Classical mythology is absolutely filled with all sorts of bizarre and disturbing stories involving horrific deeds such as murder, cannibalism, rape, incest, bestiality, filicide, fratricide, self-cannibalism, and mutilation. Just for fun, here is a compilation of some of the most disturbing stories from classical mythology.
Tantalos and Pelops
According to one version of the myth of Tantalos narrated by the Greek lyric poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – 438 BC) in his “First Olympian Ode,” Tantalos was a king of the land of Phrygia, which is located in Anatolia, which is now Turkey. Tantalos was favored by the gods and they would often visit him to eat at his table. Tantalos, however, wanted to find out if the gods were really all-knowing, so he murdered his own son Pelops, butchered his flesh, and served him to the gods in a feast.
The gods instantly knew what the meat Tantalos was serving them was. None of them ate any of the meat—except Demeter, who was mourning the loss of her beloved daughter Persephone and was not paying close enough attention to realize that it was human flesh. Demeter ate Pelops’s shoulder.
In anger, Zeus hurled Tantalos into the depths of Tartaros. In Tartaros, Tantalos is tortured for all of eternity for his crimes against nature and against the gods. He is forced to stand with water up to his waist and a bough of fruit hanging over his head. He is perpetually starving and parched, but every time he tries to drink the water, it drains away just beyond his lips and every time he tries to pluck one of the fruits, the wind blows the branch just out of his reach. Then, when he withdraws his hand or his lips, the water rises back to where it was and the branch lowers back down to where it was. Tantalos’s name is the root of our modern English word tantalize.
Once Tantalos had been taken care of, the gods brought Pelops’s butchered and cooked remains to the Moirai, who placed them in a boiling cauldron. Using the cauldron, the Moirai brought Pelops back to life. Pelops was missing his shoulder, though, since Demeter had eaten it, so the gods made him a new shoulder out of ivory.
ABOVE: Painting of the punishment of Tantalos, who murdered his son Pelops and served his flesh to the gods, by the Italian Baroque painter Gioacchino Assereto
Pasiphaë and the Bull
You have probably all heard the story of the Minotaur, but you may not have heard the incredibly disturbing story of where the Minotaur came from. Warning: this story involves bestiality.
The story goes that King Minos of Krete prayed to Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull for him to sacrifice. Poseidon sent the most beautiful white bull that anyone ever saw up out of the sea. Minos was going to sacrifice it, but he could not bring himself to kill such a beautiful and noble creature. Instead, he sacrificed a different bull and kept the bull Poseidon had sent him.
Poseidon was enraged at Minos’s disobedience, so he cursed Minos’s wife Pasiphaë, causing her to lust after the bull with uncontrollable passion. Pasiphaë became utterly obsessed with the bull. She longed for it. She felt she desperately needed to have sex with it.
Pasiphaë convinced the Athenian inventor Daidalos to create a hollow wooden cow for her to use as a disguise so she could have sex with the bull. Hiding inside the wooden cow, Pasiphaë got the bull to have sex with her. It impregnated her with its monstrous offspring, which eventually turned out to be the Minotaur.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to between c. 340 and c. 320 BC, discovered in the Etruscan city of Vulci, depicting Pasiphaë holding her son, the Minotaur, in her arms
Atreus and Thyestes
The story of Atreus and Thyestes has a very strong claim to the title of “most disturbing story from Greek mythology.” It is a story filled with fratricide, adultery, cannibalism, incestuous rape, attempted infanticide, and murderous revenge. Atreus and Thyestes were sons of Pelops. At the urging of their mother Hippodameia, they murdered their own half-brother Chrysippos and were banished by their father from their home city of Olympia. They fled to the city of Mykenai.
Eurystheus, the king of Mykenai, was away at war, so, in his absence, the brothers seized the city and Atreus set himself up as king. As king of Mykenai, Atreus swore that he would sacrifice his best lamb to Artemis. When he searched his flock, he discovered a lamb with golden fleece. Atreus sacrificed the lamb to Artemis, skinned it, and entrusted its golden fleece to his wife Aërope.
Unbeknownst to Atreus, however, Aërope was secretly having sex with his brother Thyestes. Aërope gave the golden lamb to Thyestes. Thyestes then convinced Atreus to swear that whoever owned the golden fleece would be king. Atreus, believing that the golden fleece was safely his, agreed to this. Then Thyestes showed Atreus that he had the golden lamb. By Atreus’s own decree, that meant Thyestes was king.
ABOVE: Thyestes and Aërope, painted by the Italian Renaissance painter Nosadella
Atreus was determined to regain his throne, so he sought the aid of the gods. On the advice of Hermes, Atreus convinced Thyestes to swear that he would make Atreus king only if the sun moved backwards in the sky. Then Zeus made the sun move backwards, forcing Thyestes to give the kingdom back to his brother.
Upon having his kingdom restored to him, Atreus set about getting revenge on Thyestes for having seduced his wife. Thyestes had two sons and one daughter. Atreus murdered both of Thyestes’s sons (who were, just to remind you, Atreus’s own nephews). Atreus cut off the boys’ heads and hands. Then he butchered them and cooked their flesh.
Atreus served the flesh of Thyestes’s own sons to Thyestes without telling him where the meat that he was eating came from. Thyestes ate the whole meal and enjoyed it. After Thyestes was done eating, Atreus brought out his sons’ heads and hands, revealing him the true nature of the feast he had just eaten.
ABOVE: Illustration from a French manuscript of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron dating to c. 1480 depicting Atreus presenting Thyestes with the severed heads of his murdered son, whose flesh he has just unknowingly eaten.
Thyestes was disgusted and horrified. Atreus banished Thyestes from the city of Mykenai forever, forcing him to wander abroad. Thyestes swore to get revenge on Atreus if it was the last thing he did. An oracle told Thyestes that, if he impregnated his own daughter Pelopia, then their son would kill Atreus.
Thyestes came to his own daughter in disguise and brutally raped her. Pelopia became pregnant with her father’s son and gave birth. Disgusted and ashamed, Pelopia abandoned her son in the wilderness to die. A shepherd found him, however, and brought him to Atreus. Not knowing the boy’s true parentage, Atreus raised him as his own son, naming him Aigisthos.
Once Aigisthos came of age, Thyestes told him of his true parentage. Aigisthos immediately murdered Atreus and Thyestes proclaimed himself king. Then, Atreus’s sons, Agamemnon and Menelaos, who were living in Sparta, returned to Mykenai. They overthrew Thyestes and killed him. Agamemnon proclaimed himself king.
Erysichthon of Thessalia
The story of Erysichthon is told in “Hymn 6 to Demeter” by the Greek poet Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 305 – c. 240 BC) and in Book Eight of the long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which was composed in Latin in around 8 AD by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BC – c. 18 AD).
According to the story, Erysichthon was an extremely greedy and wealthy king who ruled over the kingdom of Thessalia in north-central Greece. He ordered his men to chop down all the trees in a grove that was sacred to the goddess Demeter so that he could build a new feast hall. His men chopped down all the trees except for one large old oak, which was adorned with votive wreaths, each one representing a prayer that Demeter had granted.
Seeing that his men would not chop down the tree, Erysichthon took up an ax and chopped down the tree himself. As it happened, the tree was home to a dryad, who died when the tree was chopped down. The dryad cried out with her dying breath to Demeter to avenge her wrongful death.
ABOVE: Painting from 1870 by the French painter Émile Bin depicting Erysichthon chopping down the tree with the dryad in the sacred grove of Demeter
Demeter punished Erysichthon for having chopped down the tree by sending Limos, the divine personification of starvation, to inhabit Erysichthon’s belly. On account of Limos’s presence, Erysichthon became afflicted with a terrible, unrelenting, unbearable hunger.
Erysichthon ate and ate and ate, but, no matter how much he ate, he could never be full. In fact, the more he ate, the hungrier he became. Erysichthon sold all his possessions to buy more food so that he could eat more. He sold his gold, his jewels, palace, and everything he had, but it still was not enough. He was so hungry that he sold his own daughter Mestra into slavery so that he could use the money he got from selling her to buy more food for himself to eat.
Even that was not enough to satiate Erysichthon’s uncontrollable hunger, though. He needed more, but he had nothing left, so he began to devour his own flesh. He started with his arms and legs and then just kept eating until he died a horrible and bloody death, alone and in abject poverty.
ABOVE: Etching by the German artist Johann Wilhelm Baur depicting Erysichthon selling his daughter Mestra into slavery in order to provide himself with money to buy more food, as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Tereus and Prokne
The myth of Tereus and Prokne has a pretty good claim to the title of “most disturbing story from Greek mythology” too, though. It is a tale of rape, mutilation, filicide, and cannibalism. According to the myth, Tereus was a king of the land of Thrake, which lies in what is now northern Greece and southern Bulgaria.
Tereus married an Athenian princess named Prokne. The couple had sex and Prokne gave birth to a son named Itys. Then Tereus became mad with lust for Prokne’s beloved sister Philomela, so he violently raped her and cut out her tongue so she would never be able to tell anyone what he had done to her.
ABOVE: Philomela and Procne, painted in 1861 by the French Academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. This painting looks a bit too cheerful and wholesome for the gruesome story it is supposed to be depicting.
Philomela, however, secretly wove a scene of Tereus raping her into a tapestry and sent the tapestry to Prokne. Prokne became so horrified that she vowed to obtain vengeance against her husband for her sister’s rape and mutilation at any cost. She murdered her own son Itys, cooked his flesh, and secretly served it to Tereus. Then, after Tereus had finished eating the meal of his own son’s flesh, Prokne presented him with Itys’s head on a platter and told him what he had just eaten.
Enraged, Tereus chased Prokne and Philomela with a sword in attempt to slaughter them both, but the gods intervened and turned all three of them into birds. Tereus became the hoopoe, Philomela became the swallow, and Prokne became the nightingale. This is why the hoopoe chases the swallow and the nightingale. It is also why the swallow has no song: because her tongue has been cut out. This story also explains why the nightingale sings its sad lament; it is Prokne, still mourning for her murdered son.
Believe it or not, this grisly story of rape, mutilation, filicide, and cannibalism was actually one of the more popular myths in ancient Athens. Aristophanes alludes to it in multiple comedies and Sophokles (lived c. 496 – c. 405 BC) even wrote an entire tragedy about it, entitled Tereus. Most of the play has been lost, but a few fragments of it have been preserved. The story is also retold in the long poem Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, which was the main source of information about classical mythology in western Europe until the Renaissance and remained the most famous work on the subject until the nineteenth century.
ABOVE: Painting by the Dutch Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, dating to 1636 – 1638, depicting Prokne and Philomela presenting the severed head of Itys to King Tereus
The Death of King Priamos of Troy
King Priamos of Troy is the king of the city of Troy in the Greek epic poem the Iliad. While there are many horrific ways to die in Greek mythology, I think that the way Priamos is depicted as having died in some works of ancient Greek art may be one of the absolute worst. Several ancient Greek vase paintings depict Priamos being bludgeoned to death by Neoptolemos, the son of Achilleus, using the lifeless corpse of Priamos’s own murdered infant grandson Astyanax. How would you like to be killed like that? I think we all can agree that getting bludgeoned to death with the body of your dead grandson is a horrible way to go.
ABOVE: Attic black-figure amphora dating to between c. 520 and c. 510 BC depicting Neoptolemos bludgeoning King Priamos of Troy to death with the corpse of his infant grandson Astyanax, whom Neoptolemos has already murdered
