Poseidon’s Love for Pelops

At a Glance

• Central figures: Pelops, mortal son of Tantalus, who was killed and restored to life; Poseidon, god of the sea, who took Pelops as lover and charioteer; Oenomaus, king of Pisa; Hippodamia, the princess; and Myrtilus, the charioteer whose curse outlasted his death.
• Setting: Lydia or Phrygia at Pelops’s birth, then Mount Olympus, then the kingdom of Pisa in the Peloponnese - a region that would take its name from Pelops himself.
• The turn: Pelops, armed with Poseidon’s divine horses and chariot, enters the race for Hippodamia’s hand - then bribes Oenomaus’s charioteer Myrtilus to remove the linchpins from the king’s wheels.
• The outcome: Oenomaus dies when his chariot collapses; Pelops wins Hippodamia and the kingdom of Pisa; but when he throws Myrtilus from a cliff to avoid honoring their deal, Myrtilus curses Pelops and all his line.
• The legacy: The curse of Myrtilus took root in the house of Atreus and drove the cycles of murder and revenge that destroyed Pelops’s descendants, including Agamemnon and Menelaus.

Tantalus began the ruin of his house before Pelops could walk. The king of Lydia - or Phrygia, the sources disagree - had been granted something almost unheard of: an invitation to dine among the gods. He sat at their table. He heard their speech. He was trusted. What he did with that trust was cook his own son and present him as a dish, some accounts say to test whether the gods were truly omniscient, others say out of a grotesque pride in having something they had not tasted. The gods knew immediately what lay on the platter. They recoiled. Only Demeter, half-absent with grief over Persephone’s disappearance, ate without thinking - a piece of the boy’s shoulder, gone before anyone could stop her.

Then the gods put Pelops back together. Hephaestus cast a new shoulder from ivory, fitting it to the restored flesh, and Pelops returned to the living. The ivory shoulder was visible to anyone who looked. It marked him as someone who had passed through the gods’ hands and come out the other side.

The God and the Prince

Poseidon saw Pelops and wanted him. This was not an unusual thing for a god - the twelve Olympians had long histories of fixation on mortal men and women - but Poseidon’s feeling for this particular prince ran deep enough to act on. He took Pelops to Mount Olympus, made him his lover, kept him close. Pelops served as Poseidon’s charioteer, which was also an act of intimacy in the Greek world - to stand behind a man in his chariot, to hold his horses’ reins, was to be bound to him.

Whatever else passed between them at Olympus, Poseidon gave Pelops something that would matter when the time came: a chariot, and horses that ran faster than the wind. Not fast like a good horse. Fast like something that had never touched a racetrack. Divine horses, divine vehicle, given in love and kept against the day Pelops would need them.

Eventually Pelops came back down. He was mortal, after all, and mortality pulls. He came back into the world of men with the ivory shoulder and the memory of Olympus and the promise of the horses if he called for them.

Oenomaus and His Dead Suitors

Hippodamia was the daughter of King Oenomaus of Pisa, and her father had no intention of giving her to anyone. A prophecy had told him that his son-in-law would be his killer. Oenomaus’s solution was simple and effective: any man who wanted Hippodamia had to race him first, by chariot, from Pisa to the altar of Poseidon at the Isthmus of Corinth. If the suitor reached the altar first, he won the girl. If Oenomaus caught him before then, the suitor died.

Oenomaus had divine horses too - his father was Ares, and the horses were a gift. He had never lost a race. The skulls of the men he had killed were nailed above his door. Sources differ on the exact count: twelve dead suitors, or thirteen, or as many as eighteen. The bones of failed men marked the road. And still others came, because Hippodamia was beautiful and kingdoms are worth dying for, and young men believe they are the exception to every precedent.

Pelops came to Pisa and looked at the door with its row of skulls. He looked at Hippodamia. He decided he would race.

Myrtilus and the Linchpins

Poseidon’s horses were fast - fast enough, perhaps. Pelops was not willing to bet on perhaps. He found Myrtilus, the royal charioteer who maintained Oenomaus’s vehicle and knew every joint of its axles, and he made a proposition. Sabotage the king’s chariot before the race. In return: half the kingdom when Pelops won, and one night with Hippodamia.

Myrtilus agreed. The night before the race he went to the chariot shed and pulled the linchpins from the wheels, replacing them with pins of beeswax. In the morning everything looked as it always had.

The race launched. Pelops’s horses surged ahead, pulling the gap open. Behind him Oenomaus drove hard, confident in his animals, in his record, in the deaths he had dealt. Then the wheels began to go. The wax gave. The axles lost their pins and the chariot collapsed under Oenomaus at full speed, throwing him to the ground. He died in the wreck - killed by his chariot, killed by his charioteer’s betrayal, killed by the prophecy he had spent years trying to outrun.

Pelops won. He had the race, the woman, the kingdom.

The Cliff Above the Sea

Myrtilus wanted his payment. The terms had been clear: half the kingdom and a night with Hippodamia. Pelops had no intention of honoring either part of the agreement.

What happened next varies by the telling. In one version, Myrtilus tried to assault Hippodamia while Pelops was away; in another, he simply pressed Pelops for what he was owed. Some accounts say Hippodamia herself went to Pelops and told him what Myrtilus had demanded. In all versions the outcome is the same. Pelops took Myrtilus to the edge of a cliff above the sea - some say Cape Geraestus, some say somewhere along the coast - and threw him off.

Myrtilus fell a long way. Before he hit the water or the rocks, he called back up. The curse he laid on Pelops in those last seconds was precise: not just on Pelops himself, but on his children, and their children, and the children after them.

Poseidon received Myrtilus in the sea. The god honored him, in the way the sea sometimes honors those it swallows. Myrtilus became a constellation - Auriga, the charioteer - placed in the sky where he could watch the world below.

The House of Atreus

Pelops went on to rule and to prosper. His name endured in the land: the Peloponnese, the island of Pelops, still carries it. He had children, among them Atreus and Thyestes, and the curse moved into that generation with the patient force of something that has nowhere else to be.

Atreus and Thyestes fought over the throne of Mycenae. Atreus killed Thyestes’s sons and served them at a feast - an echo, deliberate and damning, of what Tantalus had done to Pelops. Thyestes cursed his brother in return. Agamemnon was Atreus’s son; Menelaus too. Agamemnon went to Troy, came home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, and his son Orestes killed them both and was driven mad by the Furies for it.

The curse Myrtilus threw up from the water did not run out quickly. It had been built to last generations, and it did. Poseidon’s love had lifted Pelops to a height he could not have reached alone - the divine horses, the chariot, the years on Olympus, the strength that made a king out of a boy who had been served in pieces to the gods. None of that protection followed Pelops past the cliff. What followed instead was the charioteer’s last word, spinning down through the bloodline, gathering weight with every killing, until there was almost no one left.