Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Aerope.
The gallery
Thyestes and Aerope
Nosadella, c. 1550–1570
Nosadella paints Aerope with Thyestes — Atreus' Cretan wife whose adultery and the stolen golden lamb token open the Mycenaean feud. She is the queen whose betrayal precedes the feast that made the house proverbial.
Les Pélopides (Voltaire)
Jean-Michel Moreau (engraved by Philippe Trière), c. 1785
Moreau's illustration for Voltaire's Pelopid tragedy keeps Aerope's generation on the Enlightenment stage — the adulterous queen still written into the curse that runs from Tantalus to Agamemnon.
The Feast of Atreus and Thyestes
Václav Jindřich Nosecký and Michael Wenzel Halbax, c. 1700
The Zákupy banquet mural is the sequel Aerope's betrayal helped ignite: Atreus serving Thyestes his own children — the horror that follows the stolen wife and the golden fleece of Mycenae.
In play
Thyestes
Seneca the Younger
Seneca's revenge play inherits Aerope as the wife Atreus punishes through the feast — her adultery the first wound in the Pelopid cycle the stage never forgot.
Aerope
Cretan daughter of Catreus, wife of Atreus, mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus — lover of Thyestes in the quarrel over the Mycenaean throne.