Pindar, and he wrote an ode to this
horse racer, Hyron.
Son of Denominates and in the course of the Ode he tells the story of Pelops
and Poseidon.  Pelops is in desperate
need of a horse. And who are you going to go to if you need a horse, but your
old boyfriend, Poseidon, who is the God of horses.  Pelops went to the edge of the sea and he
called on Poseidon. And there's this beautiful image of Poseidon rising up at Pelop’s
feet. Emerging from the sea and asking what he needs and Pelops
says I need the fastest horses faster than any horses on. Earth and Poseidon
tells him not to worry. He will give him horses with golden wings that fly
faster than the winds. So he should be guaranteed to win this contest against
King Oneus.
However, there's another version, or possibly a twist in this version of the
story that says that even with this amazing chariot and horses given to him by
Poseidon, Pelops still still wasn't absolutely
convinced that he could win this race. He decides to resort to sabotage, and
meanwhile it should be said that Hippodamia the Princess has fallen hopelessly
in love with Pelops
and she very much wants him to succeed in this race and take her away. So
they collude
in a bribe to the King's charioteer. The King's charioteer is called Mytilus
and keep your eye on him. He's going to
become extremely important in this story. And they bribe Myrtillus to sabotage
the King's chariot in exchange, possibly for
gold, or possibly for
the favors of Princess Hippodamia on her wedding night, before Pelop's
sleeps with Hippodamia for the first time. He will allow the charioteer
Myrtillus to sleep with his own wife. And again, different
sources tell the story
different
ways.
Whether it was money or the promise of love. In either case, the bribe was
sufficient to cause Myrtilus to betray the king. And he took the pins out of
the axles of the King's chariot, and he replaced them with wax pins so that
when the chariot went faster and faster, the pins would melt
and the wheels would fall off. And that's
exactly what happened Pelops
and the Princess Hippodamia were in one chariot. And King Oenomeas
and Myrtilus were in the other one, and Pelop's
chariot  - given to him by Poseidon -  raced faster than any chariot on Earth had
ever gone before. Oenomeos, desperate to catch up to his daughter, went faster
and faster and the pins in the axles melted, the wheels fell off. And Oenomeos
was killed. Myrtillus, the charioteer, survived and went with Pelops and the
Princess home to their Kingdom. The course of this chariot race was incredibly
long, hundreds of miles long, and so they had a long way to head home. And on
the way, how surprised will you be gentle listener, if I tell you that Pelops
decided to renege on his promise to the charioteer? Whether it was to be gold
or a knight of love with Hippodamia, Pelops decided that the best thing to do
was to silence Myrtilus forever so he could never reveal the secret of how he
had sabotaged the race. So
as they were passing the sea. Pelops gave Martellus a kick. He thrust him out
of the chariot and into the ocean where he drowned. But just before he died. He
cursed Pelops
and all
of
his descendants, and this is the beginning of the curse
of the House of Atreus. Atreus hasn't
been born yet, but this is the curse his father Pelops, has just received this
curse from the dying charioteer. Myrtillus himself was the son of Hermes, so it
was not a good idea
to kill him. But this curse - and I often wonder why it's
not called the curse of the House of Pelops - this curse is going to escalate,
and here we are at the end of this episode and we're
only halfway through the story. In the next episode, we'll
see how the two sons of Pelops. Thyestes and Atreus battle for power and seek
revenge on each other in a way that hearkens all the way back to the sin of
Tantalos and becomes a truly, truly gruesome story. So
you can look forward to that. And this is the point in the episode where I
remind you that we have no advertising or subscriptions. I'm
producing this program to let people know that I'm
out here, that I work as a storyteller in schools and museums, theaters,
libraries. And it's probably
worth
stating
specifically that when I work with children, I have many
wonderful stories that I tell. But those stories, such as you heard today are
not included. How are you listening to the program? It's
now available on iTunes, and it's available on
Spotify, but I sort of have
no idea how people are tuning in. I see that people are listening and I love
hearing from people, but I don't know how people
are
getting to me. If you go to my website. Www.tomleestoryteller.net
there's
a podcast page. There
and
I'm
including what I'm calling the
footnotes to each episode, which is
lots of links to the images that I mentioned. Some YouTube clips links to
literary references, all kinds of fun things that you can poke around in, and
you can also e-mail me. From that website, I'd
love to hear from you with questions or comments. If you find yourself in Old
Lyme, CT on February 19th, I'm going to be
performing at the beautiful Florence Griswold Museum at 2:00 o'clock in the
afternoon. They have a great exhibit
on
right now on called “Dreams and Memories” and they thought the
storytelling would be a
great way to explore that theme. And I have to
say, I agree. So come on down and be sure to say hello if you do. So
until next time, I'm Tom Lee.
Thanks for listening.