Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pelopia.
The gallery
Portrait of Christiane Henriette Koch as Pelopia
Johann Friedrich Bause, 1770
Johann Friedrich Bause's Metropolitan Museum print shows the actress Christiane Henriette Koch costumed as Pelopia — Thyestes' daughter and mother of Aegisthus in the Atreid horror. Eighteenth-century stage culture kept the Sicyonian tragedy of the sword and the unrecognized incest alive as a role for leading ladies.
In play
Bibliotheca
Apollodorus
Apollodorus tells how Thyestes begets Aegisthus on his own daughter Pelopia — the night at Sicyon, the stolen sword, and the infant who will kill Atreus.
Pelopia
Daughter of Thyestes, mother of Aegisthus — the woman whose recognition of the sword seals Atreus' doom.
Aegisthus
Pelopia's son by Thyestes — the usurper lover of Clytemnestra whose birth is the Atreid curse made flesh.
Thyestes
Pelopia's father — and, in the darkest strand, the father of her child Aegisthus — the banquet and the incest as twin horrors of the house.