Thyestes

Seneca’s Thyestes is perhaps first and foremost a play about the destructiveness of desire. The figure of Tantalus, brought on stage in Act I, becomes the central symbol for the “tantalizing” desire that drives Atreus and Thyestes, the main characters of the play. Tantalus was famous for the eternal hunger and thirst with which he was tormented in the underworld, a “desperate yearning hunger” (158), leading him to reflect:

Is anything worse

Than to be always wet and always thirsty, worse than hunger

Yearning without end? (4-6).

When the Fury sends Thyestes to Argos, it is so that he can fill his descendants Atreus and Thyestes with the same desires that torment him:

let Desire

conquer the mighty leaders of the people;

let sexual wickedness be the least of sins;

let moral righteousness, and faithfulness,

and all law perish. Let even heaven be touched

by human wickedness; why do the stars still shine,

and give their usual fiery glory to the world?

Let deep night come, let day fall from the sky (44-51).

Consumed by such desire, Atreus cannot be content with the power he holds. He sees it virtually as his duty as a king to take revenge on his brother Thyestes, and cannot be satisfied unless this revenge is as terrible as can be.