The offspring of Atreus, is another example of a terrible fate that haunts a family for generations. But in this case there is a crime committed against the gods by a ancestor of Atreus and it is in atonement for him that his descendants were beset by divine vengeance.
Tantalus king of Phrygia To mock the power of the Gods, he invited them to a banquet in his palace and made them serve the flesh of his own son Pelops, whom he had murdered. Zeus he perceived the crime and plunged Tantalus into hell where his punishment consisted of suffering from hunger and thirst, eternally, contemplating delicacies and drinks that his hands could not reach. Zeus He also resurrected Pelops, who went to Greece where he married the daughter of King Elis. Pelops was the colonizer of the Peloponnese. But one of his sons named Atreus committed a crime similar to that of Tantalus, made his brother Trieste eat his own children, and then the curse of the gods fell relentlessly on all his offspring. The grandchildren of Pelops It was Agamemnon and Menelaus, the kings of Sparta who waged the Trojan War. At the return of the war, Agamemnon was killed by his wife Clytemnestra, but their son, Orestes, killed his mother to avenge his father, being pursued by the avenging Furies. This is the family cursed by the gods, of the Atrides, whose crimes and misfortunes the poets have immortalized.