No family in Greek myth carries a longer record of blood than the House of Atreus. It begins with Tantalus, a son of Zeus admitted to the tables of the gods, who repaid that intimacy by butchering his own son Pelops and serving him at a feast to test divine omniscience. The gods restored Pelops and flung Tantalus into Tartarus, but the crime set a pattern that four further generations would repeat: a parent kills a child, a child kills a parent, and the killing is always framed as justice. Tantalus's other children fare no better — Niobe boasts of her fourteen children and watches Apollo and Artemis destroy them all, and Broteas, scorning Artemis, walks into fire.
Pelops wins Hippodamia of Elis by rigging a chariot race and then betraying his accomplice Myrtilus, whose dying curse stacks fresh doom on the line. Their sons Atreus and Thyestes tear Mycenae in half. Thyestes seduces Aerope, Atreus's wife; Atreus answers by slaughtering Thyestes's children and feeding them to their father. Exiled and instructed by an oracle, Thyestes fathers Aegisthus on his own daughter Pelopia, breeding an avenger out of incest. The two branches of Pelops's descent no longer merely quarrel over a throne — they are engineered against each other.
Atreus's sons marry the daughters of Tyndareus and Leda of Sparta: Agamemnon takes Clytemnestra, Menelaus takes Helen, whom Zeus fathered in the form of a swan. Helen's departure with Paris launches the Trojan War; Agamemnon buys fair winds by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia at Aulis. Clytemnestra takes Aegisthus as her lover and kills Agamemnon on his return. Their surviving children divide along the fracture: Electra fixed on her dead father and implacable toward her mother, Chrysothemis counselling submission, and Orestes returning to kill both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. Menelaus and Helen's daughter Hermione inherits the war as marriage politics.
This tree follows the Athenian tragic tradition — Aeschylus's Oresteia of 458 BCE, with Sophocles' and Euripides' Electra plays and the earlier Homeric account of Agamemnon's homecoming behind it. Aeschylus gave the curse its only exit: Orestes, hounded by the Furies, is acquitted by the Areopagus court, and vendetta is replaced by law. That ending is why the family still matters. The Atreids are the case study Western literature keeps returning to for inherited violence — a household where every act of revenge is also, unavoidably, the next crime.
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