Thyestes

Act III of Thyestes continues to develop the play’s central themes, especially The Destructive Power of Desire. Thyestes in particular, who enters at the beginning of Act III, is pulled in different directions by his desires. On one hand, Thyestes is like his brother Atreus in his desire for power and wealth, yet something about the promise of the power and wealth that he has lost makes Thyestes afraid. Even Thyestes does not fully understand why he is afraid, though at times he does come close to grasping the deeper situation:

Evil is conquered and tamed now: why run from misfortune?

Your pain has been well invested. Unhappiness now feels good.

Turn back and tear yourself away, while you still can (426-28).

What Thyestes seems to understand, albeit only imperfectly, is the liberating effect that his loss of power has had on him. “Lofty position,” as Thyestes admits to his son, “brought me constant fear; I was afraid / even of my own sword” (448-49). Thyestes’s dread becomes another “Sword of Damocles,” underscoring the fear that always accompanies power: For once power has been attained, one must always fight to maintain that power. Thyestes thus almost seems on the verge of concluding, like the Chorus, that temporal power is no power at all, even declaring that “The ability to do without a kingdom is a kingdom” (470).

Nevertheless, Thyestes is not able to entirely quash his ambitions. In the end, Thyestes cannot bring himself to wish for a Stoic philosopher’s life of solitude and seclusion like the Chorus. As soon as Thyestes sees his brother, he changes. He allows himself to be deceived. Though well aware that “The kingdom cannot hold two” (454), he does not question Atreus when he assures him, saying, “This kingdom allows / two rulers” (534-35). Thyestes becomes ensnared in his brother’s trap precisely because he is just like him: As Atreus had predicted in the preceding act, Thyestes still desires and hopes for power, and this desire will be his undoing. Thyestes’s desires reduce him to an “animal,” a “beast tangled in the nets” (491) of his brother Atreus. What Atreus does not see, however, is that he too has been undone by his terrible desires and has, like his brother, been turned into an animal, “an Umbrian hound held on a long rope” (497). In their struggle for an illusory power, both Atreus and Thyestes have ceased to be human.

The behavior of the brothers, indeed, seems to defy reason, to represent The Overturning of the Natural Order. The Chorus may be naive to conclude that Atreus’s attitude has really changed and that the rivalry is at an end, but if they are naive it is only because they are unable to think humans capable of inhuman evil. After all, says the Chorus:

There is no greater power than true devotion;

Strangers’ quarrels may endure long years,

But true love always holds those it has held (549-51).

Nevertheless, Atreus, as Thyestes realizes, cannot love his brother. Moreover, there is something inhuman at play in the evil rivalry between Atreus and Thyestes, as Act I confirmed. The brothers are only enacting their fate. In a moment of bitter tragic irony, the Chorus even reflects on the inexorable power of fate or fortune:

No one should trust too much in his good fortune,

No one should give up hope of better luck.

[…]

God moves our lives around on his swift spindle

And turns them upside down (617-22).

The Chorus seems to mean this sententia optimistically: At last, the evil fortunes of Tantalus’s descendants are at an end, and Atreus and Thyestes have set aside their desires and pursuit of ill-begotten pleasures—after all, as the Chorus notes, “Pleasure and pain / give way in turn; but pleasure is more brief” (596-97). It is only natural, in other words, that the brothers should really be reconciled.

However, the Chorus is wrong. The fortunes of Argos are about to change—but only for the worse. If fate and the gods conspire to influence the lives of Atreus and Thyestes on their “swift spindle”—an allusion to the thread woven by the Fates for each individual life—then they do so not to set things right but to literally overturn the natural order—in the last act, Atreus’s crime will even cause the sun to turn in its course. The Chorus thus does not realize the true meaning of their own words, creating a moment of dramatic irony in the play.