Pleisthenes
Pleisthenes (also written Plisthenes) was the name of more than one figure in the house of Pelops and Tantalus. The best known is a son of Atreus whom some ancient authors make the real father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. Another Pleisthenes appears in the story of the feud between Atreus and Thyestes.
Pleisthenes, Son of Atreus
In the Homeric poems Agamemnon and Menelaus are the sons of Atreus (Homer calls Agamemnon Atreides, “son of Atreus,” as in Iliad 1.7), but another tradition inserted a Pleisthenes between them and Atreus. According to a Hesiodic fragment reported by Tzetzes, Pleisthenes was a son of Atreus and Aerope, and Agamemnon, Menelaus and Anaxibia were the children of Pleisthenes and Cleolla, daughter of Dias (Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, fragment 69). Apollodorus tells it differently: Catreus gave his daughters Aerope and Clymene to Nauplius to sell abroad, and Aerope became the wife of Plisthenes, to whom she bore Agamemnon and Menelaus (Apollodorus, Library 3.2.2). In this version the brothers are grandsons of Atreus.
The same tradition is followed in Greek poetry. Aeschylus can call the house of Atreus the family of Pleisthenes. Clytemnestra, after the murder of Agamemnon, speaks of making a pact with “the spirit of the Pleisthenidai” (Agamemnon 1569), and Aegisthus tells how Thyestes, kicking over the table, prayed that the whole race of Pleisthenes should perish (Agamemnon 1602). Bacchylides calls Menelaus “Pleisthenid” (Bacchylides 15.48).
Family of Pleisthenes
The Pleisthenes Raised by Thyestes
A story told by Hyginus gives another Pleisthenes to Atreus. After Thyestes lay with Aerope, the wife of Atreus, and was driven out of the kingdom, he brought up Atreus’ son Pleisthenes as his own and sent him to kill Atreus. Atreus did not know the boy was his own son and killed him (Hyginus, Fabulae 86).
Pleisthenes, Son of Thyestes
A second Pleisthenes is a young son of Thyestes. Hyginus says that Atreus pretended to be reconciled with Thyestes, brought him back to his kingdom, and killed Thyestes’ infant sons Tantalus and Plisthenes and served them to their father at a feast (Hyginus, Fabulae 88). Apollodorus tells the same crime with the names Aglaus, Callileon and Orchomenus (Apollodorus, Epitome 2.13). The name Pleisthenes is thus given to two sons in the same feud: the one Atreus killed unknowingly, and the one he served at the feast.
What the ancient sources say
Passages that name Pleisthenes, in the original with English translation. The line gives the work and reference as scholars cite it.
- Hesiod, Fragments 1.69–71The Trojan War and the house of AtreusA long papyrus fragment tells how the gods were divided by strife and how Zeus planned storm and tempest over the boundless earth. The shorter fragments…
- Apollodorus, The Library (Bibliotheca), with the Epitome 3.2.1–2Catreus, Althaemenes and NaupliusAn oracle tells Catreus that one of his children will kill him, and his son Althaemenes leaves Crete for Rhodes with his sister Apemosyne, whom he later…
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