In Greek mythology, Pelops (Ancient Greek: Πέλοψ) was king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus — the peninsula that bears his name (Peloponnēsos, "Pelops's Island"). Son of Tantalus and father of Atreus and Thyestes, he won Hippodamia in a chariot race against King Oenomaus and became a founding figure of the Olympic sanctuary, where chthonic offerings at the Pelopion preceded daylight sacrifices to Zeus.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Pelops" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family and origins
Most accounts make Pelops son of Tantalus of Mount Sipylus; his mother is variously Dione, Euryanassa, Eurythemista, or Clytia. Minority genealogies call him son of Hermes and Calyce, or of Atlas and a nymph, or an Achaean from Olenus. Of Phrygian or Lydian birth in the dominant tradition, he leaves Anatolia for Greece and wins the crown of Pisa or Olympia from King Oenomaus.
By Hippodamia he fathers many children, among them Atreus, Thyestes, Pittheus, Alcathous, and Troezen. Four daughters marry into the House of Perseus. By the nymph Axioche (or Danais) he is also father of Chrysippus, his favourite son in later tragedy.
II.Tantalus's banquet
Tantalus cut Pelops into pieces, stewed his flesh, and served it to the Olympians. Demeter, grieving for Persephone, ate the left shoulder; the other gods refused. Tantalus was cast into Tartarus, and Pelops was reassembled and revived, his missing shoulder replaced with an ivory one fashioned by Hephaestus. Pindar's First Olympian Ode rejects the cannibal feast as a malicious rumour and instead has Poseidon carry the boy to Olympus as cup-bearer and charioteer apprentice until Zeus expels him for Tantalus's crimes.
III.Race for Hippodamia
Oenomaus, fearing a prophecy that a son-in-law would kill him, challenged Hippodamia's suitors to a chariot race and killed those he overtook, nailing their heads to his palace columns. Pelops invoked Poseidon, who gave him a winged chariot; in the fuller tale Myrtilus, Oenomaus's charioteer and son of Hermes, replaces the bronze linchpins with beeswax after being promised half the kingdom and a night with Hippodamia. The wheels fail as Oenomaus closes in; he is dragged to death by his horses.
Pelops then kills Myrtilus — often by casting him into the sea after an attempted rape of Hippodamia — and Myrtilus dies cursing the house. That curse haunts Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Aegisthus, Menelaus, and Orestes. After the victory Pelops institutes funeral games for Oenomaus at Olympia, a legendary origin of the Olympic Games, and gives his name to the Peloponnese.
IV.Cult at Olympia
At Olympia the Pelopion stood apart from Zeus's temple beside a gravesite near a river ford, enclosed by a circle of stones. Pelops received night-time chthonic offerings — a black ram poured into a bothros — before daylight sacrifice to Zeus. A gigantic shoulder-blade was once shown among his relics; Trojan-war lore claimed the Greeks needed Pelops's shoulder-blade at Troy. Walter Burkert notes that the chariot-race myth rose in importance at Olympia with the introduction of chariot racing in the twenty-fifth Olympiad (680 BCE).